Chapter 3 - Some Desires Are Bad
FbF Book Club: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Perry, 2022)
Previous Entry - Men and Women Are Different
“There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation”
Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1967
The above quote is a famous line spoken by Prime Minister Trudeau when his Liberal-led government decriminalized homosexual acts. We are all effectively liberals now, and have internalized his position as sound, reasonable, and commonsensical. What right does the government have in our private lives, we ask?
The liberal worldview regarding sexual relations is based around the concept of ‘consent’, and it is with this concept that Louise takes aim in the third chapter of this book where she disputes the notion of “no harm, no foul”. Is it wrong for a man to buy a dead chicken at the grocery store, have sex with it, and then eat it? According to the liberal worldview, there isn’t. Taking aim at anthropologist Gayle Rubin:
Rubin is radical in her liberalism. She famously rejects the idea of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ sexual behaviour, interpreting such moralising as inherently oppressive. To her mind, sex does not need to involve either love or commitment, and it certainly needn’t have any connection to marriage or reproduction. The only thing that matters to liberal feminists such as Rubin is whether or not all parties are able and willing to consent to a particular sex act. All other sexual morality must be discarded……
Is there more to sex than just consent? Rubin was influenced by Michel Foucault, who in turn was influenced by Sigmund Freud. This leads Perry to conclude that liberal feminists take the us vs. them view whereby the “us” isn’t women, but rather revolutionaries in conflict against traditionalism, shorn of all that makes them as actual women unique. This has severe implications for “the sexual marketplace”, in that men and women are different (see: previous entry), with different wants, different needs, and different approaches to it:
Of course the factory owner supports free marketisation, and of course his wage slave disagrees – the pike and the minnow have different economic interests. This is also true in the sexual marketplace, which was once strictly regulated but has now been made (mostly) free.
However, in this case, the classes are not the workers and the bourgeoisie but, rather, men and women – or, more precisely, the group of people who have done particularly well out of the free marketisation of sex are men high in the personality trait that psychologists call ‘sociosexuality’: the desire for sexual variety.
The psychologist David Schmitt describes the importance of sociosexuality:
Those who score relatively low on this dimension are said to possess a restricted sociosexual orientation – they tend toward monogamy, prolonged courtship, and heavy emotional investment in long-term relationships. Those residing at the high end of sociosexuality are considered more unrestricted in mating orientation, they tend toward promiscuity, are quick to have sex, and experience lower levels of romantic relationship closeness.4
In a study of male and female sociosexuality across forty-eight countries, Schmitt and his team found large sex differences to be ‘a cultural universal’, regardless of a nation’s level of economic and social equality between the sexes.
more:
This difference is explained by what evolutionary biologists term ‘parental investment theory’ – put simply, women can produce offspring at a maximum rate of about one pregnancy per year, whereas promiscuous men can theoretically produce offspring every time they orgasm.
and still more:
We see this play out in male and female sexual behaviour. The research is clear: we know that men, on average, prefer to have more sex and with a larger number of partners, that sex buyers are almost exclusively male, that men watch a lot more porn than women do, and that the vast majority of women, if given the option, prefer a committed relationship to casual sex. Sexual fetishes (also known as ‘paraphilias’) are also much more commonly found in men than in women…..
Therefore, to reduce sex to just consent is to completely deny these hard-coded differences between the sexes. It is a denial of complexity entirely for political purposes.
Perry continues with the theme of the sexual marketplace to illustrate how coercion is present in it just like it is in the economic marketplace. A tightly-regulated sexual marketplace was cast aside in the name of individual freedom and personal liberty, with a certain subset of men being the big winners, and not women, as feminists have insisted. Here Perry tosses a powerful grenade towards the liberal and radical feminists, by highlighting how their support for individual liberty in terms of sexual relations is no different than Margaret Thatcher rejecting the notion of a society, in that “we are all individuals”. And just like how extreme free market economics has devastated large swathes of the UK via de-industrialization and social collapse, so has the sexual free marketplace done to women.
….society is composed of both pikes and minnows, as well as people who may play both roles at different times (‘half victim, half accomplice’, as Simone de Beauvoir put it). Their analysis can only understand people as freewheeling, atomised individuals, all out looking out for number one and all up for a good time. Thus when they see a taboo – against, say, having sex with chicken corpses – they assume that, if no obvious purpose for the taboo springs to mind, it must therefore be unnecessary. They falsely assume that, with all such taboos removed, then we would all be liberated and capable of making entirely free choices about our sexual lives, sampling from a menu of delightful options made newly available by the sexual revolution (‘What will sir have today – the chicken?’).
Adapting to the sexual free market in order to remain competitive:
When sex before marriage is expected, and when almost all of the other women participating in my particular sexual market are willing to ‘put out’ on a first or second date, then not being willing to do the same becomes a competitive disadvantage. The abstinent young woman must either be tremendously attractive, in order to out-compete her more permissive peers, or she must be happy to restrict her dating pool only to those men who are as unusual as she is. Being eccentric carries costs.
The loosening up of sexual mores may have benefited a small group of men, but women (and other men) haven’t been the only losers.