The Revolt against the Sexual Revolution

Few people, if they’re being honest, will say they are truly satisfied with the world left to us by the Sexual Revolution. That’s the takeaway from two new books critiquing our sexual culture: The Case against the Sexual Revolution by UK writer Louise Perry and Rethinking Sex by Washington Post columnist Christine Emba.

Though both books offer valuable anecdotes and data, their big-picture observations won’t be surprising to conservative readers: casual sex is more enjoyable for men than for women, pornography encourages objectification and worse, putting an end to sexual violence will require more than consent workshops, and so on.

Their proposed solutions are similarly predictable for anyone conversant in traditional views about sex. As Perry puts it in her conclusion: “We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. And, in order to do that, we have to start by stating the obvious. Sex must be taken seriously. Men and women are different. Some desires are bad. Consent is not enough. Violence is not love. Loveless sex is not empowering. People are not products. Marriage is good.”

Both Perry and Emba counsel individual discernment as an antidote to the excesses of the hookup scene. “Holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you or just looking for a hook-up,” Perry writes. Emba confesses that she herself has adopted precisely this practice, wondering aloud, “What if the answer was to have less casual sex? For that matter, what if the answer was to have sex under the standard of love?”

To these sorts of observations, I found myself able to muster only a rather tired though quite sincere, “Welcome to the party,” a kinder cousin to the far less charitable, “Told you so.” You can almost hear the socially conservative reader respond, “Yes, of course . . . haven’t you been listening?”

But while the arguments will be familiar to readers of a certain stripe, these books nevertheless present a real point of interest, if only because of their authors. Neither is in a rush to label herself a progressive or a feminist, but neither considers herself a dyed-in-the-wool conservative either, and certainly not a social conservative. Yet both describe their deep disenchantment at having lived through or witnessed negative aspects of the world created by the Sexual Revolution.

Their critiques are interesting not because they’re fresh—they’re decidedly not—but because they’re coming from the sort of people who aren’t often found critiquing feminist dogma or casual sex. Little chinks are appearing in the dam, and perhaps a bit of light is starting to shine through.

Read here