Book review: The Case against the Sexual Revolution

A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century
Louise Perry
Polity, 2021, 200 pages, £11.75.

This article was first published in the November 22 issue of the Christian newspaper, Evangelicals Now. It was republished with permission in the Affinity Social Issues Bulletin (Issue 51 – November 2022). Download the whole issue for free.

Louise Perry has dedicated this book to ‘women who learned it the hard way’. Having worked with victims of rape and abuse, she has seen the dark side of radical feminism and sexual ‘liberation’. Many young women are told that casual sex is empowering. But they are the losers in a hook-up culture which delivers loveless sex, humiliating abuse, and miserable abandonment. Men can get sex without commitment. Women tend to value commitment more than men. Sex leads to babies. Women have babies, men do not.

In today’s culture, it takes courage to articulate the blindingly obvious!

This book is significant, not because it says anything particularly new, but because of who is saying it. We have heard the case against the sexual revolution from Christians, as well as from socially conservative commentators. But Louise Perry is a young(ish) non-Christian feminist, who writes for the left-leaning New Statesman. She confronts the assumptions of her ‘tribe’ by arguing the case for monogamous marriage. It is good for men, women, children and society.

Evidence is cited, demonstrating that, while there are exceptions, at a population scale women and children are safer within the married family than anywhere else. As family breakdown increased, partly due to easier divorce, so did the abuse of women and children. Perry’s advice to young women? ‘Get married and stay married!’

Perry is to be commended for her courage. She has attracted abuse and opposition for attacking current progressive orthodoxies.

She is to be commended for her concern. She has been moved by the testimonies of women whose lives have been wrecked by pornography, abuse, and the multiple perversions that go under the designation ‘rough sex’.

She is to be commended for her clarity. She sees through many of the current lies and writes persuasively and well.

Her book is disturbing, and offensive in parts, but we need to understand the human cost of a culture that elevates personal and sexual freedom over all else. When the guard rails of God’s moral law (as expressed in the conscience and natural law as well as the Bible) are smashed down, the consequences are catastrophic.

This book provides numerous points of discussion with non-Christians. In such conversations, we don’t always need to appeal to the Bible. God has created this world in such a way that truth is revealed in ‘the way things are’. All truth is God’s truth!

However, Perry doesn’t fully address the brutal way that radical feminism pitted women against their unborn children. Young women should be warned of the long-term emotional and physical harms associated with abortion (see testimonies on https://theunchoice.com/). And although she presents the benefits of man-woman monogamous marriage, not least for children, she fails to challenge the progressive shibboleth of same-sex ‘marriage’. Her presentation of the differences between men and women implicitly strikes a mortal blow to gender ideology, but she does not address that issue directly (although so many adolescent girls are caught up in the ‘social contagion’ of transgender identity).

Perry describes the hideous damage done by sexual ‘liberation’, but in response, she can only offer good advice. Men should behave better and abstain from porn. Women should avoid the trap of loveless sex and look for a marriage partner. But what help is that for people whose lives have already been messed up? What’s missing is the Gospel. Our Triune God offers forgiveness and healing for those whose lives have been broken, seemingly beyond repair; the power to live a new life and freedom to forgive others, even as we have been forgiven.

Sharon James works for The Christian Institute and is the author of several books. Her website is www.sharonjames.org