Book Interview: A feminist challenge to modern thinking on sex

Louise Perry worked in a rape crisis centre after she had finished her degree in Women’s Studies at Oxford: “I just found the difference between feminist theory and the reality of frontline services amazing.”

• The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
• Louise Perry
• Polity Press, £16.99

‘SEX must be taken seriously’; ‘Some desires are bad’; ‘Marriage is good’, and ‘Consent is not enough’.

These are chapter titles from a new book in which the English journalist Louise Perry moves from one cherished assumption of the sexual revolution to the next, skilfully picking them apart with reason, empirical evidence, human stories, and, occasionally, ridicule, and then replacing them with a new set of counter-cultural messages.

Anyone who thinks that, thanks to the pill, the collapse of monogamy, and the shattering of sexual taboos, humanity has reached, or is even on its way towards, the sunlit uplands of human desire may have their beliefs severely tested by Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

Mary Whitehouse, you feel, would be nodding in agreement with much of Perry’s book and perhaps even feel vindicated by some of it. But Perry comes to these issues from a very different political hinterland to the 70s campaigner (whom she is not afraid to honour for the things Mrs Whitehouse got right).

She grew up in a household that took two copies of The Guardian every day (one of which she would take to school with her). She is a member of the Labour Party and writes for the New Statesman, Britain’s preeminent left-wing weekly.

But Louise believes that the liberal left gets sex wrong. “I think it was confrontation with reality that dissuaded me of some of the standard views,” she tells me.

Both as a student, and after she had finished her degree in Women’s Studies at Oxford, Perry worked in a rape crisis centre. “I just found the difference between feminist theory and the reality of frontline services amazing. There was nothing in my philosophy intro on motherhood, really; very little in there on sexual violence.”

She found that the dominant view in feminist circles that rape is all about power, and that it doesn’t have anything to do with sexual desire, “just doesn’t stack up, if you look at particularly things like the demographics of victims, demographics of perpetrators”.

“And how do you explain rape committed by men against other men, for instance, if your whole conception of it is to do with patriarchy as the dominant motivation?”

In conversation, as in print, Louise’s tone is calm and thoughtful, but she is also unafraid to shoot from the hip. It is, she finds, “bizarrely easy for very clever women to repeat obviously stupid ideas”.

“I think that you do see that elsewhere, but it’s amazingly pronounced in feminism for some reason. I’m not sure why.”

Her book is full of challenges to contemporary received wisdom. Sexual liberalism, she writes, asks women to train themselves “out of the kind of instinctive revulsion that often has a protective function”. The world would be a better place if some men “were more ashamed of their desires and acted on that shame by mastering them”.

And the liberal feminist appeal to consent as the litmus test for what is right or acceptable, “isn’t good enough. It cannot account for the ways in which the sexuality of impressionable young people can be warped by porn and other forms of cultural influence. It cannot convincingly explain why a woman who hurts herself should be understood as mentally ill, but a woman who asks her partner to hurt her is apparently exercising her sexual agency”.

Capitalism is another consistent target: “Porn is to sex as McDonald’s is to food. These two capitalist enterprises take our natural appetites, pluck out the most compulsive and addictive elements, strip away anything truly nutritious, and then encourage us to consume more and more.”

It’s strong stuff, delivered in measured doses by a talented writer and thinker.

I asked Perry about her decision to write a book on this subject. What was the trigger? “I’d sort of been writing it in my head for a long time,” she says, but the success of We Can’t Consent to This, a campaign against the use of ‘rough sex’ defences for the killing or violent injury of women and girls, played a major part.

“We succeeded in changing the law as we wanted to,” she says. “We all felt that something was happening here: this tiny group of women, unpaid, and able to get the most amazing reception everywhere we went, really.”

This reception spanned the political spectrum: “You know, positive coverage in The Guardian and in the Daily Mail, and from Labour and the Tories. So, yeah, I felt very much as though there was something that wasn’t quite being said, but that a lot of people were thinking, and that maybe I should put it down on paper.”

But finding a publisher was not easy and The Case Against the Sexual Revolution was turned down by lots of the grander houses. Louise is now in the position of having a book published by a small academic press that is hoovering up good reviews in the biggest newspapers and websites.

“Publishing is a very cautious industry,” she says. “They have my sympathy because the lead times are so long for getting a book out that you have to try and judge the mood in two or three years from now. I think the book has done well enough to suggest that there is something else in the air.”

We talk a little about the role wider culture plays, from Sally Rooney novels questioning monogamous pair-bonding to Love Island converting short-term sexual rivalry and infidelity into a mass spectator sport. Thinking of Rooney’s Normal People, Louise mentions the ‘Connell phenomenon’. She is bemused: “Girls were, like, head over heels for Connell, talking about finding ‘their Connell’. It was a big phenomenon online, on kind of girly bits of the internet.

“And the thing that they find wonderful about him is the fact that he doesn’t want to do the BDSM stuff that the female protagonist asks for. And this is, like, amazingly gentlemanly. He is clearly good in bed and charming in all sorts of ways, but he does take advantage of other women in the book.

“In a way, I thought the fact that Normal People is held up as being the Pride and Prejudice of our age says a lot about how low the bar is and how modest are the expectations of these young women who think that Connell is a great romantic hero. It seems like there’s that a kind of yearning for what he’s offering, but also just … such low expectations.”

Some of Louise Perry’s conclusions come close to the tenets on sex to be found in traditional religion. Is she religious?

“I’m not a practising Christian. People often assume that I’m Catholic, but I’m not. I’m kind of culturally Christian, but I’m not starting from religious principles. I’m just ending up in agreement on some points.

“I have good friends who are Catholic feminists and Catholic feminism is a very coherent view and has a lot to recommend it. The main thing that I think we would disagree on is abortion. My general view is that banning abortion would probably do more harm than good and that you should be coming at it from the ‘it would be better if women weren’t getting pregnant by terrible men who don’t care about them’ sort of angle, rather than legislative intervention. So that’s the point on which I disagree most with Catholic feminists.”

We have to wrap up the interview. Later though, via email, I contact Perry, wondering whether she feels like a lone voice. Not so, it seems.

“I’m not the only feminist writing from this perspective, ”Perry tells me, mentioning other writers such as Mary Harrington, Kathleen Stock ,and Nina Power.

“We are a growing band.”