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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The bestselling feminist book, now adapted for a young adult audience
Before the 1960s, sex before marriage was frowned upon and pornography was difficult to get hold of. We are now much freer to do what we like – there has been a ‘sexual revolution’. This must be a good thing, right?
Wrong, argues Louise Perry. These changes have had many negative consequences, especially for girls and women. The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-ups and freely available porn are a tiny minority of rich and powerful men. Women have been forced to adapt to these changes in ways that often harm them.
Louise Perry carefully guides readers through the difficulties of sex in the 21st century. Her advice will be invaluable to all young women and men who may be feeling lost in a world where ‘doing it’ can sometimes seem dangerous or confusing.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
1 Sex must be taken seriously
The Pill
Sexual disenchantment
Chronological snobbery
Notes
2 Men and women are different
Human animals
Differences above the neck
Rape and evolution
How to bear it
Notes
3 Not all desires are good
The sexual free market
Chesterton’s Fence
The wrong side of history
Breaking taboos
The virtue of repression
Notes
4 Loveless sex is not empowering
The sociosexuality gap
A hand held in daylight
Cads and dads
Mutual incomprehension
Notes
5 Consent is not enough
Grooming
The crimes of MindGeek
Limbic capitalism
Logging off
Notes
6 Violence is not love
The idea of possessiveness
Choking
We can’t consent to this
Notes
7 People are not products
‘Thanks to OnlyFans’
Notes
8 Marriage is good
Notes
Conclusion: Listen to Your Mother
Notes
Acknowledgements
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Begin Reading
Conclusion: Listen to Your Mother
Acknowledgements
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For the women who learned it the hard way
A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century
The Young Adult adaptation of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
Louise Perry
polity
Copyright © Louise Perry 2025
The right of Louise Perry to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution first published in 2022 by Polity Press. This edition first published in 2025 by Polity Press.
Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6282-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024933637
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
1SEX MUST BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY
Hugh Hefner found fame and success through founding porn magazine Playboy. Marilyn Monroe was a film star and model who became an icon of glamour and celebrity in the 1950s. They are both often seen as symbols of the sexual revolution.
What was the sexual revolution? It was a period that began in the 1960s when previous restrictive ideas around sex were relaxed or abandoned. These ideas included sex before and outside marriage being frowned upon, pornography being illegal or at least very hard to access, and so on. People became freer to do what they wanted when it came to sex. This process is often referred to as ‘sexual liberation’.
Hefner and Monroe never met. They were, however, born in the same year and buried 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 He told 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 kept that promise, since it sold a lot of copies.
The magazine cover beckoned readers with the promise of a ‘FULL COLOR’ nude photo of the actress for the ‘first time in any magazine’. Hefner later said that this centrefold was the key reason for the publication’s initial success. Monroe herself was humiliated by the photoshoot. The photos had been taken four years earlier. She had them taken only because she was desperate for money at the time. She signed the release documents with a fake name.4
Hefner didn’t pay her to use her images and didn’t seek her consent before publishing them.5 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.’6
The very different lives of Monroe and Hefner perfectly illustrate 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. They found success in the same city and at the very time in history. But while Hefner lived a long, grubby life in his mansion with his many girlfriends (or ‘playmates’), Monroe died, miserable and alone, from a drug overdose, aged just thirty-six. Exploited by a series of seedy men like Hefner, her life was plagued by unhappy relationships and poor mental health.
Monroe’s life followed a similar path to that of the pop star Britney Spears. In 1999, at the age of sixteen, she gyrated in a school uniform and begged viewers to ‘hit me baby, one more time’. Spears has since suffered a very public nervous breakdown. She is like many others who have been destroyed in much the same way as the original icon of sexual freedom, Marilyn Monroe.
The public asks a lot of the women it desires; women like Marilyn Monroe and Britney Spears. And, when it all goes horribly wrong, as it usually does, this public labels these once-desired women ‘crazy’ and moves on. Difficult questions about whether ‘sexual liberation’ is to blame for destroying women like this are never asked.
Hugh Hefner experienced sexual liberation very differently from Monroe. As a younger man, he was the true playboy – handsome, charming, and envied by other men. He lived the fantasy of a particularly immature teenage boy. He hosted parties for his celebrity friends in a garish ‘grotto’ and then retired upstairs with his gang of identical twenty-something blondes. He supposedly once said that his best pick-up line was simply the sentence ‘Hi, my name is Hugh Hefner.’7 He lived to a ripe old age.
Hefner certainly never experienced any guilt for the harm he perpetrated. Asked at the age of eighty-three if he regretted any of the ‘dark consequences’ of the Playboy revolution he set in motion, Hefner was confident in his innocence: ‘it’s a small price to pay for personal freedom’.8 By which he meant, of course, personal freedom for men like him.
After his death in 2017, many newspapers and websites argued that he had helped feminism because he supported things like legalising abortion and making the contraceptive pill widely available. These developments were crucial in ensuring that women could have sex without risking pregnancy. Without them, the sexual revolution could not have happened.
But Hefner did not support these things because he wanted to help women. Hefner never once campaigned for anything that didn’t bring him direct benefit. Getting rid of the risk of pregnancy merely took away one of the reasons why women might refuse to have sex with him.
Before the sexual revolution, women had limited options when it came to sex. One option was to not have sex. Another was to get married and have children. The final one was to have sex without being married, but risk terrible consequences: getting pregnant and becoming a social outcast. It is true that the sexual revolution means that women have more choices now.
But there was a lot more to it than that. The invention of the Pill did free many women from unwanted childbearing. But the likes of Hefner also wanted this technology, and needed it, so they could indulge their own sexual desires. They still do so, often in ways that harm women, while pretending that they are liberating them.
The Pill
The impact of the contraceptive pill [the Pill] was vast. There have been plenty of periods in human history in which the norms around sex have been loosened, but their impact was limited because reliable contraception did not exist. Sex outside marriage risked pregnancy. So, straight men in pursuit of extramarital sex mostly had to seek out sex either with prostitutes, or with the small number of eccentric women who were willing to risk being cast out permanently from respectable society.
But the sexual revolution of the 1960s was a much bigger deal. It permanently changed things, and now we’re so used to it that we barely notice. It was able to happen because of the arrival, for the first time in the history of the world, of reliable contraception and, in particular, forms of contraception that women could take charge of themselves. These included the Pill, the diaphragm, and subsequent improvements on those technologies.
They meant that, at the end of the 1960s, an entirely new creature arrived in the world: the apparently fertile young woman, whose fertility had in fact been put on hold. She changed everything.
This process clearly had its benefits, but should we see it purely as a good thing? I don’t think so. This is because the sexual revolution has not, in fact, freed all of us. It has freed some of us, and at a price. Which is exactly what we should expect from such a massive change. However, the most popular story told about this revolution – the one told by political liberals and progressives – does not recognise this complexity. It sees the sexual revolution as a story only of progress.
I know this because I used to believe it. As a younger woman, I held the same political opinions as most other educated urban millennials in the West. I was a liberal feminist who believed that sexual freedom was a straightforwardly good thing with no downsides. I eventually changed my mind, in part because of my own life experiences, including a period immediately after university spent working at a rape crisis centre (more on this in the next chapter).
When I say ‘liberal feminist’, I mean a particular kind of feminism that has become dominant in the last generation or so. This kind of feminism prioritises freedom above everything else. For instance, when the actress and prominent liberal feminist Emma Watson was criticised in 2017 for showing her breasts on the cover of Vanity Fair, she hit back with a well-worn liberal feminist phrase: ‘feminism is about giving women choice … It’s about freedom.’9
For Watson and her allies, that might mean the freedom to wear revealing clothes (and sell lots of magazines in the process), or the freedom to sell sex, or make or consume porn, or pursue whatever career you like, just like the boys.
Liberal feminism promises women freedom. But female biology imposes, in reality, limits on that freedom. Women get pregnant, and being pregnant and having children is not compatible with complete freedom. When this becomes clear, liberal feminism supports trying to break those limits by using money, technology, and the bodies of poorer people. For example, it says that women should employ a full-time nanny so that they can work very long hours rather than look after their child.
I don’t reject the desire for freedom. I’m not an antiliberal. Goodness knows that women have every reason to be unhappy about many of the limits placed on them, both now and in the past. However, I am critical of any political worldview that fails to balance freedom against other good things. Women don’t only seek freedom. They want other things, and we need to bear this in mind and ask whether sexual freedom might stop them from getting some of these other things.
In this book I’m going to ask – and seek to answer – some questions about freedom that liberal feminism can’t or won’t answer. Why do so many women desire a kind of sexual freedom that so obviously benefits men more than women? What do we lose when we prioritise freedom above all else? And, above all, how should we act, given all this?
I start from a position that historically many feminists have disliked. I accept the fact that men and women are different. They have different goals and interests. Those differences aren’t going away. When we recognise these differences, then sexual politics takes on a different character. Instead of asking ‘how can we all be free?’, we must ask instead ‘how can we best promote the wellbeing of both men and women, given that these two groups have different sets of interests, which are sometimes in tension?’
Sexual disenchantment
In this book, I’m going to argue that, in the modern West, our sexual attitudes and behaviour – our sexual ‘culture’ – doesn’t properly balance these interests. It promotes the interests of creepy or predatory men like Hugh Hefner at the expense of women. And the influence of liberal feminism means that too many women don’t recognise this. This suits men like Hugh Hefner very nicely, since playboys like him have a lot to gain from the new sexual culture. It is in their interests to support a very radical idea about sex that came out of the sexual revolution.
This is the idea that sex is nothing more than a leisure activity, only invested with meaning if the participants choose to give it meaning. Proponents of this idea argue that sex has no intrinsic specialness. It is not essentially different from, say, getting a haircut or eating a meal at a restaurant. This implies that it can be treated as something to be bought and sold, like anything else. This process is called ‘sexual disenchantment’. It is the stripping away of the idea that sex is ‘special’, that it means something important and unique.
Sexual disenchantment is a natural consequence of the liberal privileging of freedom over all other values. If you want to be utterly free, you have to try to get rid of any kind of social restrictions that limit you. The most important one is the belief that sex has some unique specialness that is difficult to rationalise. When we get rid of this idea, there may be some benefits, but there is a huge downside. That downside hurts women disproportionately, for biological reasons that I’ll come back to in the next chapter. It also creates a lot of confusion.
This confusion is well illustrated by the #MeToo movement.
This was a campaign that started in 2017. Many women began to talk about the fact that they had been sexually mistreated by men. They had previously not talked about these things because they were ashamed. The idea of #MeToo was to speak out so that something could be done about these abuses.
The stories that came out of #MeToo included plenty of straightforwardly criminal behaviour. However, there were also a lot of women who described sexual encounters that were technically legal and consensual, but nevertheless left them feeling terrible because they were being asked to treat as meaningless something that they felt to be meaningful.
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.10
‘It’s just sex’ summarises the sexual disenchantment idea perfectly.
This young woman wasn’t beaten and she didn’t get pregnant. 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.
You can tell this because when it became clear, during the #MeToo campaign, that the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein had been offering women career opportunities in exchange for sexual favours, these same liberal feminists immediately condemned him. They 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.
They instinctively recognised 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 many readers will have done the same. While that was sometimes annoying, 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 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or other mental illnesses. No one will expect to become incapable of having healthy intimate relationships for the rest of her life. All of these things might happen if you have unwanted sex.
Everyone knows that having sex is not the same as making coffee and, when the idea of sexual disenchantment demands that we pretend otherwise, the result is a lot of muddle. Although at one level they sort of know that sex is special, liberal feminists are so committed to the idea of sexual freedom they have to find ways of trying to resolve this contradiction.
Perhaps, they ask, the problem is that we’re not free enough? That the sexual revolution has had downsides only because it hasn’t gone far enough? Maybe we still hold onto our shame too much? If we truly embraced total sexual hedonism, maybe it would all be ok? Liberal feminists therefore argue for more and more freedom and are continually surprised when the cure they support doesn’t cure the disease.
This fact becomes clear when we look at modern universities, where the gospel of sexual liberation is preached loudest. At the beginning of term, freshers are typically 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 also through the more subtle ways that men force women to do things they don’t really want to do. 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 do dangerous things. Things like being alone and drunk with horny men who are not only bigger and stronger than they are, but who have probably watched a lot of porn: the sort 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 hook-up culture, or any of the other negative elements of our new sexual culture. To do so would be to question the doctrine of sexual freedom, which they refuse to do. So, young women are forced to learn for themselves that freedom has costs, and they are forced to learn the hard way, every time.
Chronological snobbery
Once I started writing this book, I soon realised that it wasn’t enough simply to point out what is wrong with our sexual attitudes and behaviour. I soon realised that I would also need to offer readers some real guidance on how to live – but not the sort of silly advice that you find at the back of a glossy magazine. 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. Most of the advice I offer would have seemed like common sense until very recently. It’s the sort of advice that your grandmother would think was very obvious. It is, however, advice that I know I often ignored.
