the times | Saturday May 28 2022 saturday review 13
CSU ARCHIVES/EVERETT/ALAMY; GETTY IMAGESThe sexual revolution had other costs.
Mary Whitehouse, that batty Seventies
relic of social conservatism, was, Perry
points out, “one of the few public figures of
her day who gave a damn about child sex
abuse”. While she was lobbying for the
Protection of Children Act 1978, the BBC
was turning a blind eye to its star children’s
presenter Jimmy Savile — a man who,
Perry reminds us, used to answer the
phone to journalists with the words “She
told me she was over 16” — and members
of the Paedophile Information Exchange
were campaigning openly for the abolition
of the age of consent. The desire for sexual
tolerance can sometimes blind liberals and
feminists to the imperative of protecting
the vulnerable.
Perry takes aim at “kink culture”. She is
alarmed by the huge increase in choking.
More than half of 18-to-24-year-old
women report having been strangled by
their partners during sex, compared with
23 per cent of women aged 35 to 39. The
idea is that both parties consent to it
because they find it sexy, but given the
alarming range of injuries even a few sec-
onds of strangulation can cause (“I cannot
see a way of safely holding a neck so that
you wouldn’t be pressing on fragile struc-
tures,” wrote the author of a 2020 study),
it does not seem clear that such consent is
truly informed. I did not know that until I
read this book.
And injury is only the start. Since the
turn of the century, there has been a strik-
ing increase in the number and success ofent realities being lived within its borders
simultaneously.” It couldn’t last. The erec-
tion of the wall in 1961 was the culmination
of disputes between East and West, mostly
occasioned by the problems of the former
compared with the dynamism of the latter.
Many defied the new imposition.
“Under the shades of humid amethyst
summer nights,” McKay tells us, “East Ber-
liners found mazy routes through ‘ruins’
and ‘gardens’ and ‘backyards’. Others
slipped into the black, oily waters of the
Spree, possessions tied to them, and swam
across the divide.”
The division created its separate archi-
tectures and spaces, and its fall in 1989
preceded a pent-up building boom on an
extraordinary scale. And a culture boom.
“The artists, musicians and assorted bohe-
mians, in their repurposed realms of
cavernous factory halls and disused rail
depots, had the same transgressive in-
stincts as George Grosz and the Bauhaus
students,” McKay tells us, before asking,
“Has Berlin always favoured the young?”
I loved this book. McKay’s writing is
vivid and sometimes even beautiful. The
sense of the city and its people is conveyed.
To anyone who knows Berlin a little and is
fascinated by it, but would like to under-
stand it better, this is a wonderful aid.
And its ending is appropriate and
uplifting. “In essence,” the author con-
cludes, “Berlin was never really Hitler’s
city. Nor was it ever Stalin’s. However hard
they sought to impress their version of his-
tory on its people and streets, either with
garlands of swastikas or with the grim
ideology of uniformity, the city remained
stubbornly immutable at its heart.” And,
I’m happy to believe, it does still.
Was the sexual revolution bad for us?
T
his book about sex begins in a
graveyard. We are in Westwood
Memorial Park Cemetery in Los
Angeles, where Marilyn Mon-
roe and Hugh Hefner lie side-
by-side. The Playboy founder bought the
crypt next to Monroe’s in 1992 for $75,000
because, as he told the LA Times: “Spend-
ing an eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet
to pass up.” Having died 30 years earlier,
Monroe was not available for comment.
The image sums up the argument made
by the New Statesman columnist Louise
Perry in The Case Against the Sexual Revo-
lution that while women were the victori-
ous poster girls of the Sixties, set free by
the contraceptive pill, in reality it was men
like Hefner who benefited from it long-
term. Monroe might be the smiling face on
bedroom walls, but it was Hefner who
launched his dirty mag on the strength of
stolen images of her naked body.
As a typical “millennial urban graduate
in the West”, to use Perry’s phrase, I’m a fan
of the sexual revolution. It means I can
mess around with anyone I fancy (if they
fancy me — alas, not always a given) with-
out fear of disease or pregnancy or social
ostracism. I can wear miniskirts and mas-
turbate, then write about it in the news-
paper my parents read (hi, guys).
But Perry disagrees, as she makes clear
in this crisply readable polemic. She thinks
young women “have been utterly failed by
liberal feminism” because it has created a
sexual Petri dish in which violence can
flourish like a particularly nasty bacteri-
um. Last year, the highest number of rape
cases to date was recorded by the police in
Britain — that’s 67,125, or nearly 200 a day.
Perry, who worked in a rape crisis centre
after university, pushes back against the
feminist argument that rape is a tool used
by men to control women with an edgier
biological theory. The argument goes that
the urge to rape is hard-wired into some
men (35 per cent, according to a couple of
studies) by evolution because it confers a
selection advantage. If you’re pessimistic
about men’s capacity to control their urges,
as Perry is, the world becomes a frighten-
ing place in which “an unknown, horny
man will always be somewhat dangerous
for any woman”. Her solution is a diet of
security measures so strict it would make a
Puritan pour her a drink. She wants
women like me to only get drunk or high in
private with other women, boycott dating
apps and withhold sex for the first few
months of a relationship.
This is impractical — what 18-year-old
is going to trade in club dance floors for
bingo nights with female friends? — and
ignores the huge chunk of rapes that are
domestic. Five in six victims know their at-
tacker; one in two are in a relationship with
them (or used to be). These are not faceless
villains, but men the victims know and
love. Relationships are no protection. So
unless Perry wants to cut women off from
men entirely — now that would be radical
— any practical solution must involve
both sexes. Why don’t we talk about how
much boys at university drink?the “rough sex” defence in murder cases, in
which the defendant argues the killing was
a result of a sex game gone wrong. Some of
the sentences as a result are chillingly
light. In 2018, Jason Gaskell got six years
after he slit a woman’s throat with a knife
he kept under his pillow. A recent change
in the law should make such cases rarer.
The most powerful and persuasive part
of Perry’s argument is about the cast-iron
link between violent sexual behaviour and
the gigantic internet porn industry. In De-
cember 2020, a New York Times investi-
gation concluded that Pornhub, the tenth
most visited website in the world, was “in-
fested with rape videos” and other violent
sex acts. As a result, Pornhub reduced the
number of videos on its platform from 13
million to 4 million.
The abuse of porn stars, like the abuse of
sex workers, is rife. Linda Boreman, the
star of the 1972 hardcore film Deep Throat,
once enthused over porn as a way for “kids
[to] learn that sex is good”, but later be-
came an anti-porn campaigner, saying: “I
engaged in sex acts in pornography
against my will to avoid being killed.” The
liberal position is anything goes as long as
there is consent, but Perry argues that con-sent is a useful cloak behind which the co-
ercion of sex workers — most likely to be
young, vulnerable, poor and non-white
women — is concealed.
Young men are also porn’s victims. Erec-
tile dysfunction rates have skyrocketed in
the past 20 years, in line with porn addic-
tion, from 2 to 3 per cent to 14 to 35 per cent.
That’s because, Perry says, porn is the
McDonald’s of sex, feeding us “exaggerat-
ed versions of naturally occurring stimuli”
that ruin our relationship with reality. She
compares men mired in porn culture to
glossy, golden-coloured Australian jewel
beetles, which have been observed “ignor-
ing potential mates in order to hump dis-
carded beer bottles because these bits of
litter were more glossy and more golden”.
But I am less convinced by Perry’s belief
that sex can never be casual for women.
The scientific consensus has it that on av-
erage women have lower sex drives and
desire fewer partners than men, so, she ar-
gues, the culture of casual sex among
young people serves men, not women.
It is impossible to know just how deeply
sexist norms have permeated our sexual
desires and while I am (reluctantly) willing
to believe that 200,000 years of sex equal-
ling pregnancy has made women more
choosy, it doesn’t mean we’re naturally
monogamous. And if we do get less out of
hook-up culture, I would gently point out
that men are much more likely to have an
orgasm from a casual encounter, which is
a problem that education can rectify.
“I used to believe the liberal narrative,”
Perry writes at the start of this book and
I’m sure she would say that time and “the
reality of male violence” will change my
mind too. Perhaps she’s right. But I’m not
willing to give up on the sexual revolution
just yet (and certainly not until sex educa-
tion has gone from woeful to sufficient).
Like a few of my more sexually anxious
— and probably porn-addled — ex-
boyfriends, it just needs a little more time.monroe doctrine Marilyn was the poster girl for sexual liberationERNEST BACHRACH/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX/SUNSET BOULEVARD/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGESThe Case
Against the
Sexual
Revolution
A New Guide to Sex
in the 21st Century
by Louise PerryPolity, 200pp; £14.99This crisp polemic
says women have
paid dearly for sexual
liberation. Review
by Susie Goldsbrough
Perry wants young
women like me to
boycott dating apps
and withhold sex