The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

If sex isn't worth of its own moral category, then nor is sexual harassment or rape. If we accept that sex is merely a service that can be freely bought and sold, then we have no arguments left to make against the incels who want to 'redistribute' it or the army officials who want to offer their troops 'convenient arrangements'.

We have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation.

So I am going to propose an alternative form of sexual culture – one that recognises other human beings as real people, invested with real value and dignity. It’s time for a sexual counter-revolution.

Men are encouraged into ‘cad’ mode, pursuing temporary relationships that offer all of the pleasures of cheap sex and none of the responsibilities of commitment.

just as Jeffrey Epstein supplying underage girls to famous and powerful men sounds like particularly bizarre fiction. And yet these things really happened.

My perspective on this is often condemned as ‘carceral feminism’ by those who favour the abolition of prisons and policing, typically on the grounds of racial justice. My response to this accusation is that the women and children who make up the vast majority of rape victims are disproportionately likely to be both poor and non-white.

I conformed to the beliefs of my class, including liberal feminist ideas about porn, BDSM, hook-up culture, evolutionary psychology, and the sex trade, which will all be addressed in this book. I let go of these beliefs because of my own life experiences, including a period immediately after university spent working at a rape crisis centre.

Sex workers can act as sources of sex advice only if we understand sex to be a skillset that must be learned and refined across different partners, with good sex a result not of intimacy but of good technique. In this framing, sex becomes something that one does to another person, not with another person. All of the emotion is drained away

Prostitution has never been a matter of personal choice or female empowerment. Rather, the role of 'buyer' versus 'seller' has always been determined not only by sex but also by race, nationality and - above all - class.

In the contemporary United States, about half of women who have abortions report that they were using contraception when they became pregnant,18 and about a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortion.

posters that say ‘don’t rape’ will prevent precisely zero rapes, because rape is already illegal, and would-be rapists know that. We can scream ‘don’t rape’ until we’re blue in the face, and it won’t make a blind bit of difference. It has to be possible to say simultaneously that rape is reprehensible and that it is OK – in fact, essential – to offer advice that could help to reduce its incidence.

We should treat our sexual partners with dignity. We should not regard other people as merely body parts to be enjoyed. We should aspire to love and mutuality in all of our sexual relationships, regardless of whether they are gay or straight. We should prioritise virtue over desire. We should not assume that any given feelings we discover in our hearts (or our loins) ought to be acted upon

I propose a different solution, based on a fundamental feminist claim: unwanted sex is worse than sexual frustration.

Put differently, there are different modes of male sexuality: the mode that encourages commitment and the mode that encourages promiscuity

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.

I’m going to argue in this book that 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.

liberal feminism can’t or won’t answer: Why do so many women desire a kind of sexual freedom that so obviously serves male interests? What if our bodies and minds aren’t as malleable as we might like to think?

Spears has since suffered a protracted and very public nervous breakdown, just like the countless other Monroes – some of whom we will meet over the course of this book – who have been destroyed in much the same way as the original icon.

But, while Hefner lived a long, grubby life in his mansion with his playmates, Monroe’s life was cut short by misery and substance abuse.

For we now live in a culture where, though it isn’t taboo for a man to choke a woman during sex, or anally penetrate her, or ejaculate on her face while filming it, it is taboo for a young woman to express discomfort about the nature of the sexual bargain she’s expected by society to make.

Only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children - not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb in deciding whether or not he's worthy of your trust.

Once you permit the idea the people can be products, everything is corroded.

Teenage boys are raised on pop culture that presents having sex ‘like a man’ as the ultimate form of female sexual empowerment, and, in the porn to which they are typically exposed from childhood, women are shown begging men for painful or degrading sex acts.

She isn’t special: she’s a normal woman who has just enough emotional insight to recognise that hook-up culture isn’t good for her but is lacking the political insight to recognise the existence of a bigger problem.

particularly when sex carries so many more risks for women, in terms of violence and pregnancy.

They show no regard for their partners’ intimate lives and discard them immediately afterwards.

We should not regard other people as merely body parts to be enjoyed. We should aspire to love and mutuality in all of our sexual relationships, regardless of whether they are gay or straight. We should prioritise virtue over desire.

But, while young women should feel free to get hammered with their girlfriends or highly trusted men, doing so among strange men will always be risky.

If you wanted to design the perfect environment for the would-be rapist, then you couldn’t do much better than a party or nightclub filled with young women who are wearing high heels (limiting mobility) and drinking or taking drugs (limiting awareness).

In fact, I’d go further, and suggest that almost no one is a walking gender stereotype – I have some stereotypically feminine traits and some stereotypically masculine ones, and I’m sure you do too.