Here’s why the sexual revolution was a bad deal for women

Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner were born in the same year and buried in the same graveyard. But as Louise Perry points out in her book “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution,” they met completely different fates.

Marilyn died a tortured sex symbol of the burgeoning sexual revolution, while Hefner lived large as the quintessential playboy, capitalizing on the same sexual liberalism.

“The story of the sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood, although it is that,” Perry writes. “It is also a story of the triumph of the playboy — a figure who is too often both forgotten and forgiven.”

In her book, journalist and author Perry challenges the conception that all of the sexual revolution’s downstream effects have been universally positive for women. “The technology shock of the Pill led sexual liberals to the hubristic assumption that our society could be uniquely free from the oppression of sexual norms and could function just fine,” she argues in her book. “The last sixty years have proved that assumption to be wrong.” 

Perry advocates for a return to three principles she thinks our culture has lost sight of: dignity, virtue, and restraint. “We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down,” she says. “And, in order to do that, we have to start by stating the obvious. Sex must be taken seriously. Men and women are different… And, above all, listen to your mother.” 

The 30-year-old millennial journalist writes for a left-wing magazine in the United Kingdom and considers herself an economic progressive. But she also believes (at least some of) the good old-fashioned norms of sex, love, and dating might be worth preserving after all.

Her table of contents has gone viral — and was even tweeted out by Ben Shapiro — for her chapter names, each a countercultural piece of advice. Titles include “Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering,” “Men and Women Are Different,” and “Marriage is Good.”

Although she braced for backlash to the provocative title and countercultural content of her book, Perry says she’s received enormously positive feedback from an “unusually broad readership” — including young people looking for advice, concerned parents, and those on either side of the political divide. She said she’s heard from many liberals who share her concerns but were too afraid to say so themselves.