Journalist Louise Perry Sets Us All Straight
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century is a 216-page, August, 2022 book published by Polity Press. Author Louise Perry is a beautiful British journalist, activist against sexual violence, wife and mother. Case has received very positive reviews from professional reviewers as well as Amazon readers. Phyllis Chesler, for example, wrote "Perry has written the most radical feminist challenge to a failed liberal feminism." Helen Joyce wrote, "Brilliantly conceived and written, this highly original book is an urgent call for a sexual counter-revolution." And Rachel Cook wrote, "It may turn out to be one of the most important feminist books of its time." As of this writing, Case has almost seven hundred Amazon reviews, with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 possible stars. I had some problems with this book, but there is an audience for whom Case is just about perfect. More on that, below.
The book
depicts itself, as the title announces, as a coherent argument against the
sexual revolution. That revolution is exemplified by the birth control pill,
more widespread pornography and its acceptance, LGBT liberation, hookup
culture, easier divorce, and legal abortion and attempts to legalize
prostitution.
In the past,
those arguing against the sexual revolution might cite religion and the concept
of sexual sin as their foundation for behavior. Perry makes clear that her book
is no friend of "patriarchal religious systems," which she dismisses,
very briefly, as "unwelcome phenomena," whose "ancient religious
codes were formulated" in a world unlike our own. "Imitating the past
cannot teach us how to live in the twenty-first century." Perry
acknowledges that "religious commitment" can protect some women from
sexual disaster, but "religious commitment" is only for a tiny
minority. Clearly, her targeted audience is a member of the rapidly rising "none"
group who identifies with no religion. She must, therefore, find a reason other
than religion to recommend a rejection of what she sees as the downside to the
sexual revolution. I think Perry's proposed, new ethical foundation falls short
of the ordnance necessary to defeat the enemy at which Perry is really aiming.
This reader did
not experience Case as it is titled and marketed. The book hops from
topic to topic far too rapidly and in far too disorganized a fashion to make a
coherent case against the sexual revolution. The Marquis de Sade, websites
where Johns posts reviews of prostitutes, Sex and the City episodes, are
all very interesting, but to me diverse, briefly mentioned anecdotes never
gelled. Child pornography, prostitution, sadomasochistic sex, and hookup
culture are hefty topics. They deserve deeper treatment than they receive here.
Much of the
material Perry cites is disturbing and I often needed to stop reading. A
skilled author can present troubling material in such a way that the book
becomes a page-turner, rather than a turn-off. Perry tosses out merely icky or deeply
heartbreaking factoids and just moves on, perhaps assuming that her reader is
so jaded by the over-stimulation of wall-to-wall extreme media that, say,
accounts of the skeletons of newborn babies as a reliable marker of
archaeological digs of brothels, or mention of BBC celebrity Jimmy Saville's
sexual abuse of over a thousand child victims, won't disturb that reader.
Perry opens
with a grotesque image of the ancient Hugh Hefner, fortified by Viagra, vainly
struggling to ejaculate, even though he is surrounded by Playboy playmates
shouting obscene encouragement. His sheets are stained and there is dog poop on
the carpet. And then there's the vivid image of Marilyn Monroe repeatedly being
"scraped out" after yet another alleged abortion.
Perry doesn't
incorporate either of these hideous tableaux to advance a larger argument. She
doesn't have to. The queasy, mournful mood the images evoke are the entire
point. Perry is in fact performing a religious act with these images. One of
the themes of Catholic and other religious iconography is human decay. Medieval
Sheela-na-gig carvings on Catholic churches offered graphic depictions of
female genitalia, so graphic that they make you shudder. The Sheela-na-gig's
sexual cavity is less a site of pleasure than the open grave where the most
seductive human forms eventually putrefy and are annihilated. The beautiful and
powerful Biblical Whore of Babylon is arrayed in purple and scarlet, gold, gems,
and pearls, but she is filthy and corrupt. Skulls, sagging
breasts, toothless mouths, bulging eyes, appear in religious art
from India to Chartres.
The point of
such art was to hammer home to the audience: "You may be young and pretty
now and sex may be so seductive you can't resist. Just remember how grisly
things can end up if done badly. You have an immortal soul. Take care of that
while you scratch your sexual itch."
Perry includes lyrics
from "Cold Blow and the Rainy Night," and
"The Greenwood Side." These traditional
folk ballads convey the same message as the above-cited artworks and Bible
verses that warn the young about the downside of sex. Sex is seductive but if
indulged in outside of social norms it can be followed by punishing shame,
regret, and even, for the woman, death by starvation when abandoned by her
lover and the father of her baby. Even worse, she might burn forever in Hell for killing
her illegitimate child. Perry, in her Hefner and Monroe anecdotes, and in the
rest of her book, whether she likes it or not, is playing the role of a
preacher.
Perry was
telling this reader things she's heard many times before, from writers who
devoted more concentration to each feature she addresses. David M. Buss, for
example, did a better job arguing for a universal, cross-cultural male
sexuality that is honed by evolution. In his 1994 book The Evolution Of
Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, Buss argues against those who insist
that attractiveness is relative and changes from era to era and place to place.
Buss cites numerous examples to argue that throughout human history, all over
the world, physical attractiveness is more important to men than it is to
women, and physical attractiveness is assessed according to criteria like
youth, symmetry, proportionality, and clarity. Lizzo, in short, Buss might
argue, would not be physically attractive to most men.
Bare
Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population by Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer in
2005 better addresses how societies have assessed female versus male value.
Wendy Shalit's 1999 book A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue took
on the sexual revolution over twenty years ago, and other works, inspired by
Shalit, followed. There are even, in Perry's book, echoes of the 1995
sensation, The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr.
Right by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider.
What all the
above books have in common with Perry's is this. They all argue that in spite
of cultural changes brought about by the sexual revolution, there are certain
aspects of human sexuality that are hard-wired. Those who invest in attempts to
change hard-wired aspects of human sexuality risk not only heartbreak, but
deadly danger.
Many authors,
in many works and disciplines, have repeatedly pointed out that sex is an
evolutionary strategy for the reproduction of life. For any of us to be here,
our ancestors had to have reproduced successfully, in spite of all the odds
against doing so. Nature, not nurture, decrees that sexual reproduction is more
of an investment for women than it is for men. Men can, theoretically, father a
child every time they ejaculate. Women, on the other hand, have a much smaller
number of gametes, and they must invest a vastly greater amount of time and
energy into producing viable offspring that survive to adulthood. Women,
therefore, are evolutionarily primed to seek long-term relationships with
economically productive and supportive partners. Around the world, women care
less than men do about their partner being young or attractive. They want a
stable, devoted man who can bring home the bacon.
Men, on the
other hand, are more likely than women to prefer brief, no-commitment sex with
numerous partners. When the sexual revolution insisted that women should be
more like men and should satisfy themselves with brief, shallow sexual contact,
it was asking women to meet the needs of men, not women. Demanding that women attempt
to become more masculine hurt women.
I didn't
believe that Perry's book was in fact a case against the sexual revolution.
Sure, she insists it is, but, again, ancient brothels found in archaeological
digs, impoverished, naked, child sex slaves forced, by the British, to service
imperial personnel in Raj-era India, and the eighteenth-century Marquis de
Sade, significantly pre-date the sexual revolution. Rather, I think Perry is
taking aim at an impregnable target: male lust. Women are not exempt from
Perry's condemnation. While men are driven by lust to commit vile and even
deadly acts, women are too weak, and too eager to please, to resist men. Perry
writes about men callously using women sexually, hurting and even killing women
for sexual thrills. But she also writes about women working hard to attract and
remain with men who abuse women, because women are evolutionarily primed to prioritize
relationship with a man.
The kind of
casual sex advanced by the sexual revolution hurts women and men both, Perry
argues. It hurts women most directly. It hurts men less directly. Before the
sexual revolution, men had to become real men before they could attract a mate,
a mate who would provide them with that which they most desired, regular sex.
Without that requirement, males do not now fully grow into manhood, or into
their best selves.
As I was
reading about things I wish I had never heard of, like a current sexual fad of
men choking women, I urged myself on by promising myself that the author was
going to conclude with a solution. Indeed, she does. "Marriage Is
Good," she reports. Monogamous marriage "till death do us part,"
including the parenting of children, is the ideal.
I felt cheated.
Perry had already told me that, given demographic realities, past mistakes that
can't be fixed, and differences between the sexes, many women will never marry,
and many marriages will go south, thanks to abusive or dysfunctional men,
leaving divorced women who, she assures us, will probably never remarry. She has spent several chapters hammering away
at what a dangerous force male lust is, and how societies have tried to deal
with surplus male lust that isn't satisfied even by marriage. The prostituting of
young, poor, desperate, defenseless women and girls, and even boys, is one
societal solution to excess male lust. The other is rape. The men who never
marry, or who are too dysfunctional to fulfill the role of husband, will,
presumably, in Perry's ideal society of successful monogamous marriages,
continue to exploit prostitutes and to commit rapes. Perry's solution did not
lighten my mood.
Finally, Perry
never musters the authority to add clout to her suggestions. Again, she's
already dismissed religion as "patriarchal" and followed only by
fringe tribes still among hip, modern, atheists. She's titling at one gigantic
windmill: male lust, and a lesser windmill, female desperation to find, please,
and keep a man. Perry mentions prostitute review sites. I visited the site
Perry mentions. In one review, a fifty-year-old man criticizes a teenage
prostitute for not being warm to him. Would a man that insensitive be moved by
anything Perry says? No.
Perry describes
how harmful porn addiction is to addicts. As is usual with addiction, addicts
exhaust their abused body parts, in this case, their genitals, as well as their
neurons and their limbic systems to the point where pleasure is gone but
addiction remains, and normal functioning is handicapped or even impossible.
Will any porn addict stop visiting porn sites because Perry reminded him that
porn actresses are abused, cheated, and thrown away? I can't see that
happening.
The forces that
may have once kept male lust in check are weakened. Some feared Hell. Others
feared the neighbors or the law. Perry offers no force that can effectively
replace them. Her best weapon is science, research, and "studies
show." Studies show that children who grow up with both biological parents
in the home do better on a variety of measures. Research of online discussion
forums reveals that women feel used and depressed after hookups, even if they
have consented. Medicine insists that there is no "safe" way for a
man to choke a woman during sex. If a man feels driven by lust and his own
sadism to choke a woman during sex, is he really going to listen to the
scientific consensus that he could do permanent damage to the woman? Probably
not. By the way, I'm revealing my own Puritanical, retro values by calling "choking"
by its name. Advocates like to call it "breath play."
Perry argues
that the sexual revolution's salvific ritual is the granting of consent. If
people say "yes" to a given sex act, that sex act is sanctioned.
Perry insists that consent is worthless. Some acts are wrong even if the actors
give consent. She tosses out thought experiments. What if a man kills a
chicken, has sex with the corpse, and then eats the chicken. Is that an ethical
act? For me the more urgent question is, how does a human have sex with a dead chicken? And please don't answer that.
Take it further. What if a human being consents to being killed, and, later,
the subject of necrophilia and cannibalism? The person consented to this; if
consent sanctions all, one does not have a basis for judgment. Perry implies
that she condemns such behavior, but, again, she offers no reason why she has
the authority to render that judgment.
A more common
dilemma: women who consent to being subjected to choking and other forms of
sadomasochist sex. Perry says that sexual violence has become more common given
that sadomasochism is increasingly popular in online porn. Porn addiction
demands more and more extreme stimuli, in the same way that substance abusers
graduate from painkillers to heroin to fentanyl (to death). Pin-up type art is
no longer enough to satisfy a porn addict. He needs a gang rape and a snuff
film. And, since he has seen it on video, he feels entitled to perform it in
real life. And some women consent.
Validation of
sadomasochism is not limited to porn. Roxane Gay is a New York Times columnist
and best-selling author. She has promoted sadomasochism. Millions of other
women have voted for sadomasochism when they buy the Fifty Shades of Grey books.
Perry's argument that the internet is largely responsible for sadomasochistic
sex is questionable. E.M. Hull's The Sheik sold a million copies a
hundred years ago and inspired two hugely popular Rudolph Valentino movies.
Gone with the Wind, another publishing and cinematic sensation, also
featured a soft-core rape scene.
Perry is
correct, though, in pointing out that women who indulge in such fantasies don't
read them as many men do. Women fantasize that a man's sadomasochistic acts are
a sign of deep love and devotion. In the popular fantasies, from The Sheik to
Fifty Shades, the sadistic man eventually drops his sadism and humbly
and even tearfully confesses how desperately he loves and needs the woman he's
been bruising. The woman ends as the dominant partner. The man needs her.
Real life
sadomasochism does not live up to the Sheik fantasy. Perry mentions John
Broadhurst, an older multimillionaire who beat his younger lover, Natalie
Connolly, extensively during a sadomasochistic session. In addition to the
other injuries Connolly sustained, she apparently bled to death via her vagina.
Broadhurst argued that his lover consented to sadomasochistic sex. His defense
resulted in a brief prison sentence of twenty-two months for raping a woman to
death. Perry relies on our gut-level aversion to verify her condemnation of
women's consent to participate in sadomasochism. Gut-level aversion is not
enough. There are people who feel a profound aversion to eating Brussels
sprouts. That aversion is no foundation for a value system.
While writing Case,
Perry says, she realized that "I needed to offer readers some real
guidance on how to live." Her writing is replete with value judgments. "Liberal ideology flatters us by telling
us that our desires are good and that we can find meaning in satisfying them,
whatever the cost." "There is a darkness within human sexuality,
mostly, but not exclusively, within men." "There is no good reason to
use porn." It's not possible "to use porn ethically." Indeed,
she titles a chapter "Some Desires are Bad." "Unwanted sex is
worse than sexual frustration … it should be men, not women, who adjust their
sexual appetites." Her impulse is a religious one. Her authorities,
"recent studies report," "gut" reactions, and "moral
intuition" are not.
That our
desires are not good, and that meaning is not found in satisfying desire, that
there is even such a thing as "worse" sex or that anyone
"should" adjust their sexual appetite are all religious messages.
"I am going to propose an alternative form of sexual culture – one that
recognizes other human beings as … invested with value and dignity."
"We should treat our sexual partners with dignity. We should not regard
other people as merely body parts to be enjoyed." Men, as the stronger sex,
should practice "chivalry." Men and women should "navigate a
virtuous path."
Why? Perry not
only never answers this question, she never asks it. Once you toss out those
"patriarchal religious systems," those "unwelcome
phenomena," Judaism and Christianity,
and turn to purely materialist atheism, from what well do you draw the
concept of human value and dignity? The Judeo-Christian tradition cites Genesis
1:26-31 for its authority on the value and dignity of each human being.
Perry assumes
that she has the authority to tell men that their desires are not good, and to
tell women that they can't think for themselves. Women not only volunteer for
sadomasochistic sex, they also regularly choose and return to garden variety
domestic abusers. By what authority does Perry tell these people that she feels
better than they feel, and that she thinks better than they think? Women who
ask their sexual partner to hurt them as part of sadomasochism are, Perry says,
"mentally ill." By what authority does she say that? She doesn't say.
She just horrifies the reader again, and relies on horror to sell her point.
"Almost all men can kill almost all women with their bare hands … and that
matters." Solution? "Avoid putting yourself in a situation where you
are alone with a man … who gives you a bad feeling in your gut." Again,
the Brussels sprouts solution. If something repulses you, it is bad. Perry
acknowledges that our desires can be bad for us; but so can our aversions. And
both desires and aversions can be blind as bats – hormonally addled, teenage
bats. We need a better solution than gut-level reactions.
Interestingly,
to buttress her anti-desire stance, Perry cites G. K. Chesterton, a Catholic
apologist. In his 1929 book The Thing, Chesterton offered a brilliant
defense of conservatism. "In the matter of reforming things,"
Chesterton wrote, "there is one plain and simple principle … Let us say,
for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more
modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of
this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer
will do well to answer: 'If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won't let
you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me
that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'" Perry
cites this passage specifically in relation to the taboo against having sex
with chicken corpses, and, also, against pedophilia.
Perry insists
that the concept of "consent" is especially destructive when applied
to adults having sex with children. Children cannot consent to sex. Murkier
waters flood the mind when considering porn that depicts pedophilia. Internet
star Belle Delphine is an adult, but she pretends to be a child being raped by
a kidnapper. This is bad, Perry says. How do we know Delphine's porn is bad?
"Moral intuition" Perry says. Again, the gut is supposed to inform
our ethics. Perry must know that Delphine and other porn stars makes a very
lucrative living because many people's "guts" and
"intuition" drive them toward child pornography.
Perry can't
escape the Judeo-Christian tradition. Perry mentions Josephine
Butler, a devout Christian feminist and campaigner against child
prostitution. In addition to her activism, Butler took prostitutes into her
home and nursed them as they died of VD. Butler is such a saintly figure she is
the subject of at least two stained glass windows (here and here).
Gender studies
professor Alison Phipps bashed women like Butler in a 2020 university press
book, labeling such folk "nineteenth century vice fighters" and
"Christian moralists." Perry says, "the religious inflection of Victorian
moralizing is anathema to a determinedly secular contemporary feminist
movement. Josephine Butler was a Christian, and her faith was the key driving
force in her work. Although she was both a slavery abolitionist and an early
supporter of women's suffrage … she is condemned."
Post the sexual
revolution, it is uncool to condemn prostitution. "Sex work" is above
condemnation. Even when the prostitute is, as in Butler's day, a
twelve-year-old Indian girl sold by her parents into sexual slavery to British
troops. Perry condemns support for prostitution as a "luxury belief,"
using a term coined by Rob Henderson. Luxury beliefs "confer status on the
rich at very little cost while taking a toll on the poor."
I had my
problems with this book, but I am not its intended audience. I think The
Case Against the Sexual Revolution would make a great gift for a young,
conventionally educated, Western woman. Girls who have gone to schools that
have taught them that girls can become boys and boys can become girls and that
"if it feels good, do it," girls who might not know any of the facts
that Perry introduces, might have their minds, and their behaviors, shaken by
this book. And that would be a good thing.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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