The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution does not ask society literally to return to the years before the 1960s; it mounts a polemical prosecution of contemporary sexual liberalism. Louise Perry accepts contraception and legal abortion as necessary freedoms but argues that an ethic of “anything between consenting adults” hides unequal risk behind neutral choice. Drawing on rape-crisis work, reported cases, social science, and evolutionary psychology, she contends that rough sex, hook-up culture, and ubiquitous pornography chiefly serve a minority of high-status men rather than improving most women’s sexual autonomy to the same degree.

The eight chapter titles state the case without disguise: “Sex Must Be Taken Seriously,” “Men and Women Are Different,” “Some Desires Are Bad,” “Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering,” “Consent Is Not Enough,” “Violence Is Not Love,” “People Are Not Products,” and “Marriage Is Good.” Their clarity prevents a softened account of Perry’s position and exposes its binary architecture. She rejects the liberal-feminist idea that imitating a supposedly male capacity for consequence-free sex is liberation. On average, she argues, pregnancy risk, physical strength, exposure to sexual violence, and preferences for commitment are asymmetric, so low-commitment norms produce asymmetric consequences.

The book is strongest when it distinguishes consent as necessary from consent as morally exhaustive. A person may formally say yes amid pornographic scripts, pressure to please, disparities of age or experience, fear of losing a relationship, or a demand to treat pain as proof of sophistication. Perry focuses on sexual choking and the normalization of “rough sex” to show violence borrowing the costume of intimacy from pornography. Her point need not cancel women’s judgment: it asks a culture to provide thicker language and more viable exits for what someone does not want than reluctant acquiescence.

She grounds unequal risk partly in sexual dimorphism and evolved average preferences: women bear pregnancy, men have greater average capacity for physical violence, and a small number of men may gain most from an uncommitted sexual market. This can usefully remind abstract equality that bodies are not exposed to identical dangers, but it is also the book’s central controversy. Group averages do not predict individuals, and desire is profoundly shaped by economy, racialization, education, and culture. When biology overwhelms socialization, description easily becomes a prescription for traditional roles, excluding trans, intersex, and gender-nonconforming lives from the frame.

Under “people are not products,” Perry places pornography, prostitution, and commercial surrogacy within a critique of market contract as sufficient evidence of autonomy. She asks what power separates affluent buyers from economically vulnerable providers and how images train desire while industries transfer risk to the consumed. This is a necessary challenge to choice feminism, but the book gives limited space to sex workers’ varied testimony, harm-reduction evidence, and the police violence produced by criminalization. Moving straight from industry critique to one legal model may drive the most marginal workers into greater precarity, migration enforcement, and stigma.

Perry ultimately presents long-term monogamous marriage as the best institution for constraining male opportunism and pooling the risks of childrearing. She advises young women to delay sex, avoid partnered men, and reject violent or pornographic scripts. The advice restores commitment and responsibility to sexual ethics, yet understates how marriage has housed rape, economic dependence, and unequal care. It also does not seriously investigate queer kinship, nonmarital collective care, or consensual nonmonogamy as projects of accountability. Without public housing, child care, income security, and reproductive autonomy, marriage as the primary safety net privatizes structural problems again.

Methodologically, the book moves among statistical research, cases, observation, and evolutionary inference without always separating their evidentiary weight. “The sexual revolution” also becomes too unified, as though contraception, abortion rights, gay liberation, pornography, and dating apps formed one indivisible project. Class and race remain underdeveloped, and queer, trans, and sex-worker-led feminisms receive little sustained engagement. Perry diagnoses the market’s appropriation of liberation language, but often answers with personal virtues of dignity, restraint, and marriage rather than labor rights, welfare, anti-violence services, or platform governance.

The most responsible placement is therefore as a friction text, not a feminist primer or conduct manual. For each chapter, separate what Perry observes, what evidence she uses to explain it, and what norm she derives; none automatically proves the next. Read it beside sex-worker-rights writing, queer and trans politics of intimacy, disability sexual justice, pornography labor research, and the care economy. That preserves its sharpest question—who pays for the order called sexual freedom—without confining every woman’s safety to one relationship form. Taking sex seriously requires both a critique of markets and room for diverse desires and lives to govern themselves.