Review of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry, 200 pages, Polity (June 2022) and Rethinking Sex: A Provocation by Christine Emba, 224 pages, Sentinel (March 2022)

The question of feminism and sex has been causing controversy for as long as feminism has existed, and has only intensified since the sexual revolution. In the 1980s, radical feminists, led by law professor Catharine MacKinnon and activist/writer Andrea Dworkin, regarded not only pornography but most heterosexual sex as male exploitation of women. This anti-porn faction clashed with pro-sex liberal feminists like Ellen Willis and Susie Bright, who focused on women’s sexual liberation. In the 1990s, the feminist campaign against date rape on college campuses sought to redefine many ambiguous sexual experiences as nonconsensual. This galvanized critics like Katie Roiphe, whose 1994 critique of “rape-crisis feminism,” The Morning After, assailed the tendency to portray men as predators and women as helpless victims. In the 21st century, the feminist revival of the past decade combined a “sex-positive” celebration of “enthusiastic consent” and female sexual liberation—in all its guises from kink to sex work—with the punitive spirit of #MeToo, which embraced MacKinnon’s dictum that “feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.” The unsurprising result has been confusion and dissonance.

Now, British journalist Louise Perry enters the fray with The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. It is, as the title suggests, a provocative book; so provocative, in fact, that radical feminist Julie Bindel contributed an effusive blurb to the dust-jacket (“Brilliantly written, cleverly argued … fresh and exciting”) and then wrote a heavily negative review for UnHerd, in which she attacked Perry for endorsing “pre-feminist sexual modesty” and urging women to “invest in a hypothetical chastity belt.”

What, then, is Perry’s controversial case against the sexual revolution, which was precipitated by the invention of reliable contraception but also challenged and dismantled a wide range of traditional cultural taboos? Her view is that, while women may have been freed to have sex without marriage and even without love, this freedom was and remains illusory—because, to quote Perry’s famous compatriot Kingsley Amis, “girls aren’t like that.” Or, as Perry puts it, “Women did not evolve to treat sex as meaningless, and trying to pretend otherwise does not end well.” Men, she argues, not only have a much stronger preference and capacity for casual and promiscuous sex; a substantial minority also have a propensity for violent predation and abuse. Thus, encouraging women to find liberation and empowerment in “having sex ‘like a man’” is to set them up to be hurt emotionally and sometimes physically: at best exploited, at worst raped, battered, or even murdered.