Saturday 28 May 2022 12:25 AM Why the sexual revolution has been a disaster for women: Feminist Louise Perry ... trends now
When Emma Watson, the film star and women’s rights campaigner, was criticised for showing her breasts on the cover of Vanity Fair, she hit back by asserting ‘feminism is about giving women choice.
It’s about freedom’. For liberal feminists like her that might be true.
But for many other women — perhaps a sizeable majority — that freedom has spectacularly backfired. It has turned out to be a lie and a con.
Rather than women being emancipated sexually, in the digital age we have become a society in thrall to the worst of male sexuality.
Feminist author Louise Perry passionately argues how the sexual revolution has impacted men and women in different ways. 'For younger women in particular, today’s sexual culture is destructive, divorcing love and commitment from sex and favouring one-night stands, casual ‘hook-ups’ and ‘friends with benefits’ arrangements'
For younger women in particular, today’s sexual culture is destructive, divorcing love and commitment from sex and favouring one-night stands, casual ‘hook-ups’ and ‘friends with benefits’ arrangements.
Worse still, it pressures them into promiscuity, bombards them with violent pornography and tells them to enjoy being humiliated and assaulted in bed.
Rather than selfies, many young women on social media now post ‘belfies’ (photos of their bottoms).
Instagram and TikTok are filled with the youthful breasts and buttocks of women desperate for some positive male attention.
Film star and women's rights campaigner, Emma Watson, famously hit back at criticism after showing her breasts on the cover of Vanity Fair, stating that 'asserting feminism is about giving women a choice'.
Society now has a sexual script that is increasingly aggressive and loveless, typified by men sending women pictures of their penises, so-called ‘d*ck pics’.
I don’t know what they think the recipients are supposed to do with them.
I know of no woman who would be turned on by an image in which the rest of the person has been cropped away, leaving only a slab of flesh ready to be laid out on the anatomist’s table.
Typical female sexuality isn’t orientated towards these kinds of images. But the internet abounds with them.
Former cabaret dancer, Diane Mathews, 22, pictured burning her bra outside the headquarters of the Magic Circle in London in protest against sexual discrimination by the organisation
Violence is available, not only on mainstream porn sites but also on social media platforms marketed as suitable for children.
Dating apps such as Tinder turn people into products in a sexual marketplace that encourages users to browse the available merchandise and select their preferred options from the comfort of their homes, with very little effort and no intimacy whatsoever.
One male user described the voracious appetite that the apps encourage: ‘You’re always prowling.
'In a bar you might have two or three girls to choose from but online you can swipe a couple of hundred a day and set up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them.
'You could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.’
Another user compares Tinder to an online food delivery service —‘but you’re ordering a person’.
Hugh Hefner arriving at London Airport from Chicago with Playboy Bunnies on 26 June 1966. Hefner is considered one of the sexual revolution's 'earliest icons'
He saw no harm in scrolling through would-be sexual partners in the same way as we scroll through any other kinds of consumables.
In reality, once you permit the idea that people can be products, everything is corroded.
When Wonderbra released its famous ‘Hello Boys’ ad campaign, featuring Eva Herzigova admiring her own boosted cleavage, the posters were so distracting that they reportedly caused car crashes. That was in 1994.
In contrast, try walking down any British High Street today and keep a tally of how many lingerie-clad boobs and bums you see in shop windows, on the sides of buses and on the covers of newspapers and magazines.
The flaunting of sexuality has been so normalised we hardly notice any more.
What all this shows is that sexual liberation — the result primarily of the contraceptive pill which separated sexual activity from procreation — was flawed, largely benefiting men rather than women.
It was so from the outset. Take two of the sexual revolution’s earliest icons — Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe.
They never met, but they were born in the same year and laid to rest in the same place, side by side.
Marilyn Monroe was the first naked centrefold in the first edition of Hefner's Playboy magazine. She had been paid just $50 for a two-hour shoot with a freelance photographer, curling up on a red velvet bedspread
In 1992, Hefner bought the crypt next to Monroe’s in a Los Angeles cemetery, commenting that ‘spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up’.
At the age of 91, Hefner got his wish. The long-dead Monroe had no say in the matter.
But then she had never been given much say in what men did to her over the course of her short life.
She was the first naked centrefold in the first edition of Hefner’s Playboy magazine.
‘Entertainment for men’ was the promise offered on the cover and it was a commercial success from that very first issue.
Monroe had been paid just $50 for a two-hour shoot with a freelance photographer, curling up on a red velvet bedspread.
She was humiliated by the session, which she resorted to only out of desperate need for money.
Hefner didn’t pay her to use her images and didn’t seek her consent before publishing them.
Monroe told a friend that she had ‘never even received a thank you from all those who made millions from a nude Marilyn photograph. I even had to buy a copy of the magazine to see myself in it’.
In her provocative thesis, Ms Perry looks back at a 16-year-old Britney Spears who 'gyrated in a school uniform and begged viewers to hit me baby one more time’
The courses of these two lives show us in perfect vignette the nature of the sexual revolution’s impact on men and women.
Monroe and Hefner both began in obscurity and ended their lives rich and famous.
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.
As radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote: ‘She grinned, she posed, she pretended, she had affairs with famous and powerful men.
‘She had so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her reproductive organs were severely injured.
‘She died alone, possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time. Her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had f***ed her to death.’
More than half a century after her death, not much has changed. At the age of 16, pop star Britney Spears gyrated in a school uniform and begged viewers to ‘hit me baby one more time’.
She has since suffered a protracted and very public nervous breakdown.
Hefner, on the other hand, experienced ‘sexual liberation’ very differently from Monroe, as men typically do.
He lived the fantasy of a particularly immature adolescent boy, hosting parties for his celebrity friends and then retiring upstairs with his harem of identical 20-something blondes.
According to one of his Playmates, in old age, life in the Playboy mansion consisted of ‘Hef just lying there with his Viagra erection.
Each girl gets on top of him for two minutes while the girls in the background try to keep him excited by yelling obscenities’.
He took an obsessive and coercive attitude towards the girls, dictating how they wore their hair and make-up, keeping a detailed log of all his sexual encounters and becoming angry if refused sex.
He never experienced any guilt for the harm he perpetrated.
Asked, aged 83, if he regretted any of the dark consequences of the Playboy revolution he set in motion, he was confident in his innocence: ‘It’s a small price to pay for personal freedom.’
By which he meant, of course, personal freedom for men like him.
After his death in 2017, a British journalist argued that Hefner had indeed ‘helped push feminism forwards’ by taking a progressive stance to the contraceptive pill and abortion rights and promoting them in his magazines.
But his commitment to decoupling reproduction from sex had nothing to do with a commitment to women’s well-being.
When fear of pregnancy was one of the last remaining reasons for women saying ‘no’, he had every reason to wish for a change that would widen the pool of women available to him.
The sexual revolution that began in the 1960s certainly freed women from the burdens of chastity and motherhood, giving them control over their reproductive lives.
But it also brought the triumph of the playboy, pretending they were liberating women when in truth it was their own libidos and depravities they were liberating.
There have been plenty of periods in history in which the norms around sex have been loosened for a while.
But the sexual revolution of the 1960s stuck and its ideology is now a murky sea we all swim in.
I used to believe the liberal narrative that this free-and-easy attitude to sex was unalloyed progress.
As a younger woman, I conformed to liberal feminist ideas that saw nothing wrong in porn, bondage, sadomasochism and hook-up culture.
Women were just expressing the same casual and adventurous approach to sex as men did.
I let go of these beliefs after working at a rape crisis centre, where I witnessed the reality of male violence up close.
It made me realise that the sexual revolution has not freed all of us, but it has freed some of us, selectively and at a price.
Believe me, I’m not anti-liberal and I don’t reject the desire for freedom.
I recognise that with the right tools, freedom from the constraints imposed on women by our societies and our bodies now becomes increasingly possible.
Don’t want to have children in your 20s or 30s? Freeze your eggs. Called away on a work trip post-partum? FedEx your breast milk to your newborn. Want to continue working full-time without interruption? Employ a nanny or a surrogate who can bear your child.
But I am critical of any ideology that fails to balance freedom against other values.
And I am baffled why so many women desire a kind of
