The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry

What is the sexual revolution, and what does Louise Perry, a millennial and former rape crisis counselor, have against it?

Her opinions are more subdued than the book’s title suggests. Perry is not arguing for a return of 1950s style sexual norms. Rather, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is an assertion that every time period’s social norms have benefits and drawbacks for different demographics, and the changing sexual norms in the past sixty-odd years have harmed the median Western woman.

Perry doesn’t believe Martin Luther King Junior’s assertion that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. She dislikes the phrase “the right side of history”, preferring to think of different time periods as perpetuating harms towards different groups, some much worse than others. She suggests that “chronological snobbery, the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that what has gone out of date is discredited” has led young people to reject easily observable truths about male-female sexual dynamics, and used sexual blank-slatism to engineer norms that do not serve female interests.

So, what is the sexual revolution, anyway?

The destigmatization of pre-marital sex, and normalization of sex without commitment, loyalty, or a relationship
The widespread adoption of contraception
The destigmatization of leaving one’s relationship in the name of personal wellbeing
Sex positivity, the belief that sex is good if it is consensual

(Note: Perry’s limited scope means she doesn’t address same-sex relationships)

The sexual revolution’s second order effects have irrevocably altered social dynamics in an unfavorable way. Contraception has allowed us to decouple sex from fertility, but women are overwhelmingly dissatisfied in their “situationships”, or pseudorelationships that mimic committed relationships with the understanding that each partner can be cast aside if the other loses interest. Women are made to feel abnormal or deficient for feeling lonely: platitudes like You have to love yourself before other people can love you make the most simple and natural response to being alone a pathological state.

Consent alone is a poor metric for determining if sex is good or ethical. People, mostly women, consent to things that hurt them and things that make them feel terrible. As women are naturally more agreeable and tend to desire long term relationships more than men, a culture where sex is expected to be given freely is a culture in which women find themselves agreeing to things that make them feel squeamish, guilty, and uncomfortable, and feeling guilty for feeling bad. Puritanical norms like don’t try to have sex too early, pay for dinner to show your interest and protect a woman’s modesty may have been rooted in misogyny, but were often good heuristics for not causing harm to women. A framework based purely on ‘consent’ ignores the increasingly common sexual interactions that are consensual yet regrettable, nearly always by the woman. Modern (commonly called intersectional) feminists have attempted to address this issue by either 1) setting an absurdly high bar for ‘consensual’ or 2) arguing that these feelings only exists because of remaining societal stigma and acceptance of promiscuous behaviors--an argument that the revolution has not yet gone far enough.

Dating Dynamics

Women desire similar traits in short and long term partners, but men are much less picky when it comes to short term partners. So, many women are ‘playing themselves’ by engaging in short term relationships with a man who considers them good enough to have fun with but not good enough to invest significant time and effort in. The traditional courtship ritual required the hornier sex to invest time and effort, and this served as proof that the man considered the woman valuable rather than ‘good enough’.

Perry spends a lot of time discussing “sociosexuality”, or desire for casual sex and novel sexual encounters. Depending on their levels of sexual drive, males can be classed as “cads” (who prefer multiple sexual partners and low commitment) or “dads” (who prefer long term, devoted sexual relationships), with most falling in-between depending on their age, environment, and other factors. On average, women have a lower sociosexuality index than men, preferring more monogamous, involved arrangements and fewer short-term, uninvolved encounters. Many women pretend that they are more OK with uncommitted relationships/encounters than they are, just as women of yesteryear pretended their lives with their husbands were ideal. Perry spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the notion of overlapping normal distributions with different averages, presumably to pre-empt arguments of the sort “Oh yeah? If women don’t want casual sex, then, explain this really cool girl who is super happy, loves casual sex, and like, doesn’t even want to be in a relationship and makes 20k a month on OnlyFans.”

Which brings us to...

Sex as Work

Perry addresses the following:

So selling your body as a prostitute is wrong, but selling your body to work on an oil rig in Alaska isn’t? Sex work is work.
How can sex be unethical if it involves consensual adults enjoying themselves?
Just because your partner drinks coffee with someone else doesn’t mean they don’t want to drink coffee with you. So why do you care if your partner has sex with someone else?

Perry’s rebuttals, which are more fleshed out in her work:

If sex work is work, then why did feminists think it was so awful for Harvey Weinstein to proposition sex in exchange for career advancement? After all, bosses often ask workers to perform tasks outside of their stated duties, like making copies or staying late.
If sex is not special, then why is rape a special class of crime?
If sex isn’t special, then why do you think it’s morally wrong for a brother and sister to have sex (with contraception)?
If sex isn’t special, then why shouldn’t people be allowed to have sex in public?
If sex isn’t special, then why shouldn’t it be ‘redistributed’ (e.g. women are obliged to have sex with incels the same way wealthy people are forced to pay taxes)?

People who say that sex isn’t special do not act that way. We are hardwired to see sex as a special activity, which is why we are OK if our wife makes coffee for her boss but not OK if our wife has sex with our boss. There are taboos around sex because people feel very strongly about it in a way they do not feel about other activities! This is true of virtually everybody, whether they describe themselves as ‘sex positive’ or not!

The human environment has changed radically in the past 200 years, the human mind less so. Although we can now have sex without pregnancy, female sexual disgust remains strong towards men who we perceive to have inferior genes. So women cannot enjoy endless casual sex with random partners, just as we cannot enjoy limitless chocolate milkshakes and cheesecake: our bodies do not know that we have left the primitive ancestral environment. (Even promiscuous women are choosy about their casual partners.)

Unsurprisingly, Perry dislikes the sex industry and believes it is bad for women. A 17 year old who is raped 50 times by a gang of groomers in the UK is a national scandal, an 18 year old who has 50 encounters on a Pornhub video is normal, although both women experience similar distress (based on testimonies of women who did porn at young ages). “Consent” without consideration for social norms and financial incentives is sufficient as a legal basis to determine if someone is raped; it is insufficient to determine if something is beneficial or ethical.

If the taboo against sex work is lifted, what begins as a choice may not remain a choice for long. Selling sex is still relatively taboo, and for women who are well off, it’s a choice to engage in those behaviors. But once a choice becomes widely adopted, it becomes de-facto mandatory to be a functioning member of society. (For instance: using email used to be a personal choice. But when a critical mass of people got an email address, choosing not to get one shut you out of most jobs and opportunities. After something becomes widely adopted, one must opt-in or be seen as a social outcast.) And the people for whom sex work would become a de facto obligation first are women who are poor, uneducated, non-white, [insert disadvantaged demographic here]. “Sex work is work” is a luxury belief, one that can be espoused by a privileged member of society because it shows their own open mindedness without making them worried that they have to change their behavior. Or, perhaps it is espoused by someone who can engage in ‘sex work’ that does not bear a similarity to the experiences of the median person in the profession. People who defend sex work are often webcammers, who can post videos from the privacy of their own home. They are literate, knowledgeable, educated, and probably charge more than $200 an hour. They are people who aren’t worried that their daughters will be socially or financially pressured to become prostitutes. They are people who would never engage in such work themselves.

My opinion is that in any social arrangement, the more submissive and agreeable sex (women) will (on average) get the short end of the stick, whether that means consenting to casual relationships that make them feel poorly or staying in a bad marriage with a man who is cruel to them. However, a less-bad social structure will acknowledge these differences and create taboos against instigating the types of relationships that they are less likely to enjoy.

Porn

Perry is anti-porn for two distinct reasons:

It is bad for the consumers, who are nearly all men. It desensitizes them to the enjoyment of real women, it involves the substitution of a passive experience for an active one that brings more connection and fulfillment. McDonalds for the soul, etc.

Like fast food, or video games, or social media, I think it’s hard to address how much this affects the median consumer. Certainly, there are porn addicts, but is it possible to increase sexual enjoyment by being a moderate consumer of porn in addition to having a healthy sex life? Probably, I think. Any real world studies are full of complicating variables--as Perry points out, consumers of porn have less sex and tend to be more depressed, but this may be a chicken-and-egg situation.

The creation of porn harms women. Nominally, women are paid to be in porn films and the creation of porn benefits both the producers and the consumers. In practice, women are routinely raped, cheated, and treated poorly in the creation of porn. Countless women have come forward to recount this poor treatment. These are women who swore they were making money, enjoying themselves, being treated well while they were making porn, so it is unlikely that a viewer can discern whether a film was produced “ethically”.

Meat eaters may say that there is nothing wrong with eating meat if the animal is treated well and humanely slaughtered--after all, isn’t this a better life than the one it would have in the wilderness? Yet, the vast majority of meat eaters eat almost exclusively animals who were treated terribly on factory farms, and the vast majority of men who watch porn will watch women who are raped, abused, and psychologically damaged from porn. The theoretical harmlessness of porn is irrelevant compared to the practical harm that it causes. The vast majority of happy women do not want to do porn, so the women who do it are usually poor, mentally ill, or addicted to drugs.

My take: If someone watches porn without paying for it, with an ad-blocker, how are they supporting the industry? This would be roughly analogous to eating a burger made of cultured meat whose cells were harvested from one factory farmed cow. If you can make hundreds and thousands of burgers from that one initial cell line, then yes it’s technically unethical, but the harm is so diluted that I don’t really care.

Violence

Perry offers evidence that men are physically stronger than women (duh) more prone to violence than women (duh) and that men who enjoy violent behaviors in the bedroom like BDSM, choking, etc. are more likely to be violent outside it (duh). The same behaviors that women find charming and intriguing in courtship and sexually are often not the same behaviors that will provide safety and comfort in a relationship.

I think: under earlier norms, these “bad boys”/ violent men would still be around and still harming women. Is it really better for them to be inflicting harm on various women that they casually date as opposed to concentrating this harm on a wife for her entire life? Also, norms against physical violence are the strongest they have ever been, so this seems like an unfair criticism of the sexual revolution. “Some men are violent” is emotional background music rather than a cogent point that fits with the rest of Perry’s argument.

Marriage & Monogamy

Perry is pro-marriage, broadly. She thinks that the escape hatch of divorce deprives us of the faith that relationships are forever, cheapening them. The commodification and fungibility of partners leads to the persistent thought of ‘I can find someone better’, leading to less caring behaviors and a self-fulfilling prophecy of an unspecial relationship. Divorce is good because it allows people in very bad relationships to end them; divorce is bad because it leads people to disengage from their average relationships in the misguided hope of a perfect one--and people in the latter category are more numerous. The degree to which this happens seems like a gaping empirical question, and it seems to ask too much of the reader to agree that these people with ‘disengaged’ personalities would be happier in marriages vs. outside of them.

But, the main point of marriage isn’t (wasn’t?) just the individuals or their love, it’s the family unit. (and faith...and property rights...and cementing tribal alliances...and physical safety) “There’s never a baby, there’s a baby and a person.” For infancy and childhood, we are dependent on a caretaker. As adults, our own children and aging relatives are dependent on us. In our eld, others take care of us. The only reason the myth of the individual can persist for so long is because we do not remember our own childhood, and modern life and delayed fertility has prolonged the period of early adult independence. Marriage creates a strong social norm of supporting your children and their mother when they are at their most vulnerable and the least fun, which, Perry argues, is a great logistical good for society.

In the era of sexual revolution, leaving your partner because your personal needs aren’t being met has become destigmatized. This originally referred to women whose husbands physically abused them, and severely dysfunctional relationships. It has also had knock-on effects. Many children now grow up in a single parent home: 38% of native born American children have a single parent household. Only 44% of those with obligate child support payments received them in full. Stepparents form weaker bonds with children and are more likely to physically and sexually abuse them. This was a big culture war issue in the early 2000s, but has all but been forgotten---yet these children are still being born, lacking the advantage of two caring adult guardians. One cannot appreciate the burden single parenthood puts on women, especially poor women, if one does not have a child. It is a good thing that men feel social pressure to provide for their wife and offspring, and this social pressure is going away, especially in the lower classes, where it is most needed. Effective contraception created a moral hazard: premarital sex and casual relationships became destigmatized, leading to a growth in the number of children born out of wedlock and without a man who felt a strong duty to support them, emotionally or financially. There’s nothing wrong with single parenthood is another luxury belief espoused by people who won’t be forced into it with insufficient resources. “Children are a lot, are you ready for this?” is a good question for a couple to ask themselves before deciding to discontinue the pill; it is a less charming question for a man to ask himself after he has already impregnated his friends with benefits.

I think: Perry’s argument opens the potentially nasty question---“what do men get in return”? In yesteryear, men got an obedient servant who was subordinate and obligated to fulfill their sexual needs. But if we’re not rolling back the gains of feminism, and the social stigma of leaving the mother of your children is gone, what is the system of carrots and sticks to get men to stay?

Synthesis

I respect Perry for the narrow scope of her advice. She’s a pragmatist. The Case Against the Sexual Revolution isn’t about laying groundwork for utopia in which relationships are fun, one derives nonstop fulfillment, and problems are minimal: Perry respects that any social system involves unhappiness, whether from delayed gratification, boredom, loneliness, or stifling obligation. It’s gentle encouragement to women that no, you aren’t defective for feeling lonely and alienated by hookup culture, no, it’s not weird and unenlightened for you to want commitment and loyalty from a partner.

Her message boils down to:

Social rituals like having the man to pay for dates and withholding sex are useful for women because they are good proof that you are seen as a good potential partner and not disposable.
Women who try to have sex ‘like a man’ (e.g. without commitment) will generally have a bad time and feel lonely and degraded.
Consent is a low bar, and activities can be quite bad for women and unenjoyable while still being consensual.

My main criticism is that it’s...boring? Not because Perry is a bad writer, but because I agree with most of it already. I also don’t think it’s possible to aggregate all of the suffering and pleasure caused by sexual norms of 50-odd years ago and the sexual norms of 2022 and say 2022 is worse, but I do think most of the criticisms Perry offers are valid. There is no path to nirvana, any set of social norms will lead to different flavors of suffering.

Perry’s primary audience is women, but I think it’s worth talking about how hook-up culture and modern sexual mores affect men, too. My impression is that it’s another instance of rising inequality, just like income, or alcohol consumption: there’s a ‘winner take all’ effect, in which the most desirable men can enjoy many women until they choose a long term partner, but many more men are lonely without the beneficial effects of regular sex and a supportive relationship.