The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book takes a critical look at the post-sexual revolution society and asks if not everything that has been a good development. It asks if society as a whole, with liberalised sex, has been a disadvantage to society.

🎨 Impressions

I thought it was an interesting book in the sense that it asks if not being a sex-liberal society has been a disadvantage to girls. I think this might be true. Maybe the best way we have a truly better society is to limit the sex available for boys. Maybe all men should have a limit on how many they can date/have sex with. Same for girls maybe, then we can develop meaningful relationships instead of just having some boys do all the sex. I think most of us would be happier with that result.

I think it is an okay book, but only people who are very liberal feminists should read it as it is not that interesting for people who are not in that category. It was not that good either.

✍️ My Top Quotes

Monroe reportedly told a friend that she had ‘never even received a thank-you from all those who made millions off a nude Marilyn photograph. I even had to buy a copy of the magazine to see myself in it.’
He supposedly once said that his best pick-up line was simply the sentence ‘Hi, my name is Hugh Hefner.’
The 2 percent of Western European men who report watching more than 7 hours of porn a week are not a healthy and happy group, and nor are the men whose porn use may be less time-consuming but is nevertheless personally destructive. The continuing influence of the NoFap movement is a testament to the sexual dissatisfaction that often comes with porn use.
Liberal feminism takes this market-orientated ideology and applies it to issues specific to women. For instance, when the actress and campaigner Emma Watson was criticized in 2017 for showing her breasts on the cover of Vanity Fair, she hit back with a well-worn liberal feminist phrase: ‘Feminism is about giving women choice … It’s about freedom.’
Western sexual culture in the twenty-first century doesn’t properly balance these interests – instead, it promotes the interests of the Hugh Hefners of the world at the expense of the Marilyn Monroes. And the influence of liberal feminism means that too many women don’t recognize this truth, blithely accepting Hefner’s claim that all of the downsides of the new sexual culture are just a small price to pay for personal freedom’.
Sexual disenchantment is a natural consequence of the liberal privileging of freedom over all other values, because, if you want to be utterly free, you have to aim for any kind of social restrictions that limit you, particularly the belief that sex has some unique, intangible value
S. Lewis coined the phrase ‘chronological snobbery’ to describe ‘The uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.’
I reject the poisonous dichotomy that insists that the past must be either all good or all bad. I don’t think that we should imitate any sexual culture of the past, but nor do I think that what we have seen over the last sixty years has been a process of relentless improvement.
1950s home economics book offering ‘tips to look after your husband’ went viral on social media. The housewife was advised that, when her husband got home from work, she should have dinner on the table, her apron off and a ribbon in her hair, and that she should always make sure to let her husband ‘talk first’.
But the would-be Hugh Hefners are also hurt by the pretence, albeit in a less obvious way. Mouldering away in the Playboy mansion doesn’t kill a person, but it does corrode them. True happiness is not to be found on a soiled mattress being ridden by a woman who doesn’t even like you.
The famous quote from Against Our Will, in which she describes rape as ‘nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.’4 Brownmiller’s model understands rape as an expression of political, as well as physical, dominance.
Plus there really is some truth to the claim – workplace sexual harassment, for instance, is almost never perpetrated by junior men against more senior women. Instead it follows a predictable gradient: perpetrated by those with more power against those with less.
If we think that rape is ‘natural behaviour’ then we must – according to Brownmiller’s view here – also think of it as, firstly, permissible and, secondly, inevitable. This first claim is a textbook example of the naturalistic fallacy: the false belief that because something is natural it must necessarily be good. But the second claim is more difficult. If rape is indeed a product of evolution, does that make it inevitable? Well, not necessarily, but it certainly does make it more difficult to eradicate,
Brownmiller writes in Against Our Will that ‘no zoologist, as far as I know, has ever observed that animals rape in their natural habitat, the wild. This statement is wrong – egregiously wrong, in fact, because plenty of other animals commit rape, and they also behave in all of the other horrible ways in which human beings sometimes behave.
We are closer to harbour seals than we are to elephant seals, since our females weigh on average just 25 per cent less than our males and most of our societies are only mildly polygynous. But there is some degree of sexual dimorphism that, while it may be tempered by cultural conditions, remains evident in every human society.
In hand grip strength, 90 per cent of females produce less force than 95 per cent of males. In other words, almost all women are weaker than almost all men, and any feminist analysis of the power dynamic between men and women has to begin with the recognition of this fact.
just as the United States women’s national football team in 2017 were beaten by the Dallas under-fifteen boys’ team, composed of boys who had just crossed the crucial puberty line and so had begun to develop the strength and power of adult men.
the central feminist question ought not to be ‘How can we all be free?’ but, rather, ‘How can we best promote the wellbeing of both men and women, given that these two groups have different sets of interests, which are sometimes in tension?’
such a high proportion of rape victims are teenagers.
Female rape victimization and female sexual attractiveness peak at exactly the same age – the two graphs map onto each other almost perfectly. Socialization theory can’t account for this because, if ‘rape is about power, not sex’, why would rapists just happen to target the age group that also just happens to be the most sexually desirable to men?
And Buss adds that, in terms of personality, rapists tend to be more impulsive, hostile, disagreeable, promiscuous, hyper-masculine, and low in empathy compared with other men.
Which is true, of course it is! But here’s the point: rapists don’t care what feminists have to say.
was only after Savile died, unpunished, in 2011 that the scale of his crimes became clear. It is now believed that, over the course of at least forty years, BBC staff turned a blind eye to the rape and sexual assault of up to 1000 girls and boys by Savile in the corporation’s changing rooms and studios.
successful apps are brightly coloured like fresh fruit and glint like fresh water.
Porn is to sex as McDonald’s is to food. These two capitalist enterprises take our natural appetites, pluck out the most compulsive and addictive elements, strip away anything truly nutritious, and then encourage us to consume more
Most submissives (‘subs’) are female and most dominants (‘doms’) are male. One 2013 study of participants in a BDSM online forum found that only 34 per cent of men consistently preferred the sub position, while an even smaller proportion of women – 8 per cent – identified as doms.
Any man who can maintain an erection while beating up his partner is a man to steer well clear of, but those with an interest in masochism don’t want to hear that kind of grim truth, and those with an interest in sadism don’t want to be forced to repress their desires.