The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

Part 2, Winners and Losers

Louise Perry begins The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by comparing and contrasting the sexual histories of two American icons, Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe. I don't need to recount the stories of Hefner and Monroe, you likely know enough to appreciate why Perry deploys this contrast right out the gate. Specifically, the "benefits" and "liberations" of the sexual revolution have not been shared equally between men and women. This is Perry's big overarching theme: the sexual revolution has been very, very good for men. Case in point, Hugh Hefner. But the sexual revolution has not been so good for women. Case in point, Marilyn Monroe.

As I mentioned last week, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is not a Christian book. Perry's criticism of the sexual revolution comes from a feminist perspective, a perspective that many conservative Christians will find difficult. Perry's argument will have an asymmetrical feel for many readers given that her concern is how the sexual revolution has allowed men to hurt and exploit women, the same way that Marilyn Monroe was exploited. I expect many conservative male readers of the book will chaff at this feminist asymmetry. But like I said last week, I think this is a strength of Perry's book. If you want your criticism of the sexual revolution to be persuasive in today's culture, it has to come from within the feminist camp where the sexual revolution has been, and continues to be, marketed as "win" for women, as emancipatory. Perry's agenda to attack that marketing on its own terms. 

Here's how Perry frames her location in these debates at the start of Chapter 1 "Sex Must Be Taken Seriously":

This book is an attempt to reckon with [the changes wrought by the sexual revolution], and to do so while avoiding the accounts typically offered by liberals addicted to a narrative of progress or conservatives addicted to a narrative of decline. I don't believe that the last sixty years or so should be understood as a period of exclusive progress or exclusive decline, because the sexual revolution has not freed all of us, but it has freed some of us, and selectively, and at a price...

My complaint is focused more against liberals than against conservatives for a very personal reason: I used to believe the liberal narrative. As a younger woman, I held the same political opinions as most other millennial urban graduates in the West--in other words, I conformed to the beliefs of my class, including liberal feminist ideas about porn, BDSM, hook-up culture, evolutionary psychology, and the sex trade ... I let go of these beliefs because of my own life experiences, including the period immediately after university spent working at a rape crisis centre. If the old quip tells us that a 'conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged by reality', then I suppose, at least in my case, that a post-liberal feminist is just a liberal who has witnessed the reality of male violence up close.

So, readers of this series beware, the issue of male violence will be at the leading edge of Perry's argument throughout the book. And if that focus seems biased and asymmetrical, that is my point about Perry's feminist (or post-liberal feminist) starting point. Perry is going to argue that the sexual revolution has been very, very good for men, but very, very bad for women. (Well, stated more clearly, very, very good for a certain kind of man, the Hugh Hefners of the world and those who would emulate him. From a Christian perspective, the sexual revolution has been bad for men as well, as we’ll come to see.) As Perry will argue, the uneven outcomes of the sexual revolution have to do with the distinctive and peculiar sexual psychologies of the genders, psychologies rooted in a long adaptive and evolutionary history. As Perry goes on to describe the questions at the heart of her book:

In this book I'm going to ask--and seek to answer--some questions about freedom that liberal feminism can't or won't answer: Why do so many women desire a kind of sexual freedom that so obviously serves male interests? What if our bodies and minds aren't as malleable as we might like to think? What do we lose when we prioritise freedom above all else? And, above all, how should we act, given all this?