The sexual revolution that followed widespread access to the contraceptive pill has been a mixed blessing for women, says writer Louise Perry.
Her new book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution argues that this was a revolution that left many women with the worst of all worlds, while being a benefit to men.
"It is urgent and daring and brave", says The Guardian in its review. "It may turn out to be one of the most important feminist books of its time."
Photo: Vanity Studios London
“The argument I make basically is that women have got a pretty raw deal, because on the one hand, we suffer all of the consequences, negative consequences, when sex goes wrong, in terms of things like unwanted pregnancies, and sexual violence overwhelmingly, is perpetrated by men against women.
“But we don't get nearly as many of the positive sides of it because it is more likely to be things like casual sex are much more likely to be enjoyed by men and less so by women.
“And so, while I argue that there are obviously all sorts of benefits from the sexual revolution, crucially the pill, which is the big technology shock that drives all of this, and that women are now able to control their reproduction in a way that wasn't possible in the past, just because the technology didn't exist to allow us to.”
But, she says, there are “whole bunch of downsides on the social level.”
Perry, whose writing appears in The New Statesman, The Times, The Critic, The Daily Mail, and The Telegraph, says the differences between men and women remain profound.
“I think that it was a mistake for some strains of feminism to assume that trying to imitate men, and specifically to imitate a kind of masculine style of sexuality, was necessarily aspirational for women.
“So, the idea that if we could just kind of let go of all of those old-fashioned norms and just be more free then that would necessarily result in women being happier. I don't think that has happened.”
The contraceptive pill hasn’t liberated women, in her view.
She quotes a line in her book ‘when motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for men’, and believes it is now more socially acceptable for men to walk away from their children and the mothers of their children.
“Particularly if they're conceived in kind of casual relationships, because the reasoning from these men and they'll say it pretty boldly sometimes, is well it was it was your fault for not using contraception properly, it was your fault for not getting an abortion. It's your problem now, basically. Which is obviously hugely destructive for the women who end up abandoned and their children most of all.”
It is ironic, she says, that a technology that allows women to take charge of their fertility would have led to an increase in single motherhood.
“You’d think it would be the opposite, wouldn't you? Because with a few exceptions, no woman would choose single motherhood; it is so difficult having to play the role of both mother and father. And we know that single mothers are much poorer than average, face all kinds of adversity.
“And yet that was precisely the effect of the pill.”
The pill pretty rapidly changed societal norms in which young people lived, she says.
“The social norms that had existed to control horny young people, to put it bluntly, to keep them apart from one another, to control childbearing which was the function of all of these old fashioned norms often understood by feminists as being patriarchal and oppressive and of course they were that was one of their functions, one of their effects.
“But they also had other purposes around controlling the circumstances in which children were born and the environment in which they brought up in and when those norms were very, very rapidly destroyed at the same time as religion fading away in the West, you ended up with, for instance, the shotgun marriage just no longer serving any purpose whatsoever.
“And so, by the end of the 70s the shotgun marriage basically doesn't exist anymore.
“It's very, very rapid social change. And of course, it had benefits. But the argument that I'm making in the book is that it had a lot of downsides as well.”
Photo: Polity Books
Perry also says in the book that women should only get drunk with other women unless they know the men they are with very well – she is also no fan of dating apps.
“I've spent a lot of my professional life campaigning around the criminal justice system and trying to secure more conviction rate for sexual crimes and so on.
“So, I fully understand and sympathise with people who are worried about victim blaming, but then I also think that these are things that we all tell each other in private, these are things that mums tell their daughters.
“And many of these are just kind of straightforward, common sense pieces of advice, but ones that are often born from experience and having a fairly gritty understanding of the dark side of male sexuality.”
Not all changes in society are positive, Perry says.
“I don't believe in progress as an ideal. I don't believe that history has a shape, that things always get better in a kind of linear way and that the story of the sexual revolution is one of just everyone getting freer and freer as time goes by.
“I think it's a lot more complicated than that. And I think also, the problem with viewing it in that way, is that it means necessarily that younger people have more wisdom, have more insight than older people, that it's completely impossible to think that someone who lived in another era could actually be right about something, and actually have greater insight than someone who hasn't had the same experiences as them.
“And the result of that way of thinking is that it becomes impossible for younger feminists to learn anything from older women, these women are dinosaurs, they have nothing to teach us kind of thing.”
This means feminist ideology has to refresh every generation, she says.
“You see things, cultural products that only are a decade old or whatever, already condemned as being problematic. And I think that does do a particular disservice to young women.”
She also warns about dating apps in the book.
“One of the problems with dating apps compared with other ways of meeting a partner, is that there's no accountability in relation to them, particularly if you're in a big city like London, or like Auckland.
“These guys can just kind of disappear into the night. What I'm advising is to attempt other avenues first, because one of the good things about dating someone who's from your social circle, is that you have some sense of his reputation.
“If he's treating other partners badly in the past, you're likely to hear about it. And there are some social consequences if he treats you badly in some way, none of which dating apps have.”
