This is an interesting analysis which perhaps pays its subject too much praise. I read Louise Perry's The Case Against The Sexual Revolution a few weeks ago. I found it blooming with inconsistencies. I will attempt to outline them here( this might be long).
Perry takes to task the fundamental male desire to pursue non-committal sex with many partners. But she ignores the fundamental female desire to maintain a committed sexual relationship with the most desirable partner. In many cases, a desirable man can sleep with as many women as he pleases, but the servicing of his desire is only possible because many women will prefer the hope of securing him down to a relationship to settling down with someone less attractive. Half the book is a polemic against polygamous relationships but this is impossible without the hypergamous nature of women. The two desires so neatly coexist which is why they have remained consistent throughout human history.
If men must curb their desires, women must also curb theirs. Indeed, this is why in societies where monogamy is so strictly enforced ( rural India comes to mind), many women are in unhappy relationships with very unattractive men. Eating one's cake and having it is a philosophy one should not possibly believe in beyond childhood
Perry cites many of her examples- the book has a stunning absence of statistical evidence by the way - from anecdotes of porn actresses and college relationships. Suffice to say that that is unrepresentative of the general population. In both categories, the women have made active choices - in the case of porn stars and prostitutes, by default - to sleep with men who have fewer inhibitions about treating women with disrespect. College dating, which is highly mimetic and superficial, also rewards these kinds of men as women of that age are often still in their ' bad boy' phase.
Perry advocates a dangerous idea that consent is not enough. In a particularly memorable passage, she decries that sexual relationships have been transacted in something akin to a free market. Well, if people should not make their own sexual choices for themselves, then someone else must be making these sexual choices for them.
This is not hypothetical. It is pure logic. Eugenicists, for example, obviously would like an eugenics sympathetic government to make those choices. The point is if two people's willing consent isn't enough, then it means people's decisions to have sex and enter into sexual relationships, the very thing Perry treats with such reverence, should be governed by other people. That is an ironic and inescapable conclusion.
It's remarkable that in the chapter titled Consent Is Not Enough, the book mainly advances its case by discussing pedophilia and porn. In fact, these are two cases where sexual relationships are frowned upon precisely because consent is strictly impossible ( pedophilia) or because in many cases, it wasn't obtained ( the unfortunate and widespread abuse of porn stars is well documented). This is like writing a book called Peace is Not Enough and making your case by discussing the awful consequences of World War I and World War II. If this were intentional, it is hilarious. If it were not, it is unintelligent.
Perry does not idolize marriage. In fact, she stoically recommends it as the worst of all possible worlds. I'll not begin to analyse why such an attitude is likely to make marriage an unattractive and depressing prospect to young people, especially set side by side with untrammelled sexual freedom.
There are brilliant insights in this book. The sly comparison of prostitution with slavery is certainly intriguing but half true because while slavery is fundamentally involuntary, prostitution is mostly a voluntary arrangement. Of course, the argument can be made that it is only voluntary because the prostitute lacks better options. Well, of course, it is. Poor people take up all kinds of jobs because they lack better options. The only good takeaway from that is to abolish poverty. That's a takeaway you can get by simply paying attention to our world.
The truth is the pendulum has swung too far in the West. The sexual revolution, like all revolutions, has calcified into a dictatorship of superficial preferences. But that is as much men's fault as it is women's fault, and if any solution were to result, it would be as much women's responsibility as it would be men's. There are many victims of this dynamic. The book's attempt to monopolize victimhood on behalf of women is in fact the principal attitude which led to the sexual revolution in the first place.
Occasionally, The Case Against The Sexual Revolution makes a good case against the sexual revolution. Usually, and perhaps unfortunately, it simply makes a good case against itself.
I wanted to address the choking thing. It is pretty new, because it definitely did not exist when I was young and dating (70s) or older, divorced and dating (90s)... by the 90s, there were male requests for things like spanking, anal sex, etc. but never choking.
I think all of these come directly from PORN and porn is overwhelmingly a male endeavor... written by men, directed by men, consumed by men... women are a tiny part of it. (We do like erotica, but not porn.) MEN who see women being choked (and liking it), take this into the bedroom and indicate to their partners that this is hot & sexy, so the women do it. OR the women see the porn, and figure out that this is something their male partner would get off on. The idea that women actively wish to be choked is bizarre and I strongly feel is untrue (not even getting into how sick and unsafe it is!).
Jun 13, 2023·edited Jun 13, 2023Liked by Misha Saul
This is probably the best-written book in the "conservative points in liberal words" genre (a good genre!) Perry is dishing out parental wisdom, almost folk-tales, in modern, politicized language. Avoid wolves on the way to grandma's! Get Rumpelstiltskin's name! Don't build your house out of straw! Perry takes the same tone. Will professors take the bait and become like grandmothers, warning the young (and especially young women) to be cautious in love? I await the results but fear the implementation.
Misha, you nailed my issue with the book. Perry frequently explains why women don't have agency, cordoning it off as you said, and it seems to beg the question of what agency means in this discussion. That being said, I think Perry's fault in describing women is the same she has in describing men. She is not nearly harsh enough!
On men: “They care about youth, and they care about looks, but otherwise they don’t care who they’re ejaculating into, and they certainly don’t care if that person is enjoying themselves. If given the chance, these men will treat their sexual partners as unfeeling orifices…. That is the punter’s view of the matter."
I think Perry writes like this to avoid scaring her readers. Even within the boundaries of the law this isn't the worst case! Pointing out the "embarrass him in front of his friends" threshold helps, but Perry is far, far off the mark in describing cads. A worse case that I think many people have seen: A guy has sex with a girl on a fling, breaks her heart, then brags about it to everyone they both know, humiliating her in front of everyone. Perry mentions bragging as a vice from prostitution, and uses "Sex in the City" as a fictional example where this bragging goes well for women. Writing out the real-life case of someone whose friendships and trust in the world are irrevocably damaged at seventeen would be a complete change in mood, but this seems *far more relevant* to Perry's target audience. The flip-side is, of course, facing up to that agency. Perry has to avoid writing "Please, for the love of God, make good choices, there are some real monsters out there who will happily accept your worst decisions" in order to get the audience she wants, but that seems like the best interpretation of the book. Mean Girls got to this dynamic, and even managed to point out the girl-on-girl violence that Perry never comes close to.
There's obviously a synthesis here that needs better than me to type out, a beautiful essay on the switch that flips in Catholic parents from "Why would you even want to go to the dance" to "Where are my grandchildren?" I think Jane Austen novels perfectly detail the thrilling and romantic process of discerning cads from chivalrous men. Alas, the culture war cannot be driven by personal discernment and age-old wisdom. Perry cannot spend a whole book saying "We, men and women, collectively and individually, must repair community institutions that we are perversely destroying." This would be ignored for spicier takes that argue from universal principles rather than personal advice. Nevertheless, for people who ignore old advice for modern principles, this is a refreshing way of seeing your grandmother's Thanksgiving interrogations and questions about the good life.
I note a consistent oversight in these descriptions of male sexual "psychopathy." It's the cognitive bias sometimes known as the saliency bias. Just as a small proportion of criminals commit a large proportion of crimes, a small proportion of men make up the pool of the "elite men" in Perry's world of the sexual marketplace. The "elite men" that populate her world are elite in their desirability profiles--looks & intelligence--but they are disproportionally lacking in empathy. Some are are so far along that spectrum that they're sociopathic. Some "desirable" men actually do recoil at callously using women for their sexual gratification and immediately moving on. Using other people as instruments to achieve our own narrow ends--sexual or otherwise--could be the definition of immorality. Those men who decline that course don't make it into Perry's anecdotes. They're more likely to get married and disappear from tinder. In other words, Perry's world of male sexual psychopathy is drawn from the pool of men who are relatively high on dark triad traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy) because such men disproportionately populate the successful men on tinder and its ilk. What may be true is that the modern sexual marketplace is a more welcoming playground for such men than the old-fashioned markets for dating and courtship.
Hasn't it occurred to her that she loves marriage because it 1)suits her self-interest tradeoffs and 2)She didn't have to trade of anything in the mate market? The "evil hippies brainwashed women to not know their self interest" is a no more compelling argument than "the evil patriarchy brainwashed women to not know their self-interest". Here is a simpler explanation for the decline in marriage - men in the bottom half of the cognitive distribution control a much lower share of GDP than they used to. bet Louise Perry didn't have to marry a man with less earning potential than her or one significantly less intelligent than her. My assumption is that values changes are cope, not causation. It is so weird how both progressive women and trad con women don't see they are just wanting to rig cultural norms around what adjudicates their tradeoffs better, but structural factors always win. These people who think the decline of marriage is just an example of liberals spreading "misinformation" (no more compelling than when liberals think conservative misinformation causes behavior) should just reckon people just stop doing things when it no longer does the things it used to do at the costs it used to do it. Liberals and tradcons both believe a variety of "the rubes aren't smart enough so they need elites to tell them what is good for them".
Never thought I'd wind up talking about this on a conservative blog but I followed a link from Marginal Revolution and hey, it's Substack.
First of all, marriage is increasingly a bad risk for elite men. With no-fault divorce she can blow up your life and eat half your savings and have a claim on future earnings any time she feels like eat-pray-loving or finding herself. (Paging Honor Jones in the Atlantic.) If women don't want to go through working a double shift at home and work for a mediocre man...non-mediocre men are less and less willing to take the risk. For mediocre men, which is most of us, there's video games.
Also, as Misha says, lots of men take dangerous jobs that shorten their life expectancy and people don't see a problem with that. I don't particularly see why women's lives count more than men's. (I know why, evolution, sperm is cheap eggs are expensive, but somehow evo psych is never an excuse when it benefits men rather than women.) One of the big things that turned me off feminism at a very young age was finding out that women don't have to register for the draft. The USA hasn't drafted anyone in a few decades now, but plenty of countries do (and military service has been an issue behind the rise of men's-rights parties in South Korea).
Also, ah... lot of the kink stuff is a lot less dangerous than choking. *Actual kinksters* (you're a geek, you meet a lot...what is it with science fiction nerds and BDSM?) consider choking dangerous because of the threats to the brain blood supply and airway. Outside the weird stuff you see on TV and in...ah...places devoted to that sort of thing, a lot of the stuff is made to be a lot more dangerous and evil-looking than it actually is dangerous--the whips don't draw blood like the ones used on horses, the cuffs are often padded and can be removed by the cuffed person. Spankings are delivered to the body part with the most padding. A lot of it is to satisfy women's desires to be with a Bad Guy (which, as others have said, are quite common) without actually being a Bad Guy.
Women control the sexual market. All they have to do is close their legs and hold out until they get everything they say they want (commitment). Before the 1960's that is what women did and if men wanted sex they had to commit. Now women open their legs to the top 10% of men with the most sexual market value, who are also fucking lots of other women, and then wonder why no commitment is forthcoming. There are plenty of men out there who want marriage and family. But that is not who the women are rewarding. No, they are rewarding the men who hit it and quit it. This is 100% women's fault. Men will do as little or as much as it takes to get laid. Women are simply not demanding enough in the trade
This is an interesting analysis which perhaps pays its subject too much praise. I read Louise Perry's The Case Against The Sexual Revolution a few weeks ago. I found it blooming with inconsistencies. I will attempt to outline them here( this might be long).
Perry takes to task the fundamental male desire to pursue non-committal sex with many partners. But she ignores the fundamental female desire to maintain a committed sexual relationship with the most desirable partner. In many cases, a desirable man can sleep with as many women as he pleases, but the servicing of his desire is only possible because many women will prefer the hope of securing him down to a relationship to settling down with someone less attractive. Half the book is a polemic against polygamous relationships but this is impossible without the hypergamous nature of women. The two desires so neatly coexist which is why they have remained consistent throughout human history.
If men must curb their desires, women must also curb theirs. Indeed, this is why in societies where monogamy is so strictly enforced ( rural India comes to mind), many women are in unhappy relationships with very unattractive men. Eating one's cake and having it is a philosophy one should not possibly believe in beyond childhood
Perry cites many of her examples- the book has a stunning absence of statistical evidence by the way - from anecdotes of porn actresses and college relationships. Suffice to say that that is unrepresentative of the general population. In both categories, the women have made active choices - in the case of porn stars and prostitutes, by default - to sleep with men who have fewer inhibitions about treating women with disrespect. College dating, which is highly mimetic and superficial, also rewards these kinds of men as women of that age are often still in their ' bad boy' phase.
Perry advocates a dangerous idea that consent is not enough. In a particularly memorable passage, she decries that sexual relationships have been transacted in something akin to a free market. Well, if people should not make their own sexual choices for themselves, then someone else must be making these sexual choices for them.
This is not hypothetical. It is pure logic. Eugenicists, for example, obviously would like an eugenics sympathetic government to make those choices. The point is if two people's willing consent isn't enough, then it means people's decisions to have sex and enter into sexual relationships, the very thing Perry treats with such reverence, should be governed by other people. That is an ironic and inescapable conclusion.
It's remarkable that in the chapter titled Consent Is Not Enough, the book mainly advances its case by discussing pedophilia and porn. In fact, these are two cases where sexual relationships are frowned upon precisely because consent is strictly impossible ( pedophilia) or because in many cases, it wasn't obtained ( the unfortunate and widespread abuse of porn stars is well documented). This is like writing a book called Peace is Not Enough and making your case by discussing the awful consequences of World War I and World War II. If this were intentional, it is hilarious. If it were not, it is unintelligent.
Perry does not idolize marriage. In fact, she stoically recommends it as the worst of all possible worlds. I'll not begin to analyse why such an attitude is likely to make marriage an unattractive and depressing prospect to young people, especially set side by side with untrammelled sexual freedom.
There are brilliant insights in this book. The sly comparison of prostitution with slavery is certainly intriguing but half true because while slavery is fundamentally involuntary, prostitution is mostly a voluntary arrangement. Of course, the argument can be made that it is only voluntary because the prostitute lacks better options. Well, of course, it is. Poor people take up all kinds of jobs because they lack better options. The only good takeaway from that is to abolish poverty. That's a takeaway you can get by simply paying attention to our world.
The truth is the pendulum has swung too far in the West. The sexual revolution, like all revolutions, has calcified into a dictatorship of superficial preferences. But that is as much men's fault as it is women's fault, and if any solution were to result, it would be as much women's responsibility as it would be men's. There are many victims of this dynamic. The book's attempt to monopolize victimhood on behalf of women is in fact the principal attitude which led to the sexual revolution in the first place.
Occasionally, The Case Against The Sexual Revolution makes a good case against the sexual revolution. Usually, and perhaps unfortunately, it simply makes a good case against itself.
I wanted to address the choking thing. It is pretty new, because it definitely did not exist when I was young and dating (70s) or older, divorced and dating (90s)... by the 90s, there were male requests for things like spanking, anal sex, etc. but never choking.
I think all of these come directly from PORN and porn is overwhelmingly a male endeavor... written by men, directed by men, consumed by men... women are a tiny part of it. (We do like erotica, but not porn.) MEN who see women being choked (and liking it), take this into the bedroom and indicate to their partners that this is hot & sexy, so the women do it. OR the women see the porn, and figure out that this is something their male partner would get off on. The idea that women actively wish to be choked is bizarre and I strongly feel is untrue (not even getting into how sick and unsafe it is!).
I’d like to know your reaction to Bryan Caplan’s review: https://betonit.substack.com/p/marry-the-market-reflections-on-the
This is probably the best-written book in the "conservative points in liberal words" genre (a good genre!) Perry is dishing out parental wisdom, almost folk-tales, in modern, politicized language. Avoid wolves on the way to grandma's! Get Rumpelstiltskin's name! Don't build your house out of straw! Perry takes the same tone. Will professors take the bait and become like grandmothers, warning the young (and especially young women) to be cautious in love? I await the results but fear the implementation.
Misha, you nailed my issue with the book. Perry frequently explains why women don't have agency, cordoning it off as you said, and it seems to beg the question of what agency means in this discussion. That being said, I think Perry's fault in describing women is the same she has in describing men. She is not nearly harsh enough!
On men: “They care about youth, and they care about looks, but otherwise they don’t care who they’re ejaculating into, and they certainly don’t care if that person is enjoying themselves. If given the chance, these men will treat their sexual partners as unfeeling orifices…. That is the punter’s view of the matter."
I think Perry writes like this to avoid scaring her readers. Even within the boundaries of the law this isn't the worst case! Pointing out the "embarrass him in front of his friends" threshold helps, but Perry is far, far off the mark in describing cads. A worse case that I think many people have seen: A guy has sex with a girl on a fling, breaks her heart, then brags about it to everyone they both know, humiliating her in front of everyone. Perry mentions bragging as a vice from prostitution, and uses "Sex in the City" as a fictional example where this bragging goes well for women. Writing out the real-life case of someone whose friendships and trust in the world are irrevocably damaged at seventeen would be a complete change in mood, but this seems *far more relevant* to Perry's target audience. The flip-side is, of course, facing up to that agency. Perry has to avoid writing "Please, for the love of God, make good choices, there are some real monsters out there who will happily accept your worst decisions" in order to get the audience she wants, but that seems like the best interpretation of the book. Mean Girls got to this dynamic, and even managed to point out the girl-on-girl violence that Perry never comes close to.
There's obviously a synthesis here that needs better than me to type out, a beautiful essay on the switch that flips in Catholic parents from "Why would you even want to go to the dance" to "Where are my grandchildren?" I think Jane Austen novels perfectly detail the thrilling and romantic process of discerning cads from chivalrous men. Alas, the culture war cannot be driven by personal discernment and age-old wisdom. Perry cannot spend a whole book saying "We, men and women, collectively and individually, must repair community institutions that we are perversely destroying." This would be ignored for spicier takes that argue from universal principles rather than personal advice. Nevertheless, for people who ignore old advice for modern principles, this is a refreshing way of seeing your grandmother's Thanksgiving interrogations and questions about the good life.
I note a consistent oversight in these descriptions of male sexual "psychopathy." It's the cognitive bias sometimes known as the saliency bias. Just as a small proportion of criminals commit a large proportion of crimes, a small proportion of men make up the pool of the "elite men" in Perry's world of the sexual marketplace. The "elite men" that populate her world are elite in their desirability profiles--looks & intelligence--but they are disproportionally lacking in empathy. Some are are so far along that spectrum that they're sociopathic. Some "desirable" men actually do recoil at callously using women for their sexual gratification and immediately moving on. Using other people as instruments to achieve our own narrow ends--sexual or otherwise--could be the definition of immorality. Those men who decline that course don't make it into Perry's anecdotes. They're more likely to get married and disappear from tinder. In other words, Perry's world of male sexual psychopathy is drawn from the pool of men who are relatively high on dark triad traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy) because such men disproportionately populate the successful men on tinder and its ilk. What may be true is that the modern sexual marketplace is a more welcoming playground for such men than the old-fashioned markets for dating and courtship.
Re:choking/bdsm, data seems to show this is overwhelmingly a female prefence not male. See Justin lehmillers research and aella from twitter
"We ask (mainly) men to risk their lives for money all the time"
The reproductive positions of the sexes aren't symmetrical.
https://medium.com/cregox/is-there-anything-good-about-men-by-roy-f-baumeister-d111ba407de3
Hasn't it occurred to her that she loves marriage because it 1)suits her self-interest tradeoffs and 2)She didn't have to trade of anything in the mate market? The "evil hippies brainwashed women to not know their self interest" is a no more compelling argument than "the evil patriarchy brainwashed women to not know their self-interest". Here is a simpler explanation for the decline in marriage - men in the bottom half of the cognitive distribution control a much lower share of GDP than they used to. bet Louise Perry didn't have to marry a man with less earning potential than her or one significantly less intelligent than her. My assumption is that values changes are cope, not causation. It is so weird how both progressive women and trad con women don't see they are just wanting to rig cultural norms around what adjudicates their tradeoffs better, but structural factors always win. These people who think the decline of marriage is just an example of liberals spreading "misinformation" (no more compelling than when liberals think conservative misinformation causes behavior) should just reckon people just stop doing things when it no longer does the things it used to do at the costs it used to do it. Liberals and tradcons both believe a variety of "the rubes aren't smart enough so they need elites to tell them what is good for them".
Never thought I'd wind up talking about this on a conservative blog but I followed a link from Marginal Revolution and hey, it's Substack.
First of all, marriage is increasingly a bad risk for elite men. With no-fault divorce she can blow up your life and eat half your savings and have a claim on future earnings any time she feels like eat-pray-loving or finding herself. (Paging Honor Jones in the Atlantic.) If women don't want to go through working a double shift at home and work for a mediocre man...non-mediocre men are less and less willing to take the risk. For mediocre men, which is most of us, there's video games.
Also, as Misha says, lots of men take dangerous jobs that shorten their life expectancy and people don't see a problem with that. I don't particularly see why women's lives count more than men's. (I know why, evolution, sperm is cheap eggs are expensive, but somehow evo psych is never an excuse when it benefits men rather than women.) One of the big things that turned me off feminism at a very young age was finding out that women don't have to register for the draft. The USA hasn't drafted anyone in a few decades now, but plenty of countries do (and military service has been an issue behind the rise of men's-rights parties in South Korea).
Also, ah... lot of the kink stuff is a lot less dangerous than choking. *Actual kinksters* (you're a geek, you meet a lot...what is it with science fiction nerds and BDSM?) consider choking dangerous because of the threats to the brain blood supply and airway. Outside the weird stuff you see on TV and in...ah...places devoted to that sort of thing, a lot of the stuff is made to be a lot more dangerous and evil-looking than it actually is dangerous--the whips don't draw blood like the ones used on horses, the cuffs are often padded and can be removed by the cuffed person. Spankings are delivered to the body part with the most padding. A lot of it is to satisfy women's desires to be with a Bad Guy (which, as others have said, are quite common) without actually being a Bad Guy.
Women control the sexual market. All they have to do is close their legs and hold out until they get everything they say they want (commitment). Before the 1960's that is what women did and if men wanted sex they had to commit. Now women open their legs to the top 10% of men with the most sexual market value, who are also fucking lots of other women, and then wonder why no commitment is forthcoming. There are plenty of men out there who want marriage and family. But that is not who the women are rewarding. No, they are rewarding the men who hit it and quit it. This is 100% women's fault. Men will do as little or as much as it takes to get laid. Women are simply not demanding enough in the trade