Mini-book review: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

Growing up in the 1990s, it was de rigueur that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was a uniformly positive movement that liberated young people from the outdated rules of traditional sexuality, and that only fussy religious holdouts continued to decry these changes. Well, it’s been a 60-year social experiment now, and we can evaluate the effects with some degree of sobriety and objectivity.

Louise Perry, journalist and writer, on the Chris Williamson podcast

What’s been interesting is that the strongest critics of the modern sex culture are not from religious voices but secular and feminist voices. A slew of new books have been published from this perspective, most prominently The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry and Rethinking Sex by Christine Emba.

In an age of hookup culture, Only Fans, and the #MeToo movement, Perry and Emba criticize the modern sexual culture for being particularly harmful to women. Their argument is that there used to be a “double standard” where men were allowed to be promiscuous whereas women had to be chaste, which was unfair and sexist. The modern world eliminated that double standard by encouraging women to be as promiscuous as men, but that has mostly served the interest of men, particularly rich men. The vast majority of women do not enjoy random sexual encounters, which exposes them to danger and shame. Rather, Perry and Emba argue for a world where men are asked to be as chaste as women, which protects vulnerable women and privileges family formation.

Christine Emba, columnist for the Washington Post, speaking at a conference at Georgetown University

This recalls an even early sexual revolution, one that predates the 1960s by two millennia, in which a persecuted and marginalized group advocated, for the first time in history, for the rights of women and slaves against sexual predation, and a sexual standard in which powerful men were expected to practice sexual restraint and probity.