The Case Against The Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry
A communist reviews the New Statesman columnist's first book
Listen, I won’t try to hide it: I have been a Louise Perry fanboy for a while. From the moment she announced her debut book, The Case Against The Sexual Revolution, I wanted to read it, and recently I had the money to get a copy. It took me two days to finish it and stuff it full of sticky tabs and marginalia. At the same time, I filled up several pages of a notebook with my impressions.
The thesis Perry aims to prove is straightforward and plainly stated: the sexual revolution in the West is a net negative for everyone except its profiteers, and it does an especially intense harm to young women. For Perry the “sexual revolution” denotes a general course taken by Western sexual culture, which began in earnest during the 1960s and has yet to change bearing or even slow down. Among its key elements are hormonal birth control and pornography, the latter exerting unsubtle influence on more implicitly “innocent” media. Its outcomes include the widespread use of both, the deadly mainstreaming of BDSM, and the advent of “dating” apps that facilitate hookup culture.
This review is not going to cover everything in the book. I want to riff on certain topics Perry explores that relate to my own political concerns and theoretical interests. Her chapter titles render these topics as clear statements:
Men and women are different.
Some desires are bad.
People are not products.
Relative to the length of the text, Perry covers a lot of ground. The book is good. Read it yourself.
Men and women are different
From the outset Perry makes clear that she thinks feminists and fellow-travelers have left too much on the table when it comes to evolutionary psychology and the science of sex differences. Maybe they have avoided them as tools due to their common misuse by their political opponents. Perhaps, as I’m inclined to say, they have rejected them on ideological grounds, because they are committed to a constructivist account of sexed differences in behaviors, aptitudes, and life outcomes. In such a blank-slate account, men and women are different, but only below the neck, and differing outcomes observed where such physical differences play no role are evidence of a coercive regime of “gender” imposed by “patriarchy”.
Perry leaves room for an account of women’s effective subjugation within class society that does not require a transhistorical “patriarchy” in which men at large are the creators, agents, and beneficiaries of the diverse forms and intensities of women’s marginalization. This angle contrasts with the radical feminist commitment to the notion of “sex class”: an idea treated as though it were a class in the Marxist sense, but with members defined by an immutable characteristic rather than by social relations. The idea Perry admits recalls the words of Soviet revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai, who wrote:
The followers of historical materialism reject the existence of a special woman question separate from the general social question of our day. Specific economic factors were behind the subordination of women; natural qualities have been a secondary factor in this process. Only the complete disappearance of these factors, only the evolution of those forces which at some point in the past gave rise to the subjection of women, is able in a fundamental way to influence and change their social position.
Like Kollontai, Perry identifies the female body and the nature of productive work in the dominant mode of production as having shaped the division of labor as it relates to sex, and thus the extent of women’s inclusion in political and economic life. Technology is what made physical strength less important in the industrial workforce, allowing women to join it. Technology has since made physical differences all but irrelevant to many of the highest-valued activities in the global economy. This view allows us to understand women’s subjugation as a historical function of both female biology and economic development, rather than a relentless project of organized misogyny on which men at odds with each other in all other respects smoothly collaborate. It also allows us to recognize that married heterosexual couples share political interests because they share the same class position, and to reserve the term “patriarchy” for sexist family arrangements it actually describes.
A key concept that Perry returns to throughout the book is “sociosexuality”, which is a measure of a person’s appetite for casual sex with new partners. In this feature, as you’d expect, men and women differ wildly at the edges of the distributions. The sexual revolution, she argues, has optimized our sexual culture for the short-term interests of people high in sociosexuality, and thus against the interests of almost all women, as well as the great majority of men. The antisocial ethos of hippie-era “free love”, with its laundry list of miserable downsides, has become mainstream and commodified.
Perry sympathetically acknowledges that second-wave feminists viewed liberation from female biology as a cornerstone of the liberation of women, given the prevalence at the time of what amounts to forced reproduction. Yet their incomplete vision lets women live as equals to men only insofar as they live as though they were men. All women thus freed from the expectation of motherhood, we find that among the majority of women who want to become mothers and raise their children in a stable home, a smaller proportion than ever have the opportunity. By “curing” fertility and making double-income households a norm, we have reduced women’s equality to a choice between being a mother in the prime of your life and having a career in the future. We have failed to realize equality by failing to recognize difference, adapting women’s bodies to society rather than adapting society to women’s bodies.
It is quite clear that an understanding of gender as something independent of sex is not compatible with Perry’s analysis or mine. Unfortunately for those committed to such ideas, material reality has the stronger case. Scientific socialists who reject identity politics can’t afford to base our understanding of women’s rights and equality on anything flimsier than the fact that women are female.
Some desires are bad
Every once in a while, I am involuntarily reminded of the existence of abuse porn. This is a genre of pornography in which misogynistic verbal and physical attacks are not just a possibility, but the entire point of a scene. These videos are not only a record of rape in fact, because legally-produced pornography is prostitution, but a depiction of rape in principle. In other words, these are videos made expressly to appeal to men who fantasize about committing rape.
What kind of men get off to this idea? A small but dangerous minority of us, according to Perry. Rejecting a stubborn feminist truism, Perry tells us rape actually is a sexually-motivated crime in most cases, rather than a more abstract “act of patriarchal dominance”. She draws from her experience working in a women’s shelter, where she first read A Natural History of Rape and came to see that sexual violence is not merely violence committed by sexual means, but violence that expresses sexual urges.
The age distribution of both perpetrators and victims of rape backs up this claim. Overwhelmingly rape is a crime committed by men in their reproductive prime against women in their reproductive prime. The rate of offenses against men by men corresponds roughly to the prevalence of homosexuality. A woman’s statistical risk of victimization drops off sharply as she approaches and enters her thirties. In other words, due to the distasteful fact that it outdoes celibacy as a reproductive strategy, rape has tagged along with promiscuity and aggression as a behavior to which some men are genetically predisposed.
Having been long unconvinced that every man is a potential rapist who needs to be “taught not to rape”, I appreciate this perspective. It better explains the fact that most men never commit any act of sexual violence, and that the minority who do commit such acts tend to commit a lot of them. It gives us hope for recognizing developmental red flags in sex offenders that enable psychological intervention to save young men from themselves, to say nothing of saving others from becoming their victims.
Alongside and in concert with the abundance of porn, the normalization of BDSM brings horrific consequences even for those without this predisposition to sexual violence. Perry has seen all too much of this while serving as Press Officer for We Can’t Consent To This, an organization that documents cases in which men charged with killing their partners claim that it was “rough sex gone wrong”. How can we distinguish between men who accidentally kill their partners during sex and men who intended to do it all along? It becomes harder than ever when works like the 50 Shades series are decidedly mainstream, shaping what young people think is “normal” or even permissible in the bedroom.
The terrifying thing about what I’ve said so far is that pornography allows deviants, like proto-pedophiles and those predisposed to rape, to evolve into monsters in the privacy of their own homes. Its easy availability allows them to pretend there’s nothing abnormal about them as they experience arousal and orgasm in response to stimuli that would make me or you vomit. It takes men who once could’ve tamed themselves, men who could’ve become valuable members of society, and turns them into sexual predators. Insightful feminists have long told us that porn could do this, but by arguing it applied to men in general, the majority of porn users who don’t escalate so dramatically could easily write the point off based on personal experience.
Why do we allow people to produce this antisocial filth, to sell video evidence of sex crimes as an entertainment product that can turn consumers into criminals? Why do we allow people to consume it, or to reproduce its aesthetics with a cheeky wink to advertise unrelated products? If you film a real-life murder, the film is itself illegal. Yet, as countless people have pointed out, if you film an act of prostitution you can sell it or make infinite ad revenue from streaming it.
The legal answer is “free speech”, but that’s total bullshit and the industry’s soulless lawyers know it better than anyone. We could ban the production and distribution of everything depicting explicit sexual contact between real people tomorrow without meaningfully suppressing anyone’s “art”, much less their opinions. More conservatively, we could make its production and distribution legal only when no profit is made. The reason that any porn is legal, and thus that practically any kind of porn is legal, is that capitalists run our governments and they don’t give a damn about us, or about morality, or about the well-being of society beyond the walls of their luxurious homes.
As ever, the profits are privatized and the costs socialized. Our men become criminals under their influence, their men get away with the same crimes. Our women become sex industry victims, their women become sex industry girlbosses. The daughters of capitalists don’t get chewed up and spit on by this machine that turns rape into rapists, although some of them like to do PR for it by demanding we call them “sex workers” after they post a few selfies.
People are not products
What I just described is a necessary result of the free market and how it trains us to think that we have no right to tell anyone with money what they can or cannot purchase. The existence of any imaginable demand is only ever a reason to meet that demand, never to question it. No moral outrage is great enough to justify anything more restrictive than a paywall.
Perry demonstrates how this mentality appears in our daily lives as “sexual disenchantment”, which aims to remove the instinctive understanding that one’s sexual behavior carries more meaning than one’s taste in clothes or music. It falls short of that goal, necessarily, but a lot of money goes into constantly reminding you that you are supposed to believe that it is normal to act like a degenerate sex addict millionaire. In all aspects of love and sex we are conditioned by marketing to think like johns, seeing potential partners as products or experiences instead of people. Every day you get a notification from Tinder and Uber Eats, both trying to sell you on the infinite variety of their delivery options.
As Perry observes, however, sex is not a consumer activity. Sex is a social activity, and a uniquely intimate one. Sexual contact triggers hormones that cause pair bonding. You cannot think your way out of this. One biological function of sex, regardless of orientation, is to make you fall ever deeper in love with a person you share your life with. People high in sociosexuality can resist the effect more easily, but they still have the same need for intimacy, so even they lose out eventually.
Considering that young people are less sexually active than in prior decades, it is clear that telling this lie year after year does not make it true. Optimistically, that means we have more choice in the matter than you’d expect. The pendulum has swung hard in the direction of free-market hedonism, but many of us have dodged it. Human nature remains such that only the most soulless freaks can actually enjoy a life of pure selfish pleasure. Most of us have not found the promise of such an empty existence compelling enough to adapt to its demands.
Conclusion
In this book Perry shows how our miserable sexual culture is an excess of capitalist individualism. She explains how the “freedom” it supposedly offers is neither genuine nor desirable. Centrally, she argues that the primary, almost exclusive, beneficiaries of the sexual revolution are high-status and/or promiscuous men, who “win” at the expense of most men and almost all women, and who nonetheless ultimately suffer from their own “success”.
The book’s first chapter ends by saying the time has come for a “sexual counter-revolution”. I agree with the content of this claim, but not the language. The so-called “sexual revolution” itself is, in Marxist terms, blatantly counterrevolutionary. It makes red-light district window displays of desperate working women and turns lonely working men into depleted, porn-addicted monkeys. Despite calling herself a “post-liberal” feminist and a “Burkean conservative”, Perry’s analysis is primarily materialist and empirical, making it almost trivial for socialists to adapt and apply the lessons it offers.