The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Louise Perry
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is a natural consequence of the liberal privileging of freedom over all other values, because, if you want to be utterly free, you have to take aim at any kind of social restrictions that limit you, particularly the belief that sex has some unique, intangible value – some specialness that is difficult to rationalise. From this belief in the specialness of sex comes a host of potentially unwelcome phenomena, including patriarchal religious systems. But when we attempt to disenchant sex, and so pretend that this particular act is neither uniquely wonderful nor uniquely violating, then there is another kind of cost.
That cost falls disproportionately on women, for biological reasons that I’ll come back to in the next chapter. And liberal feminists do seem to recognise this disproportionate impact, as demonstrated by the popularity of the Me Too movement, which began in earnest in 2017. This outpouring of rage and sorrow was evidence of a sexual culture that wasn’t working for women. The stories that came out of Me Too included plenty of unambiguously criminal behaviour, but there were also a lot of women who described sexual encounters that were technically consensual but nevertheless left them feeling terrible because they were being asked to treat as meaningless something that they felt to be meaningful. The boss who expects sexual favours as a condition of promotion, or the date who expects a woman to ‘put out’ when he pays for dinner, are both more than willing to accept the principle of sexual disenchantment and thus view sex as a meaningless product to be exchanged on a free market (‘You suck me off, I give you some good of equivalent value’). One student wrote, for instance, of hooking up with one of her peers:
He slid inside me and I didn’t say a word. At the time, I didn’t know why. Maybe I didn’t want to feel like I’d led him on. Maybe I didn’t want to disappoint him. Maybe I just didn’t want to deal with the ‘let’s do it, but no, we shouldn’t’ verbal tug-of-war that so often happens before sleeping with someone. It was easier to just do it. Besides, we were already in bed, and this is what people in bed do. I felt an obligation, a duty to go through with it. I felt guilty for not wanting to. I wasn’t a virgin. I’d done this before. It shouldn’t have been a big deal – it’s just sex – so I didn’t want to make it one.24
‘It’s just sex’ summarises the sexual disenchantment idea perfectly. This young woman wasn’t beaten, she didn’t get pregnant, and she actually quite liked the young man she had sex with, at least at first. So why did she experience this sexual encounter as such a big deal? Because sexual disenchantment isn’t actually true, and we all know it, including the liberal feminists who expend so much energy on arguing, for instance, that ‘sex work is work.’ You can tell because, when it became clear that Harvey Weinstein had been offering women career opportunities in exchange for sexual favours, these same liberal feminists immediately condemned him – not only for the violence and threats he had used in the course of committing his crimes but also for requesting sexual favours from his subordinates in the first place.
There was an intuitive recognition that asking for sex from an employee is not at all the same as asking them to do overtime or make coffee. I’ve made plenty of coffees for various employers in the past, despite the fact that coffee-making wasn’t included in my job description, and I’m sure most readers will have done the same. But, while it might sometimes be annoying to receive this request, no worker who makes coffee for their boss will expect to end up dependent on drugs or alcohol as a consequence. No one will expect to become pregnant or acquire a disease that causes infertility. No one will expect to suffer from PTSD or other mental illness. No one will expect to become incapable of having healthy intimate relationships for the rest of her life. Everyone knows that having sex is not the same as making coffee, and when an ideology of sexual disenchantment demands that we pretend otherwise the result can be a distressing form of cognitive dissonance.
And liberal feminists don’t have the conceptual framework necessary to resolve this distress. The Guardian’s Jessica Valenti, for instance, described the phenomenon of violating sex that doesn’t actually meet the legal threshold for rape in a column written at the height of Me Too: ‘It’s true that women are fed up with sexual violence and harassment; but it’s also true that what this culture considers “normal” sexual behavior is often harmful to women, and that we want that to stop, too.’25
But an anthology of essays on the subject of Me Too, edited by Valenti and published in 2020, demonstrates the inability of her brand of liberal feminism to respond properly to the problem she identifies.26 The contributors to the anthology all want sexual violence to end, and rightly so. But they’re queasy about using the power of the state to arrest and imprison rapists, and they don’t want women to have to change their behaviour in order to avoid exposure to dangerous men, since even raising this possibility is regarded as ‘victim blaming’.
Rather than propose alternatives – vigilante justice, anyone? – the writers avoid contending with difficult questions at all. They limit themselves to milquetoast ideas such as helping men to overcome their ‘masculine insecurities’ (Tahir Duckett) or creating community spaces in which perpetrators can seek ‘healing and justice’ (Sarah Deer and Bonnie Clairmont). Contributors such as the campaigner Andrea L. Pino-Silva write of the need to ‘talk seriously about ending sexual violence’ but propose nothing more concrete than workshops on university campuses that, among much else, ‘celebrate and empower queerness’. Pino-Silva believes that such workshops won’t work unless they also tackle every form of oppression under the sun, from colonialism to biphobia. I don’t believe these workshops will work at all, so I suppose that’s one point we can agree on.
Some contributors not only reject ideas that might go some way towards alleviating the problem of sexual violence, they actually propose ideas that will make the problem worse. Sassafras Lowrey encourages rape survivors to seek out sexual partners with a taste for violence, otherwise known as ‘joining the BDSM community’, and Tina Horn presents prostitution as a benign career route for young women. This is the central principle of liberal feminism taken to its logical conclusion: a woman should be able to do anything she likes, whether that be selling sex or inviting consensual sexual violence, since all of her desires and choices must necessarily be good, no matter where they come from or where they lead. And if anything bad comes from following this principle, then we return to the only solution that liberal feminism has to offer: ‘teach men not to rape.’
But then what else can liberal feminists advise? They have made the error of buying into an ideology that has always best served the likes of Hugh Hefner and Harvey Weinstein, his true heir. And from this they derive the false belief that women are still suffering only because the sexual liberation project of the 1960s is unfinished, rather than because it was always inherently flawed. Thus they prescribe more and more freedom and are continually surprised when their prescription doesn’t cure the disease.
This fact becomes clear when we look at the twenty-first-century university campus, where the gospel of sexual liberation is preached loudest and where BDSM societies27 and ‘Sex Weeks’28 are the new normal.29 At the beginning of term, freshers are given a lecture on the importance of consent and sent on their way with ‘I heart consent’ badges and tote bags. The rule they’re taught is simple enough: with consent, anything goes. And yet this simple rule is broken again and again, both through rape and through the more subtle forms of coercion that so many women recounted during Me Too. Few liberal feminists are willing to draw the link between the culture of sexual hedonism they promote and the anxieties over campus rape that have emerged at exactly the same time.
If they did, they might be forced to recognise that they have done a terrible thing in advising inexperienced young women to seek out situations in which they are alone and drunk with horny men who are not only bigger and stronger than they are but are also likely to have been raised on the kind of porn that normalises aggression, coercion and pain. But in liberal feminist circles you’re not supposed to talk about the influence of online porn, or BDSM, or hook-up culture, or any of the other malign elements of our new sexual culture, because to do so would be to question the doctrine of sexual freedom. So young women are forced to learn for themselves that freedom has costs, and they are forced to learn the hard way, every time.