Marriage will not protect women. Archivo El Grafico/Getty Images

Most feminists agree that heterosexual young women face, on the dating scene, a dystopian nightmare. Louise Perry’s new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, is representative, arguing that the proliferation of porn and hook-ups leads to harmful sexual practices and miserable relationships. For this, as it says on the tin, she blames the seismic shift in attitudes towards sex and relationships in the Sixties, which was partly the result of legalised abortion and the availability of the contraceptive pill. So far, so good.
I had assumed that women, aside from the progressive “feminists” for whom all sex is good sex, knew perfectly well that the so-called sexual revolution only benefited men, giving them access to women’s bodies without fear of consequences. After all, feminist historian Sheila Jeffreys wrote Anticlimax, a searing takedown of the myth that women became sexually liberated post-1967, in 1990.
Failing to cite Jeffreys, or any of the vast number of feminists who have written against the sexual revolution, Perry even seems to be suggesting that she alone developed the critique. In response to an article written by the actor Emma Thompson, in which she said that the sexual revolutions of the Seventies and Eighties made women “more available” and encouraged predatory behaviour, she tweeted: “has…. has Emma Thompson been reading *me*?”
There is absolutely nothing wrong with blowing your own trumpet when you have a new book out, but Perry is in danger of giving the impression, to swathes of young women, that she is a sole voice of reason. There are, in fact, plenty of feminists who advocate against sexual libertarianism. But some of us also advocate for women’s sexual pleasure and liberation.
I joined the Women’s Liberation Movement at the very end of the Seventies as a 17-year-old lesbian. Many of the feminists I hung out with had escaped miserable or even violent relationships with men and, realising that they had been railroaded into compulsory heterosexuality without making a conscious choice, they were now making up for lost time by having great sex with women.
The feminism I practised prioritised women’s sexual pleasure and liberation alongside the campaign to end unwanted sex and male violence. Thinking back to those days, where true sexual liberation felt possible, I can’t believe that more than 40 years later pre-feminist sexual modesty is being peddled as a response to male violence and exploitation.