‘Feminists are wrong to oppose marriage’
from spiked:
Louise Perry on how woke, liberal feminism has failed women.
Women’s freedom was the great promise of the sexual revolution. Freedom from oppressive, traditional codes of behaviour. Freedom to choose when to start a family, if at all.
But for Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, that great period of liberation has also come at a cost. It has undermined the strong relationships and communities that are really at the heart of human flourishing, while leaving many people feeling atomised and empty.
So, do we need a reckoning with the sexual revolution? Has ‘liberation’ gone too far? Or is it a lack of freedom, rather than an excess of it, that is at the root of our modern ills?
Louise joined Brendan O’Neill for the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss all this and more. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.
Brendan O’Neill: I really enjoyed your book and I think it’s got some great insights. But the one thing I bristled at, to a certain extent, was the thread in it on how contemporary feminists and other people on the woke side of politics, for want of a better word, are always arguing for more ‘liberation’ as the solution to our problems. It got me thinking, is freedom really a bad thing?
Christopher Lasch talks about how, at the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s, the period after the sexual revolution didn’t give rise to the liberated individual, but rather to the weak self, the minimal self, the self that constantly requires an admiring audience. This actually locks you into an illiberal relationship with society, because you are constantly needing validation and the approval of others. And that directly impacts on your ability to be a robust, free individual, making choices and living in the way that you think is best for yourself and your community.
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