The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Louise Perry
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at least some such reports. For we now live in a culture where, though it isn’t taboo for a man to choke a woman during sex, or anally penetrate her, or ejaculate on her face while filming it, it is taboo for a young woman to express discomfort about the nature of the sexual bargain she’s expected by society to make. This bargain says: sacrifice your own wellbeing for the pleasures of men in order to compete in the heterosexual dating marketplace at all.
As Perry documents in sometimes shocking vignettes, whatever ill effects the sexual revolution had for women in the twentieth century have been supersized in the digital age of the twenty-first. There is little doubt that contemporary sexual culture is destructive for younger women in particular. It sells them a sexbot aesthetic, pressures them into promiscuity, bombards them with dick pics and violent pornography, and tells them to enjoy being humiliated and assaulted in bed. It says that, as long as they choose it, being exploited for money is ‘sex work’ and that ‘sex work is work’. It also tells women not to mix up sex with love and to stay disconnected and emotionless from partners. It encourages them to change their bodies in ways that match pornographic ideals. And, worst of all, it says that to comply with all of this is empowering – ignoring the obvious fact that telling women to subdue their minds and submit their bodies to physically stronger strangers can be lethal.
Perhaps surprisingly, the taboo around discussing the costs of the sexual revolution is enabled by popular feminism. This is because popular feminism is a version of liberal feminism, and liberal feminism in its populist guise is focused mostly on a woman’s ‘right to choose’ or ‘consent’, construed incredibly thinly. Everything and anything goes as long as you choose or consent to it at the time. What this misses out, of course, is that people can be pressured – by peers or partners or wider cultural forces – into believing that they want things which later they come to recognise as bad for them. In a culture dominated by male sexuality, there’s an obvious interest in convincing women that they want to have sex like men do, and many women go along with things they later come to regret.
At this point, the inner liberal feminist in many readers may be howling: but what if I genuinely want all that stuff? Well, good for you if you genuinely do. But, as Perry shows, even if this sort of sex works for some women, there are many other women for whom it does not. And they aren’t ‘prudes’, or ‘frigid’, or ‘asexual’, or ‘in a moral panic’, or any of the other insulting words produced by the culture to keep the whole man-pleasing machinery working. Nor need they be religious. There are plenty of reasons to be wary of contemporary sexual mores that are perfectly secular.
Both liberal feminism’s narrow focus on choice and its incapacity to discuss deep differences between women and men stem from its intellectual forefather: liberalism, a political tradition heavily focused on freedom of choice as the thing definitive of personhood. The fantasy of a liberal subject is of an ostensibly sexless individual, defined mostly by the presence of a free will, untethered by family ties or community expectations and pursuing private preferences in a relatively unfettered way. I say ‘ostensibly sexless’, because – in a point made by second-wave feminists and brought up to date by Perry – this idealised figure of a liberal subject sounds more like a man roaming around getting his oats than a woman whose life is intertwined with the kids that are the outcome of her own sexual activity.
How then can we start talking about what might work for women, specifically? Perry turns to biology and evolutionary psychology, asking: What does a woman tend to desire, given the kind of female animal she is, with the specific reproductive capacities she tends to have? (Talk of animals is not insulting. We are all animals, though hubris tries to make us forget it.) Given the vexed history of discussion about nature vs nurture within feminism, this move towards the natural is a bold one. But Perry’s approach deserves open-minded attention – especially when you remember that, according to the currently more popular narrative, human bodies as well as minds are plastic. Yes: such is liberal feminism’s fear of limits upon personal freedom that – in tandem with its BFF capitalism – it now construes facts about healthy bodies as obstacles to freedom. Don’t like your breasts? Buy new ones, or cut them off altogether! (Delete as appropriate.) Incredibly, in some feminists, the degree of denial stretches even to telling us that biology itself is a myth or a construct. Yet, as Perry argues, once we acknowledge the ‘hard limits imposed by biology’, we can make informed inferences about female wellbeing in particular – rooted in the real, and not what is projected or fantasised by men.
Perry’s background as a journalist, commentator, and campaigner against ‘rough sex’ criminal defences perfectly places her to tackle these issues, and she does so with characteristic style and fearlessness. Her book does several things that are unusual for a modern feminist text. It refuses the easy wins of the Cool Girl Feminist, swimming against the pink tide of sex-positive vacuity to spell out some uncomfortable truths. It is uninterested in liberal feminist buzzwords such as freedom and equality, focusing instead on women’s needs and wellbeing, independently from a consideration of men. Whether you ultimately agree or disagree with Perry’s analysis, the book takes the interests of women deadly seriously and carves out a space for them to talk properly about the costs of the sexual culture in which they must sink or swim. It’s essential for the wellbeing of young women that we do this, and we should all be grateful to Perry for advancing this important conversation.
1 Sex Must Be Taken Seriously
Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe – those two icons of the sexual revolution – never actually met, but they were born in the same year and laid to rest in the same place, side by side.1 In 1992, Hefner bought the crypt next door to Monroe’s in the Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles for $75,000,2 telling the Los Angeles Times: ‘I’m a believer in things symbolic … [so] spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up.’3 At the age of ninety-one, Hefner got his wish. The long-dead Monroe had no say in the matter. But then she had never been given much say in what men did to her over the course of her short life.
Marilyn Monroe was both the first ever cover star and the first ever naked centrefold in the first ever edition of Hefner’s Playboy magazine, published in December 1953. ‘Entertainment for MEN’ was the promise offered on the front cover, and the magazine evidently delivered on that promise, since it was a commercial success from its very first issue.
Marilyn Monroe’s naked photos were four years old by the time of their publication. In 1949, the 23-year-old Monroe had been paid $50 for a two-hour photo shoot with pin-up photographer Tom Kelley, who had promised that he’d make her unrecognisable, and almost delivered on his promise.4 The woman curled up on a red velvet bedspread is not obviously Monroe, since her hair was a little more brunette at the time, her pained face was half hidden behind an outstretched arm, and her pale, pretty body was indistinguishable from the bodies of most of the other models in Playboy (which would not feature a black centrefold until 1965 – the eighteen-year-old recipient of this dubious honour, Jennifer Jackson, later described ‘Hef’ as ‘a high-class pimp’).5
The clothed Monroe on the cover of the magazine beckoned in readers with the promise of a ‘FULL COLOR’ nude photo of the actress for the ‘first time in any magazine’, and Hefner later said that her centrefold was the key reason for the publication’s initial success. Monroe herself was humiliated by the photo shoot, which she resorted to only out of desperate need for money, signing the release documents with a fake name.6 Hefner didn’t pay her to use her images and didn’t seek her consent before publishing them.7 Monroe reportedly told a friend that she had ‘never even received a thank-you from all those who made millions off a nude Marilyn photograph. I even had to buy a copy of the magazine to see myself in it.’8
The courses of these two lives show us in perfect vignette the nature of the sexual revolution’s impact on men and women. Monroe and Hefner both began in obscurity and ended their lives rich and famous, having found success in the same city and at the very same historical moment. But, while Hefner lived a long, grubby life in his mansion with his playmates, Monroe’s life was cut short by misery and substance abuse.