The Bedevilments of Sex: Louise Perry’s “The Case against the Sexual Revolution”03/06/20226
Ralph Leonard
The legacy of the sexual revolution has been scrutinised, even called into question altogether recently. What was traditionally hailed as a liberation, in particular for women and sexual minorities, that abolished antiquated and oppressive sexual customs and taboos, so that individuals could pursue their erotic odysseys free of shame, guilt and legal sanction, is increasingly viewed as bringing about an anarchy and leading to anxiety in sexual relations, which have become oppressive for women, who still live in a society biased in favour of men.A lot has been made of the apparent sex negativity of Gen-Z. Despite being the most sexually flexible generation, they are having less sex and fewer children than their predecessors. Billie Eilish has been championed as the poster girl of this Zoomer backlash against sex positivity for her stance against pornography and her preference for baggy and otherwise “modest” clothing, designed to deter sexualised commentary about her body. Even the sex-positive feminist Laurie Penny fears that “we’re on the edge of a real anti-sex backlash.” The inference seems to be that the sexual revolution may have been a mistake.
Louise Perry isn’t shy about saying so. In her new book, The Case against the Sexual Revolution, she encourages this backlash. While she accepts that there has been modest progress for women, she questions the notion that the sexual revolution has been a gain or a liberation for women. Quite the opposite. “Women have been conned,” she declares. The sexual revolution, Perry emphatically argues, didn’t liberate them. Instead, it liberated the libidos of high-status playboys and lechers such as Hugh Hefner and Harvey Weinstein at the expense of women. “We have smoothly transitioned from one form of female subservience to another,” she writes, “but we pretend that this one is liberation.” The rule of St. Augustine has been replaced with the rule of Don Juan and thus: “It’s time for a sexual counter-revolution.” This isn’t your usual traditional religious moralism. Perry’s thinking is quite secular. It appeals to science (specifically, evolutionary psychology). But, like religious moralism, which is based on the idea of man as a fallen being, Perry’s use of evolutionary psychology reveals the supposed limitations of our evolved nature. And, like a religious moralist, Perry regards what Henry Miller called “the World of Sex” as dangerous, devilish and in desperate need of the shining light of virtue.
Perry advertises her book as an attempt to reckon with the immense change the sexual revolution has created throughout society and culture. She proclaims that she does not endorse either “the accounts typically offered by liberals, addicted to a narrative of progress, or conservatives addicted to a narrative of decline.” Instead, she makes the following arguments. First, men and women possess significant sexual differences due to their intrinsic biology and to evolutionary adaptations, and these differences have consequences for how men and women relate to each other sexually. Second, liberal feminism, in its arrogance, ignores and dismisses these consequences, to the detriment of women. Third, not all sexual desires are good. Some are bad and need to be stigmatised. Fourth, sex without love isn’t liberating, but spiritually and emotionally oppressive. Fifth, consent is an insufficient guarantee that sex is ethical. And, finally, she makes what she calls a feminist case for monogamous marriage.
Although Perry’s critique is clearly influenced by radical feminism—particularly in its hostility towards pornography and prostitution—she arraigns radical feminists for their wilful dismissal of biology. Most notably, she disagrees with the radical feminist orthodoxy that views rape as “an expression of political domination rooted in patriarchy.” Rather, she asserts, “rape is an aggressive expression of sexual desire.” However, the main antagonist in Perry’s critique is liberal feminism and “its wrong but also harmful narrative of sexual liberation.” Once a liberal, sex-positive feminist herself, she claims to have been mugged by reality when she witnessed male violence against women up close and began to grapple with humanity’s “biological limits.” She now sees liberal feminism as the handmaiden of the new patriarchy. Few liberal feminists, she writes, are “willing to draw the link between the culture of sexual hedonism they promote and anxieties over campus rape.” Her main philosophical gripe with liberal feminism is its attachment to human exceptionalism: it naively understands humans as “uniquely detached from the normal processes of natural selection” and is beholden to a blank-slatist view that presents human nature and sexuality as exclusively moulded by socialisation. Because of this they are “unwittingly imitating the religious fundamentalists who resisted Darwin” in their hostility to the insights of evolutionary psychology.
So, for example, men evolved to want casual sex more than women do (on average) because they need to spread their genes, while women have evolved to want committed monogamy more than men, because of their limited reproductive capacity and the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. The advent of reliable contraception and abortion emancipated women from their biological limits and gave women the freedom to have commitment-free casual sex, like men. This has placed an intolerable burden on women, making them ripe for exploitation by the patriarchy with a human face.
The crux of Perry’s case rests on the argument that contemporary sexuality is defined by “sexual disenchantment” (an idea inspired by Max Weber). Sex has been evacuated of any mysterious, magical or holistic quality by the materialist philosophy that undergirds modern culture. It’s been reduced to meaningless leisure activity—“neither uniquely wonderful or uniquely violating.” Just as the rationalism of the Enlightenment reduced the “sacred grove” of the natural world to “mere timber” in the words of Hegel, Perry feels that the sexual revolution has reduced women’s bodies to mere flesh, meat, bleep: objects to be consumed by men at their pleasure, commodities that can be freely exchanged in the marketplace like any other commodity. This has interesting echoes of Margaret C. Jacob’s essay “The Materialist World of Pornography” in Lynn Hunt’s 1996 collection The Invention of Pornography. Jacob writes about the relationship between the rise of mechanistic materialism and the growth in pornography during the Scientific Revolution:
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Source:
https://areomagazine.com/2022/06/03/the-bedevilments-of-sex-louise-perrys-the-case-against-the-sexual-revolution/
