The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Contemporary sex positivity goes against the inherent interests of heterosexual women, according to this alarmist treatise. New Statesman columnist Perry pleads with young women to reject hookup culture and "avoid being alone with men they don't know," contending that liberal feminism has been blind to biological and hormonal realities in pursuit of women's liberation. Characterizing men as "pikes" and women as "minnows," she argues that centering discussions about sexual behavior around the issue of consent forces women "to emotionally cripple themselves in order to gratify men" and condone behaviors that their moral intuition knows are wrong. She also suggests that rape is an inherent "mode" of male sexuality, that "snobbish progressives" are ignoring the dangers of child sexualization and pedophilia, that BDSM is unacceptable even with consent, that sex without love is hurtful to women, and that it is illogical for feminists to argue that "sex work is work" and also be "hyper-sensitive to any suggestion of sexual impropriety in their own workplaces." Though Perry acknowledges that accessible birth control benefits women, she expresses concern that it has fostered relationship-free sexual habits. Perry's essentialist perspective, harsh tone, and slippery slope arguments are unlikely to change the minds of young women who have embraced their sexual agency. This provocation misses the mark.
