'Why The Sexual Revolution Failed'

My Review of Louise Perry's seminal book

Louise Perry has emerged as a powerful voice against liberal feminism in recent years. A writer, columnist and campaigner against sexual violence, she joins a growing number of public intellectuals who, like her have been 'mugged by reality' and turned conservative as a result. Perry's encounter with reality came by way of the hook up culture of her student days in Oxford University and later as a volunteer at a rape crisis centre. Lived experience and an impressive analytical ability brought her to a radical re-evaluation of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its destructive consequences for women but also, though less obviously and immediately, for children and men too.

Perry mentions 'Chesterton's fence' and the age-old temptation to discard the boundaries and norms set by previous generations in the name of progress, personal autonomy and a changing cultural environment. Removing a fence without first knowing its purpose may be reckless. Removing it in defiance of its purpose, believing that we know our own nature better than our ancestors did is hubristic. Perry's book maps the unfolding of this hubris.

For women, the sexual revolution, enabled by the contraceptive pill, which campaigning feminists considered an unmitigated triumph, has come back to bite. But the learning process is proving very slow and very painful. It has sharply divided the feminist movement. The 'liberal', as opposed to 'radical' or 'revisionist' feminists like Perry and fellow writer, Mary Harrington, march along to the same old, jaded drum beat of feminist memes from the 1960s. We might instance the publicly funded 'National Women's Council of Ireland' (NWCI) as the particularly obdurate slow learners here. They refuse to acknowledge the glaringly obvious fact that the sexual revolution has not served women's interests, apart from perhaps a tiny elite of affluent careerists like themselves. Instead they insist that the movement has not gone far enough, that men haven't been sufficiently educated to embrace the implications of 'equality'. And, of course, this particularly toxic and parasitic NGO always ends up with pleas for more state investment in their pet projects to unblock the remaining barriers to a notion of 'equality' that denies there is any inbuilt asymmetry between the sexes.

Perhaps, we may hope that people like Perry are being heard further down the ranks of womankind where being 'mugged by reality' tends to happen sooner rather than later. The rejection of two recent referendums in Ireland, referendums driven in large part by the NWCI, that set out to remove 'mothers' from the Constitution and re-define family, was overwhelmingly rejected which strongly suggests that ordinary women and men too are beginning to resist the ideological propaganda machine.

Perry graphically describes how the sexual revolution has coarsened sex and re-set the relationships between men and women. On mens' terms. The promise of 'copious and commitment free sex' does not work for the vast majority of women. Perry makes her case powerfully.  Yet, the hyper-sexualisation and 'pornification' of our culture continues to be monetised by high status women in the entertainment industry. Perry does not mention the billion dollar earning, global pop star, Taylor Swift who has joined the list of performers she name checks, ranging from now middle-aged stars like Kylie Minogue and Madonna to the likes of Swift. What they all have in common is marketing strategy based on sex appeal as much as talent. Their costumes are glorified beach or underwear that sometimes references porn paraphernalia. Perry describes how Harry Potter actress, Emma Watson, defended herself from very critical backlash after she bared her breasts in Vogue magazine by saying she was exercising 'choice'. No doubt her 'choice' was influenced by the publisher's cheque. These are the women who are influencing the rising generation of girls and boys. It is hardly surprising that the young of both sexes feel so pressured and perplexed by this relentless messaging that self-identity and self-worth are rooted in sexual signifiers.

The sexually suggestive attire worn by pop artistes on mainstream platforms pales in comparison with the outlandish garb of sexual deviancy and degeneracy easily accessed on online porn sites.  Perry paints a grim picture of the dark web which she says is not necessarily dark in the sense of being deeply buried and difficult to access. In fact it is all too easy. The most profitable online platform today is not, as one might expect, Amazon, or Facebook or Twitter.  The father of all media behemoths is none other than Pornhub that carries, interalia, videos of 'women being asphyxiated in plastic bags' and of sex-trafficed women and children being raped. Perry notes that while Jeff Bezos and Mark Zucherberg are household names, few are familiar with the names David Marmorestein Tasillo and Feras Antoon, the vastly wealthier founders of the innocuous sounding Mind Geek and its highest grossing platform, Pornhub. And, of course, no commercial success stands alone. Access to these hubs of contagion and exploitation is provided by credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard. Following a campaign highlighting the activities of pornhub, the credit card companies implemented 'a crackdown on unverified content', reducing the number of videos from 13 million to 4 million. So, after that it's business as usual again we are led to assume. 

Perry doesn't believe porn can be ethical at least for the vast majority of those engaged in it. She challenges the mantra that 'sex work is work', a view espoused by the likes of Irish Minister for Minorities, Roderic O Gorman and Amnesty International. Sex work, or prostitution, properly speaking, requires a woman to 'ignore her own lack of sexual desire or even bone-deep revulsion and to suppress her self-protective instincts in the service of another person's sexual pleasure'. Such astute comment could, one feels, only come from someone who had lived fairly deeply within this culture herself. There are thousands and thousands of women who experience what she describes so well but who could never, ever express their thoughts and feelings with such bullseye accuracy. Those who purport to speak for women, who should be standing up for such women are still captured by the chimera of difference denying 'equality' and simplistic notions of 'autonomy' that fail to understand psychological complexity and gender difference.

Denial of sexual asymmetry has now reached quite literally the level of burlesque absurdity. Drag and queer subcultures parody women in a way that would be considered misogynistic and offensive if straight men were involved. In crossdressing, we see outlandish makeup, wigs, vertiginous heels and costumes wrapped tightly around prosthetic curves. This time the sexual innuendo is in exaggerated mimicry and explicit verbal quips. Despite efforts to mainstream drag and queer in libraries and schools and public festivals under the guise of supporting diverse identities, the fact is that this is about what best can be described as 'adult entertainment' for men. It shows how male sexuality has permeated the culture in train of a liberation movement that was meant to empower women.

For Perry, the sexual liberation revolution has backfired for women because male and female sexuaity have different dynamics. Women are orientated to look for a partner with the qualities they would want in the father of their children. Sex for women, despite contraception, is potentially hugely consequential. It's not necessarily a big deal for men for whom hook-up sex is like 'ordering takeaway food'. In contrast women want 'an arm around the waist' or 'to hold hands in daylight' and they want commitment. They want the very opposite of what the sexual liberation set out to give them, 'copious sex without commitment'. Having it all, 'leaning in' does not work for most women. The fact that 'less than half of tenured female academics have children' is revealing.  For the much greater cohort of women who occupy the plains beneath the ivory towers, the central life project of raising a family edges out ambition and monetary gain. Yet, their voices are not heard. Perry notes that only 3% of academic papers from feminists in academia mention motherhood.

The only answer liberal feminists have to different expectations around sex is to teach men the principle of 'consent'. Perry doesn't believe it's so simple. There are many ways 'consent' can be compromised in a culture that regards sex so lightly and, given the availability of abortion, free of the consequences that historically gave women incontrovertible grounds for resisting male advances. Beyond the 'consent' fence, such as it is, women have to reckon with male expectations drawn from their experience of online pornography that normalises depravity and violence.

Perry makes the interesting point that extending freedoms to a minority who want it, and for whom it has no negative consequences, has implications for everyone else 'on the bell curve'. She sees how social developments since the 1960s have undermined the institution that best protects women and children and best secures the social good, 'monogamous marriage'. She quotes writer and cognitive psychologist, Steven Pinker, who said step parents 'pose the strongest risk factor for child-abuse ever invented'. However, Perry notes that monogamous marriage is not 'our natural state' and has to be 'enforced through laws and customs'. 

This is where, I feel, Perry's analysis runs to ground. Marriage indeed needs the support of laws and customs but to flourish, marriage and family life, up to recent decades, also had the support of a faith culture too. Perry rejects any suggestion that restoring the Chestertonian fences of the pre-1960's era would be a positive step despite what she says about the value of cultural fences. If 'laws and customs' are not grounded in a clear vision of humankind's unique dignity and destiny what anchor do they have? She knows that campus programmes 'to teach men not to rape' are ineffective but does not see any way of incuclating restraint and responsibility other than by force of law. Her book makes assumptions that social order and balance can be restored by simply accepting that unleashed sexual desire, particularly male sexual desire, is a dangerous and destructive force that must be hemmed in by well defined social and cultural controls proven to benefit the common good. 

Perry accepts the value of moral and cultural 'fences' but only sort of. Her acknowledgment that extending freedoms to minorities on the fringes has consequences all the way across the social spectrum is not reflected in her views on abortion and her rejection of the traditional iteration of 'monogamous marriage'. She believes that contraception and abortion have 'freed women from the back-breaking work of unwanted children'. She holds that 'denying a same sex couple the right to marry is both cruel and nonsensical'. Yet, these freedoms have been shown to be massively consequential across society.  Perry believes it is 'possible to be pro-choice and make men pay for the children they help to create'. This statement is mired in incoherence and wishful thinking. Where marriage is concerned, it is easy to see from the Irish experience alone how the attack on both marriage and motherhood, as played out in the recent referendum campaigns, grew out of the country's decision to extend marriage to gay couples. The same campaigners were involved in both referendums.

There is indeed, as Perry argues, a clear line from 'hard case' law to appease a minority to radical social re-ordering that no one asked for. The question is how far can one shift a fence or lower a fence without defeating its purpose? Louise Perry deftly and eloquently identifies the challenges created by a reality denying view of equality in this brilliantly researched book but offers no convincing signposts to the way back from the insanity of our time.