The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Louise Perry
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as a standard piece of cultural analysis, but I realised when I began writing that it needed to go further. It wasn’t enough just to point out the problems with our new sexual culture and leave it at that – I needed to offer readers some real guidance on how to live. Advice on sex is too often trivialised and shoved to the back of the magazine, with feminist arguments over sexual culture dismissed as so much girly bickering. But what we’re concerned with here is not only the most important relationships in most people’s lives but also the continuation of our species. So when I chose the title of this chapter, I was thinking not only of the problem of sexual disenchantment but also of the role of the advice columnist, who is rarely taken as seriously as she should be. Having sex should be taken seriously, and so should talking about it. It’s a serious matter.
The advice I’m offering applies almost exclusively to heterosexuals, particularly heterosexual women, because the effect of the sexual revolution on relations between the sexes is the subject of this book. And none of it is ground-breaking: anyone who has spent enough time living in the world and learning from her mistakes should be able to cobble together a set of rules that look much like mine. But while a lot of my advice will seem like common sense to most older readers, my experience of talking face-to-face with men and women under the age of thirty is that it is shocking enough to make a person’s jaw drop (literally, in several cases).
I would probably have been just as shocked a decade ago, because I didn’t know any of this when I was a younger woman. I thought, stupidly, that I understood life better than anyone else, as teenagers typically do, and I realised my mistake only years later, having learned the hard way and having watched my friends do the same. This wasn’t because my parents or other adults in my life failed me – far from it – and I wasn’t in any way unusual among my peers. But I was raised in a liberal environment that leant too heavily on a simplistic ‘progress’ narrative of history, and the problem with this narrative is that it encourages us to ignore both the ways in which things may have become worse over time and the advice offered by older generations. C. S. Lewis coined the phrase ‘chronological snobbery’ to describe ‘[T]he uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.’30
Older people are dismissed by snobbish twenty-first-century liberals as not only foolish and uninteresting but also (far worse) as ‘problematic’. While in most cultures the elderly are regarded as sources of wisdom, and thus granted particular respect, in the modern West they are more likely to be disregarded and condescended to, shut away in nursing homes and assumed to be of no use to anyone.
At the end of every year, a rush of articles in liberal publications advise twenty-somethings on how best to withstand the problematic opinions voiced by older relatives over Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner (‘It’s your responsibility to challenge bigoted relatives over the holidays’, advised Teen Vogue, for instance, in 2019). The fetishisation of youth in our culture has given us the false idea that it is young people who are best placed to provide moral guidance to their elders, despite their obvious lack of experience. And for anyone nudging forty, be assured that the ‘problematic’ bell also tolls for thee. The articles that have appeared regularly since 2018 on the ‘homophobia, sexism and fat-shaming’ in the sitcom Friends prove the need for constant renewal within the progress model.31 When popular culture less than three decades old is already condemned as unacceptable, what hope have people who are more than three decades old of keeping pace? They can’t, that’s the point – the model demands that we reject them.
Within living memory, we have witnessed a very sudden break with the norms of the past, and the necessity of this break is constantly justified in the liberal media through reference to the bad old days. This kind of present-centrism is parodied beautifully in a 2020 TV adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in which the ‘Savage Lands’ – more like an Indian reservation in the novel – are reimagined as a theme park devoted to twenty-first-century American decline. Twenty-sixth-century New London visitors load onto a tour bus and gawp at the ‘house of correction’ (a prison) and the ‘house of monogamy’ (a church), and witness a re-enactment of what is presented as the most important event in the savages’ calendar, ‘the annual day of black’ (Black Friday), in which shoppers tear each other to pieces in their lust for bargains.
A tour guide informs visitors cheerfully that the key elements of savage culture included ‘jealousy, competition, greed and strife.’ She’s not wrong, of course. The Savage Lands theme park is designed to demonstrate to New Londoners the perils of the old way of life, and its inclusion in the drama is designed to show us how tempting the twenty-sixth century could seem when set beside the twenty-first. These future people have successfully rid themselves of many of our flaws: their lack of privacy ensures a lack of crime; their lack of family ensures a lack of in-group preference; and their lack of monogamy ensures a lack of sexual jealousy. The cost that citizens pay for all this stability is that they must live under an authoritarian regime that suppresses any discontent with the pleasure drug soma. This regime encourages the citizens of New London to visit the Savage Lands theme park because demonising the past serves to justify the status quo. Conservatives in our own era who idealise the past achieve much the same effect in reverse, because the past is a political weapon that can readily be used to colour our perspective on the present.
I reject the poisonous dichotomy that insists that the past must be either all good or all bad. I don’t think that we should imitate any sexual culture of the past, but nor do I think that what we have seen over the last sixty years has been a process of relentless improvement. What’s clever about the Savage Lands of Brave New World is that the theme park representation is honest, up to a point. The twenty-first century is an era of ‘jealousy, competition, greed and strife’ that is easy enough to condemn. But there is also a dishonest side to the Savage Lands, in that highlighting the evils of the past also serves to distract from the evils of the present. Today’s progressive representation of life in the 1950s serves much the same purpose.
In 2016, an extract from a 1950s home economics book offering ‘tips to look after your husband’ went viral on social media. The housewife was advised that, when her husband got home from work, she should have dinner on the table, her apron off and a ribbon in her hair, and that she should always make sure to let her husband ‘talk first’.32 This advice was not unusual for housewife manuals of the time, or indeed those of earlier eras, all of which advise women to make their housekeeping look effortless, hiding grime and exertion from their menfolk.
How reactionary, we think now, how stupid and backward! But then take a look at a small sample of Cosmopolitan magazine guides published within the last decade: ‘30 ways to please a man’,33 ‘20 ways to turn on your man’,34 or ‘How to turn him on – 42 things to do with a naked man’35 (this last guide includes ‘rim him’ and ‘dole out some flavored lube’). In what sense are these guides not encouraging precisely the same degree of focus on male desires, except in this case it is sexual pleasure rather than domestic comfort? The only difference I can see is that the arse licking is now literal.
Women are still expected to please men and to make it look effortless. But while the 1950s ‘angel of the house’ hid her apron, the modern ‘angel of the bedroom’ hides her pubic hair. This waxed and willing swan glides across the water, concealing the fact that beneath the surface she is furiously working to maintain her image of perfection. She pretends to orgasm, pretends to like anal sex, and pretends not to mind when the ‘friends with benefits’ arrangement causes her pain. I’ve spoken to women who suffered from vaginismus for years without telling their partners that being penetrated was excruciating. I’ve also spoken to women who have had abortions after hook-ups and never told the men who impregnated them because, while sharing the inside of their bodies was expected, revealing the inconvenient fact of their fertility felt too intimate. We have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation.
This pretence hurts the Marilyn Monroes, particularly when they are poor and friendless, and I want above all in this book to speak to the young women who have been lied to