Feminists must abandon their delusions about the sexual revolution
by Louise Perry, New Statesman:
Men and women are not the same, and it is usually women who suffer when we pretend otherwise.
My first book will be published on 3 June. It’s titled The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and it pretty much does what it says on the tin. My argument is that the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s has mostly not been of benefit to women.
As I write this, the first reviews are being published, as well as several extracts, and the word “provocative” is coming up a lot, as I thought it probably would. The Sunday Times is running a very alarming poll on its website asking readers: “Do you agree with Louise Perry’s opinions?” I gulped when I first saw this, but have since been pleasantly surprised to see that about three quarters of respondents have so far answered “yes”, suggesting that, if I am a provocateur, then I am not an especially outrageous one.
The level of interest that the book has attracted pre-publication has startled me, although there have been rumblings in the media for a while suggesting an imminent backlash against the excesses of the sexual revolution. My friend Katherine Dee – an American writer and expert in the history of internet culture – has for several years been predicting a swing back against the dominance of sex positive feminism in prominent spaces, and in recent months has found herself vindicated, with the Guardian announcing that Gen Z was “turning its back on sex-positive feminism” and the New York Times saying that the ideology was “falling out of fashion”.
The plea of the mournful revolutionary, when faced with the terrible consequences of his utopianism, has always been that “real communism has never been tried”. This, too, is increasingly the go-to explanation for sexual revolutionaries who are dismayed at where we find ourselves as a culture. If the consequences for women of sexual liberation have been more violence, more abuse and more unhappiness – as I argue is true – then their solution has to be yet more liberation, if the revolution is going to be waged right to its bloody end.
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