Was the sexual revolution bad for us? This is the case against

Was the sexual revolution bad for us? A confronting new account reveals that women have paid dearly for sexual liberation.

While women were the victorious poster girls of the Sixties, set free by the contraceptive pill, in reality it was men like Hefner who benefited from it long-term.

This book about sex begins in a graveyard. We are in Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, where Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner lie side-by-side. The Playboy founder bought the crypt next to Monroe’s in 1992 for $75,000 because, as he told the LA Times: “Spending an eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up.” Having died 30 years earlier, Monroe was not available for comment.

The image sums up the argument made by the New Statesman columnist Louise Perry in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution that while women were the victorious poster girls of the Sixties, set free by the contraceptive pill, in reality it was men like Hefner who benefited from it long-term. Monroe might be the smiling face on bedroom walls, but it was Hefner who launched his dirty mag on the strength of stolen images of her naked body.

As a typical “millennial urban graduate in the West”, to use Perry’s phrase, I’m a fan of the sexual revolution. It means I can mess around with anyone I fancy (if they fancy me - alas, not always a given) without fear of disease or pregnancy or social ostracism. I can wear miniskirts and masturbate, then write about it in the newspaper my parents read (hi, guys).

But Perry disagrees, as she makes clear in this crisply readable polemic. She thinks young women “have been utterly failed by liberal feminism” because it has created a sexual Petri dish in which violence can flourish like a particularly nasty bacterium. Last year, the highest number of rape cases to date was recorded by the police in Britain — that’s 67,125, or nearly 200 a day.

Protesters call for greater public safety for women after the rape and murder of UK woman Sarah Everard.

Perry, who worked in a rape crisis centre after university, pushes back against the feminist argument that rape is a tool used by men to control women with an edgier biological theory. The argument goes that the urge to rape is hard-wired into some men (35 per cent, according to a couple of studies) by evolution because it confers a selection advantage. If you’re pessimistic about men’s capacity to control their urges, as Perry is, the world becomes a frightening place in which “an unknown, horny man will always be somewhat dangerous for any woman”. Her solution is a diet of security measures so strict it would make a Puritan pour her a drink. She wants women like me to only get drunk or high in private with other women, boycott dating apps and withhold sex for the first few months of a relationship.

This is impractical — what 18-year-old is going to trade in club dance floors for bingo nights with female friends? — and ignores the huge chunk of rapes that are domestic. Five in six victims know their attacker; one in two are in a relationship with them (or used to be). These are not faceless villains, but men the victims know and love. Relationships are no protection. So unless Perry wants to cut women off from men entirely — now that would be radical — any practical solution must involve both sexes. Why don’t we talk about how much boys at university drink?

The sexual revolution had other costs. Mary Whitehouse, that batty Seventies relic of social conservatism, was, Perry points out, “one of the few public figures of her day who gave a damn about child sex abuse”. While she was lobbying for the Protection of Children Act 1978, the BBC was turning a blind eye to its star children’s presenter Jimmy Savile — a man who, Perry reminds us, used to answer the phone to journalists with the words “She told me she was over 16” — and members of the Paedophile Information Exchange were campaigning openly for the abolition of the age of consent. The desire for sexual tolerance can sometimes blind liberals and feminists to the imperative of protecting the vulnerable.

Pedophile and BBC broadcaster Jimmy Savile.

Perry takes aim at “kink culture”. She is alarmed by the huge increase in choking. More than half of 18-to-24-year-old women report having been strangled by their partners during sex, compared with 23 per cent of women aged 35 to 39. The idea is that both parties consent to it because they find it sexy, but given the alarming range of injuries even a few seconds of strangulation can cause ("I cannot see a way of safely holding a neck so that you wouldn’t be pressing on fragile structures,” wrote the author of a 2020 study), it does not seem clear that such consent is truly informed. I did not know that until I read this book.

And injury is only the start. Since the turn of the century, there has been a striking increase in the number and success of the “rough sex” defence in murder cases, in which the defendant argues the killing was a result of a sex game gone wrong. Some of the sentences as a result are chillingly light. In 2018, Jason Gaskell got six years after he slit a woman’s throat with a knife he kept under his pillow. A recent change in the law should make such cases rarer.

The most powerful and persuasive part of Perry’s argument is about the cast-iron link between violent sexual behaviour and the gigantic internet porn industry. In December 2020, a New York Times investigation concluded that Pornhub, the tenth most visited website in the world, was “infested with rape videos” and other violent sex acts. As a result, Pornhub reduced the number of videos on its platform from 13 million to 4 million.

The abuse of porn stars, like the abuse of sex workers, is rife. Linda Boreman, the star of the 1972 hardcore film Deep Throat, once enthused over porn as a way for “kids [to] learn that sex is good”, but later became an anti-porn campaigner, saying: “I engaged in sex acts in pornography against my will to avoid being killed.” The liberal position is anything goes as long as there is consent, but Perry argues that consent is a useful cloak behind which the coercion of sex workers — most likely to be young, vulnerable, poor and non-white women — is concealed.

Young men are also porn’s victims. Erectile dysfunction rates have skyrocketed in the past 20 years, in line with porn addiction, from 2 to 3 per cent to 14 to 35 per cent. That’s because, Perry says, porn is the McDonald’s of sex, feeding us “exaggerated versions of naturally occurring stimuli” that ruin our relationship with reality. She compares men mired in porn culture to glossy, golden-coloured Australian jewel beetles, which have been observed “ignoring potential mates in order to hump discarded beer bottles because these bits of litter were more glossy and more golden”.

But I am less convinced by Perry’s belief that sex can never be casual for women. The scientific consensus has it that on average women have lower sex drives and desire fewer partners than men, so, she argues, the culture of casual sex among young people serves men, not women.

It is impossible to know just how deeply sexist norms have permeated our sexual desires and while I am (reluctantly) willing to believe that 200,000 years of sex equalling pregnancy has made women more choosy, it doesn’t mean we’re naturally monogamous. And if we do get less out of hook-up culture, I would gently point out that men are much more likely to have an orgasm from a casual encounter, which is a problem that education can rectify.

“I used to believe the liberal narrative,” Perry writes at the start of this book and I’m sure she would say that time and “the reality of male violence” will change my mind too. Perhaps she’s right. But I’m not willing to give up on the sexual revolution just yet (and certainly not until sex education has gone from woeful to sufficient). Like a few of my more sexually anxious — and probably porn-addled — ex- boyfriends, it just needs a little more time.

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, by Louise Perry (Polity, 200pp)

The Times