Sarah Harte: Louise Perry’s conservative book lobs a grenade into feminist discourse
In a world of rapid conclusions, it will be interesting to see what reactions Louise Perry’s provocative take on feminism provokes. File picture
There’s a new wind blowing across Europe where writers, thinkers, think tanks, intellectuals are increasingly coming out of the traps as “conservatives” although they may use other labels.
In a broad sense, their ideology sees itself as countering a liberal overemphasis on freedom and individual rights.
With the publishing of her new book 'The Case against the Sexual Revolution', feminist author and New Statesman columnist Louise Perry lobs a grenade into feminist discourse.
Her book is aimed at convincing young heterosexual women that our hypersexualized culture “decouples” love and commitment from sex, pressurizes them into promiscuity, celebrates sex work, violent pornography and casual hook-ups, and is damaging them while being “a gift to men.”
“Sex-positive” vacuity, she believes, does young women no favours. She laments young women on social media “desperate for some positive male attention” posting “belfies” (photos of their bottoms).
She also believes that gender-neutral bathrooms in schools are “the stupidest things ever.” She points to the “outpouring of rage and sorrow” around the #MeToo movement as “evidence of a sexual culture” that isn’t working for women.
Generations of women are paying the price for the excesses of male lust which have been supersized in the digital age.
Her basic thesis is that there are deep differences between men physically, psychologically, biologically and in terms of their natural desires and that liberal feminism has sold young women a lie in the name of so-called equality.
Rules in the epilogue of her book advise young women (particularly those between 13 and 25):
- to avoid being with strange men;
- to avoid using dating apps;
- to only get drunk or high in private with female friends;
- to hold off having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months;
- and to only have sex with a man she thinks would make a good father to her children, not because she necessarily intends having children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb in deciding whether or not he’s worthy of her trust.
Consent, she writes, is an inadequate measure of what is and is not abuse.
“For now, we live in a culture where though it isn’t taboo for a man to choke a woman during sex, or anally penetrate her, or ejaculate on her face while filming it, it is taboo for a young woman to express discomfort about the nature of the sex bargain she’s expected by society to make.”
She believes that consent workshops are “mostly useless” because some men are biologically driven to rape so educating them about consent will achieve nothing.
Perry, a campaigner against male sexual violence became more conservative in her views after working at a rape crisis centre. She self-describes as “a post-liberal feminist” who is “just a liberal feminist who has witnessed the reality of male violence close up”.
Perry is big on evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. She links the crime of rape back to biology, rejecting the idea that our culture constructs rapists meaning certain men are born rapists rather than becoming ones.
In an evolutionary sense, she says that rape is rational because rape confers a selection advantage on men giving them more opportunities to pass on their genes. She believes that about 10% of men are rapists, with up to a third capable of rape if they thought they would get away with it.
It’s a dim view of the male gender and runs counter to the belief held by many criminologists that rape is a power-based crime rather than a biologically driven imperative. She advocates locking rapists up for life, if necessary.
Perry sets out the pernicious nexus between porn, tech and capitalism clearly and cogently. Porn, she writes, normalizes aggression, coercion and pain. “People are not products,” she writes. “Porn watchers” are “caught up in a form of “limbic capitalism”, while porn is “the debased offspring of capitalism”.
She links social and economic liberalism which she says are intertwined to a market-orientated ideology which benefits men like Harvey Weinstein who she describes as Hugh Hefner’s natural heir.
Her views on porn aren’t far from the much-misrepresented radical feminist and activist Andrea Dworkin who she quotes frequently during the book.
Dworkin wrote: “Pornography is a celebration of rape and injury to women; it’s a kind of union for rapists, a way of legitimising rape and formalising male supremacy in our society.”
On prostitution, Perry also points out “the prostituted class has historically been comprised of women with no other options”.
Right across the globe the poorest women service the demand of the richest men. Society, she writes, is composed of “pikes and minnows” and the idea that minnows have free choice may be illusory.
Where Perry and Dworkin shoot off in opposite directions is marriage.
“One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man,” Dworkin wrote. Perry sees marriage as a panacea.
Get married and try to stay married is the advice delivered to young women in the last chapter of her book. The idea that the way to lead a full, safe life free from sexual violence is to cocoon within the confines of straight marriage will set many teeth on edge.
She sees the problem for women as being “how to persuade men into sexual continence” and marriage as a way to discourage “short-termism in male sexual behaviour”.
In the context of increased levels of domestic violence and partner homicide, the idea of enforced monogamy is debatably a deficient way to go about protecting women from male violence.
Her views on marriage, divorce and single motherhood (“a catastrophe”) could safely be termed as those of an arch-conservative.
“In an era without contraception a prohibition on sex before marriage served female, not male interests,” she writes.
In the context of the Magdalene laundries, mother and babies’ homes, and the swift and merciless consequences for those who strayed outside a narrow orthodoxy (many of whom continue to pay a price) the control of reproductive rights remains a particularly sensitive issue for many Irish women. This dark history can never be finessed away with clever logic.
Perry’s views when taken as a totality have a strong whiff of a new puritanism one that has for years been steadily gaining traction in the USA.
The potential impending reversal of Roe v Wade could have knock-on consequences for the right to contraception in the US. Jacky Eubanks, a Gen Z recent college graduate, running for a Michigan state senate seat and endorsed by Trump has spoken of her intention to vote to make birth control illegal should the opportunity arise.
She is not alone in her anti-contraception stance. Tate Reeves, the Republican Mississippi Governor has recently refused to rule out the possibility that his state might ban certain forms of contraception. The idea also seems to have some currency in Idaho where a Republican state Representative, Brent Cane, said that he would consider banning the morning-after pill and IUDs.
A Perry world in some ways reminds me of the world conjured up by the controversial Canadian psychologist and guru Jordan Peterson. Perry is focused on how to achieve women’s health and happiness while Peterson is concerned with how men might lead good healthy lives.
His view seems to be based on the idea that the assertion of female rights represents a loss for men (he seems deeply resentful of women) and her view is that the excesses of male sexuality take something from women (she sees many men as natural-born rapists).
Another intersection seems to be that the world they imagine is heterosexual with prescriptive, traditional roles for men and women. Both seem to imagine an existential sort of crisis. It’s arguable that both, as crusaders, rationalise and naturalise a patriarchal social order.
While Perry’s take on sexuality is counter to the prevailing orthodoxy that feminism is about freedom of choice it does seem to be part of what the writer Monica Ali has termed an “age of hot takes and hotter opinions”.
In publishing terms, and more generally, the middle ground is no longer sexy. Perry’s manifesto seems canny in that it’s likely to foment controversy, and presumably get the tills ringing.
However, in a world where the backlash for saying the wrong thing can be great Louise Perry’s fearlessness about saying things that are uncomfortable stands out.
Her book has been described by one admirer as a “counter-cultural polemic” for those who are uneasy about the “mindless orthodoxies or our ultra-liberal era”. Others will reject it as a joyless, regressive dangerous throwback to a time with backstreet abortions, and trapped, desperate women.
Perry either makes a case for a new sexual culture built around restraint or around repression depending on your outlook. Or is the choice binary, to either wholeheartedly accept or reject everything she says?
Last year, the writer and podcaster Africa Brooke wrote an open letter about leaving the cult of wokeness because of its performative political correctness and forced conformity. Although her sentiments were interpreted by some as a dog whistle to conservatism, her post attracted millions of views.
Brooke is articulate about the need to build tolerance for discomfort, embrace intellectual diversity, and make room for difficult conversations.
She wrote:
Tim Harford writes in The Financial Times of what he has coined the 'oil slick effect'.
“It’s not simply possible for somebody simply to be wrong about something; they must be wrong about everything, and wicked too,” he writes.
“The oil slick covers and ruins everything.”
In a world of rapid conclusions, it will be interesting to see what reactions Louise Perry’s provocative take on feminism provokes.
* The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is published by Polity.
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