Why should advocating sexual restraint be ridiculed?

Louise Perry is on a mission: ‘It wasn’t enough just to point out the problems with our new sexual culture,’ she declares at the start of her punchy first book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. So she offers advice as well to the young women she believes have been ‘utterly failed by liberal feminism’.

That’s because contemporary sexual mores have exposed them to risks, the most serious of which are linked to some men’s propensity for violence. Women, Perry argues, have in recent decades been conditioned to repress their desire for attachment. They have learned instead to behave in ways more typical of men, with their greater (on average) appetite for casual sex or ‘sociosexuality’.

Perry, who says that working for a rape crisis service changed her attitudes, points to the dangers of sado-masochistic sex, as shown by the rise of the ‘rough sex’ defence, whereby the growing number of women (and smaller number of men) killed by their partners are claimed in court to have consented to the violence which led to their deaths.

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But Perry believes the problem goes deeper. She attacks the normalisation of extreme pornography, hook-up culture and the apps which promote it, and the ethically weak concept of consent whereby a person’s agreement to any given activity is regarded as the last word.

Missionaries preaching sexual restraint are liable to be mocked, and Perry has been compared to Mary Whitehouse. But Christian morality is not the motivation for the sexual counter-revolution she proposes. She does not want a return to the way things were before birth control and abortion were legalised, when single mothers were stigmatised and their babies taken away from them. Instead of this punitive double standard, she argues for a new sexual settlement which allows for differences between males and females, and a version of feminism that supports this.