AMA with Louise Perry, author of ‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution’ - 14th July

[JuliaMumsnet]

Hello

We’re pleased to announce an AMA with writer and campaigner Louise Perry in the wake of her new book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. The thread is open for questions now and Louise will come on to answer them on Thursday and Friday.

Louise Perry is a columnist at the New Statesman, a features writer for the Daily Mail, and the Press Officer for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This. More about Louise’s book:

“Ditching the stuffy hang-ups and benighted sexual traditionalism of the past is an unambiguously positive thing. The sexual revolution has liberated us to enjoy a heady mixture of erotic freedom and personal autonomy. Right?

Wrong, argues Louise Perry in her provocative new book. Although it would be neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back to a world of pre-60s sexual mores, she argues that the amoral libertinism and callous disenchantment of liberal feminism and our contemporary hypersexualised culture represent more loss than gain. The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn – where anything goes and only consent matters – are a tiny minority of high-status men, not the women forced to accommodate the excesses of male lust. While dispensing sage advice to the generations paying the price for these excesses, she makes a passionate case for a new sexual culture built around dignity, virtue and restraint.

This counter-cultural polemic from one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary feminism should be read by all men and women uneasy about the mindless orthodoxies of our ultra-liberal era.”

Please ask your questions from now - though the thread will be open until Louise has finished answering questions.

As always, please remember our guidelines - one question per user, follow-ups only if there’s time and most questions have been answered, and please keep it civil. Also if one topic is dominating a thread, mods might request that people don't continue to post what's effectively the same question or point. (We may suspend the accounts of anyone who continues after we've posted to ask people to stop, so please take note.) Rest assured we will ALWAYS let the guest know that it's an area of concern to multiple users and will encourage them to engage with those questions.

Many thanks,

MNHQ

You've reminded me of a time recently when I was on a narrow pavement approaching an elderly man, and we both hopped off the pavement simultaneously to politely make way for the other. He said cheerfully "but I wanted to give way to you!" Judging the age/pregnancy status of someone who might need your seat on the bus is one of life's great sources of awkwardness, I have no solutions to it I'm afraid!

Chivalry has trade offs. Everything has trade offs. Particularly when we're talking about populations containing people with a wide range of different temperaments. In a society that values chivalry, men who are already polite to women are liable to become excessively courteous to the point of being patronising. Equally, in societies that don't value chivalry, men who are already prone to rudeness are liable to be grossly disrespectful to women. Pick your poison, I guess. Personally I'd rather be patronised.

Oh great thanks!

I'm looking forward to reading your book, after coming across a few of your articles. I suppose my question is a bit leading, because the alternative is too depressing, but do you see any hope on the horizon that teenage girls today might see through and push back against the normalisation of things like 'rough sex' and what to my generation looks like straightforward abuse? How can we as a society and individuals support this generation of young women who I think are growing up subject to extreme pressure, from men and other women, to conform to certain behaviours?

Also how do you explain the fact that many women are often so complicit in their own sex's abuse and marginalisation? What's the reason for this in your view?

I'm broadly in sympathy with your expressions of concern about the pornification of popular culture and the general trend of young women putting up with shoddy, half-arsed relationships where the guy expects sex without any particular commitment in return. Don't even get me started on things like schools and universities presenting a sanitized vision of sex work and encouraging young women to think this might be normal or empowering.

Re marriage: I discussed this a bit on the Mumsnet discussion board thread on your book, but: my concern is that there may be only so many decent guys (I mean, ones who are actually capable of committing to marriage and then being passably good spouses and fathers afterwards). I personally insisted on marriage myself and will be talking to my own daughters about the financial and personal risks that young women take when they have children with men who refuse to marry them based on weedy excuses.

Butliving in a country where virtually all births take place within marriage and unmarried motherhood is very tabooI'm also uncomfortable aware of the tradeoffs involved here. The result of these taboos mean very high rates of long-term singlehood and a lot fewer babies being born. Demographers generally agree that in developed countries, strong taboos on out-of-wedlock births and low fertility rates go together. Of course, that's destabilizing to society in all kinds of other ways, in the long term. And then there is the issue of so many people just being single and lonely throughout their lives.

Is it better for babies to just not get born in the first place, rather than to be born into less-than-ideal relationships, and is it better for women to stay single rather than have a less-than-ideal partner? How do we balance the societal need for babies to get born, against the challenges of children being born into unstable relationships, mothers' boyfriends, stepfathers and the like... and how do we manage these tradeoffs? I'm skeptical of the idea that we can just make all men into satisfactory partners; I feel quite sure that a large minority of men simply lack the personality traits necessary to be a good husband and dad, and that this is probably one of society's hard-to-solve issues.

bubblesbubbles11 · 13/07/2022 01:05

I like your ideas Louise Perry (from what I have read on google).

I am on a really tight budget.

What is the easiest/cheapest way for me to get your book please?

The kindle edition is currently £10.44 on Amazon (you don't need a kindle to reader it, you can use your computer)

Or put in a request for your local library to order it? I do this often and most of the time they do, if it's a book that's been reviewed in the press etc.

Will you answer the question please about why you're writing for the Daily (Hate) Mail? This totally jars with me. How do you feel about your writing appearing online next to the sidebar of shame?

I think it is like steering between Scylla and Charybdis. The feminist instinct to reject claims of biologically-rooted difference at the psychological level is coming from a very understandable desire to reject scientific sexism (e.g. the "missing five ounces"), which has historically been used to exclude women from public life. From this has developed a further effort to reject biologically-rooted difference at every level, including denying the existence of strength and size differences. Eventually you end up arguing, for instance, as Laurie Penny does here:

"Strict gender segregation is seldom questioned, which conveniently allows women’s events to be sidelined while ensuring that no sportsman will ever be beaten by a woman. But dividing sports by gender isn’t natural or inevitable."

Penny is being completely consistent within the liberal feminist ideology, which is all about emphasising sameness between men and women. She's also proposing a policy that would seriously harm female athletes, as I think most Mumsnetters would agree.

My argument is that we don't have a choice about acknowledging biologically-rooted difference. It's there, whether we want to accept it or not. An effective form of feminism starts from recognising sexual asymmetry and working with it, however challenging that might sometimes be.

A few people have asked this, so consider this a collective response. I signed with both the New Statesman and the Daily Mail because I want to speak to as wide an audience as possible. The Mail has a circulation of over a million, and is the only UK newspaper with a majority female readership. I'm not just interested in selling books, I'm interested in affecting government policy as a campaigner, and politicians care about what Mail readers think. A feminism that can only speak to Guardian readers is a feminism that will fail.

I think that's right, and that's an impulse imported from the US where the Christian Right are much more powerful than they are here. The problem with defining feminism solely in reaction against that enemy is that you end up adopting some perversely anti-woman ideas. For instance liberal feminism has completely dropped the ball on porn. We've got an immensely wealthy global industry that is destroying the lives of many of its workers and its consumers, and warping our sexual culture in all sorts of dysfunctional ways, to the detriment of young women in particular. But many liberal feminists are terrified of being seen as anti-porn, because that's what the 'bad guys' think, so they won't touch it.

Very interesting question. It does seem to me that the internet has supercharged the downsides of the sexual revolution, even if its consequences have been positive as well as negative (as with almost all things).

I try to resist the pendulum swing metaphor, even though it's an attractive one. I prefer to think of sexual cultures geared towards typical female sexuality (more monogamy and commitment) versus those geared towards typical male sexuality (more sexual variety and hedonism available to men). My argument is that our culture is in the latter category, along with many others. As I write in chapter 7:

"This sexuality gap produces a mismatch between male and female desire at the population level. There are a lot more straight men looking for casual sex than there are straight women, meaning that many of these men are left frustrated by the lack of willing casual partners. As we have seen, in the post-sexual revolution era, the solution to this mismatch has often been to encourage women (ideally young, attractive ones) to overcome their reticence and have sex “like a man”, imitating male sexuality en masse. The thesis of this book is that this solution has been falsely presented as a form of sexual liberation for women, when in fact it is nothing of the sort, since it serves male interests, not female.

But one of the points I have been keen to stress throughout this book is that, although our current sexual culture has significant problems, that does not mean that the sexual cultures of the past were idyllic. All societies must find some kind of solution to the sexuality gap, and those solutions can be anti-woman in many diverse ways.

Our modern solution is to encourage all women, from every class, to meet the male demand for casual sex. In contrast, the solution adopted by most societies in the period before the invention of reliable contraception was for the majority of women to have sex only within marriage (whether that be monogamous of polygynous), while a minority of poor women were tasked with absorbing all that excess male sexual desire. Aside from a handful of high class courtesans and call girls who might attain some degree of social status – usually having come from poor backgrounds originally – the prostituted class has historically been composed of women with no other options: the destitute, those abandoned by their partners, those addicted to drugs or alcohol, and those captured in warfare or tricked by traffickers. Prostitution is an ancient solution to the sexuality gap, and it is not a pleasant one."

So it's not that we need to swing 'back' towards the 1950s and hopefully settle somewhere in the middle (the 1980s???) because I don't think that linear model of progress/regress works. Rather, I think we need to be more assertive about the needs and desires of women as a sex class – particularly poor women, who suffer most when the dark side of male sexuality is unchained.

Thank you for this thoughtful and non-bullshit answer. I agree with you.

Thank you! And a very pertinent question.

I'm a member of the Labour Party, but I've worked with politicians across Parliament and have a lot of respect for individual Tories and LibDems who care deeply about MVAWG. I wouldn't say that either party is better on the issue by default, and if you look at landmark feminist victories there's a fairly even spread between the two main parties historically. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago arguing that feminism in the UK is diverging from the left/right binary, and that's a good thing.

I do think, however, that under funding the criminal justice system is deeply anti-feminist, and this government has cut it to the bone. Women commit very little crime but are very often the victims of it, particularly domestic and sexual crime. And women consistently report higher levels of anxiety in relation to crime. Right now I think we have an unholy alliance between small state conservatism and anti-carceral progressivism, both of which are happy for the state to withdraw. I think that's a disaster for everyone, but for women in particular (the subject of another essay of mine from 2020).

Hello! No need to apologise!

Some of what's going on is definitely capitalism run amok in a very direct way. The porn industry, for instance – I have a chapter in the book on limbic capitalism and porn.

Sometimes the link is less direct, and perhaps has been imported (as you say) from America. I do see a very consumerist attitude towards sex in our contemporary culture, e.g. dating apps are structured like shopping apps and encourage users to view other people as products.

One of the errors that a lot of commentators make is to see this as a conflict between left and right (the left are sex positive, the right are sex negative, etc.), but I think the ideology that's actually driving the sex positive view is derived from what's sometimes called double liberalism. I write about this briefly in my first chapter:

"I’m not using ‘liberal’ as short-hand for ‘left wing’ – in fact, far from it. The American post-liberal political theorist Patrick Deneen describes economic liberalism and social liberalism as intertwined, with a liberal cultural elite and a liberal corporate elite working hand in hand:

Today’s corporate ideology has a strong affinity with the lifestyles of those who are defined by mobility, ethical flexibility, liberalism (whether economic or social), a consumerist mentality in which choice is paramount, and a “progressive” outlook in which rapid change and “creative destruction” are the only certainties.

Post-liberals such as Deneen draw attention to the costs of social liberalism, a political project that seeks to free individuals from the external constraints placed on us by location, family, religion, tradition, and even (and most relevant to feminists) the human body. In that sense, they are in agreement with many social conservatives. But post-liberals are also critical of the other side of the liberal coin: a free market ideology that seeks to free individuals from all of these constraints in order to maximise their ability to work and to consume. The atomised worker with no commitment to any place or person is the worker best able to respond quickly to the demands of the market. This ideal liberal subject can move to wherever the jobs are because she has no connection to anywhere in particular; she can do whatever labour is asked of her without any moral objection derived from faith or tradition; and, without a spouse or family to attend to, she never needs to demand rest days or a flexible schedule. And then, with the money earned from this rootless labour, she is able to buy consumables that will soothe any feelings of unhappiness, thus feeding the economic engine with maximum efficiency."

The book contains a lot of advice directed at individual readers, some of which has been reproduced elsewhere (and proved controversial). I didn't write about government or institutional policies in the book, but I do have a lot of thoughts. A few examples:

• Personal criminal liability for executives of porn platforms who break existing law on child sexual abuse images and extreme porn content, because focusing only on possession of illegal porn hasn't worked. We need to seriously hurt the industry, including via large fines.


• Schools need to come down a lot harder on sexual violence, and not by relying on ideological interventions like consent workshops (I write in the book about why those won't work). Physical impediments are always more effective and I think Katharine Birbalsingh is an important voice here, since she demonstrates that tough discipline can work very well indeed. e.g. if students are watching porn at school and using it to intimidate girls, there should be a strict ban on smartphones in school, to reduce opportunity. Introducing gender neutral bathrooms runs directly counter to this principle and has proved disastrous - we need to be moving in the opposite direction.


• I hear a lot of "it's terrible, but what can you do?" from parents. Actually you can do a lot, but it necessitates being less permissive. If you read the Everyone's Invited testimonies, you'll see that most of the assaults described didn't take place at school, but at parties where children had been left alone with alcohol and no adult supervision. Similarly, it has become normal for kids to be handed smartphones when they're 10 or 11, and then we're surprised to discover they're using them to watch porn. Schools should be reinforcing this approach. Speaking to your children about these issues is good, but it's not as good as practical interventions. My guess is that my generation (I'm a millennial mum) will be much stricter with our children because we've experienced the dark side of too much permissiveness.

Thank you!

Teenage girls are hyper sensitive to social status, more so than any other demographic. That's one of the reasons they're particularly vulnerable to contagious mental illnesses like anorexia and ROGD. I'm not in the least bit surprised that ideas like "if your boyfriend chokes you that means you're sexy and cool" have led to a proliferation of TikTok videos in which teenage girls show off their neck bruises. It used to be that status was available to girls who were particularly chaste, while other girls were slut shamed. That status hierarchy span on a sixpence within the last generation or two.

On the plus side, that suggests that the status hierarchy could easily change again, and quickly. One of the things I'm trying to do with this book is start a conversation about the differences between male and female sexuality, highlighting the fact that actually men wanting to choke women is not a sign that those women are sexy and cool, but is instead a sign of that man's sexually aggressive desires. Young women are often incredibly ignorant about the dark side of male sexuality (I certainly was). My hope is that being honest about that reality will break the link between sex positive ideology and social status. There are parts of e.g. TikTok where that seems to be underway already (my friend Katherine Dee keeps a record of content like this).

@louisemperry Thank you so much for the reply. You have really illuminated something that I’ve been considering for a long time- the death of community connection as a one of the main stressors of modern life (and particularly women’s lives). But you did so much more eruditely than I ever could!

You have a baby son I think? Any thoughts on how you will raise him to address the kind of issues you raise?

I'll make this my last answer before calling it a night.

This is a great question and one that preoccupies me. On paper, the numbers ought to work out: the proportion of men who really aren't suited to being husbands and fathers may well be roughly equivalent to the proportion of women who don't want to get married and have children anyway. Plus of course there are LGB people who aren't interested in straight relationships. So it's not like we're looking for 50:50 pairing off.

But that's clearly not how it works in practice, and men who aren't suited to being fathers are nevertheless reproducing all over the place, and making their partners and children miserable, particularly through violence and other abuse. I don't know exactly what proportion of men are in this irredeemable (or almost irredemable) category, but it's a non-trivial minority. There are also women who make terrible and abusive mothers but have children anyway, whereas some women who would make wonderful mothers end up leaving it too late for various reasons... there's a lot of tragedy at play here.

And there's a lot to be said about falling fertility rates, too much to say here (I'm actually thinking of writing my next book on this topic). Some of it is to do with a dearth of marriageable men, which is partly about temperament, but also partly about changes to the economy that make breadwinner jobs hard to come by. It's a big and interesting topic which I intend to write more on.

Logging off now because I'm knackered, but if there are any more questions overnight I'll try and squeeze in some more answers tomorrow - thank you so much for such thoughtful comments, it's been a pleasure!

Thanks Louise

Thank you for the links, I will read (not today though, it's too hot ). Good luck with the next book.

Thanks very much to all of you for your brilliant questions and to @louisemperry for coming on to respond.