If I had a daughter in her teens or twenties, I'd want her to know about the work of Louise Perry. The world our kids are growing up in continues to ratchet up its emphasis on sexuality. And for girls and women, casual sex and hookup culture is touted as "empowering." But what
if the opposite is true?
As a pastor, I sometimes feel that Christian teaching about sexuality is misunderstood as moralistic -- something that keeps people from pleasure and excitement. "Don't do those immoral things!" we say. "Why not?" people ask. Our answer? "Well, because you're not supposed to. It will make Jesus sad
if you do."
What if we start this whole discussion another way? What if we were to look at it simply from the perspective of What is best for people? What is most empowering for men ... and women? Enter Louise Perry.
Louise Perry is a journalist from the UK, who, as she says, grew up feminist, attended an ultra-liberal university, and writes for a left-wing magazine. She's written a book about how the landscape for women and girls in our "post sexual revolution" world is problematic and dangerous. In fact, her book title spells out the conclusion of her research: "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution."
As she has stated in multiple interviews, she approached her research on modern sexuality as a feminist ... primarily concerned with what would be most helpful and empowering for women. She "started with
feminist assumptions, and after study, wound up with more socially conservative conclusions."
Make no mistake -- Perry is not a Christian, and her views do not fully align with Christian morality. But her insights are important, because they highlight how the ethics and morality that have been advocated by the Christian
faith -- along with many other religious and wisdom traditions -- are not anti-sex, anti-women, or anti-pleasure. Rather, the ethic we promote is meant to protect something important and valuable, and lead towards human FLOURISHING.
Her book was released in the UK in May, and is now available in the US. She recently
published an article in the Wall Street Journal, with a summary of her views. What follows will be some excerpts from that article:
PERRY ON THE DOWNSIDE OF TODAY'S HOOKUP CULTURE
Hookup culture is often promoted as liberating for women, because it encourages their sexual agency and power to seek sexual experience and gratification themselves. It takes casual sex as a given and desirable for both men and women. Perry finds that it doesn't really work that way. She finds it damaging for women ... because it doesn't take into account the fact that sex means
something different for women, and that they experience it differently than men, regardless of what our culture tries to tell us. Here's how she puts it:
"Hookup culture demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to match male sexuality and thus meet the male demand for no-strings sex.
"In a sexual marketplace in which such a culture prevails, a woman who refuses to participate puts herself at a disadvantage. As one group of researchers put it, 'some individual women may be capitulating to men’s preferences for casual sexual encounters because, if they do not, someone else will.'
"Yet studies consistently find that following hookups, women are more likely than men to experience regret, low self-esteem and mental distress. Female pleasure is rare during casual sex. Men in casual relationships are just not as good at bringing women to orgasm in comparison with men in committed relationships: In first-time hookups, only 10% of women orgasm, compared with 68% of women in long-term relationships. These figures don’t suggest a generation of women reveling in sexual
liberation. Instead, a lot of women seem to be having unpleasant sex out of a sense of obligation. ...
"If you’re a young woman launched into a sexual culture that is fundamentally not geared toward protecting your safety or well-being, in which you are considered valuable only in a very narrow, physical sense, and if your basic options seem to be either hooking up or celibacy, then a comforting myth of “agency” can
be attractive.
"But this myth depends on naiveté about the nature of male sexuality. Too many young women today ignore the fact that men are generally much better suited to emotionless sex and find it much easier to regard their sexual partners as disposable. Too many fail to recognize that being desired by men is
not at all the same thing as being held in high esteem.
"It isn’t nice to think of oneself as disposable or to acknowledge that other people view you that way. It’s easier to turn away from any acknowledgment of what is really going on, at least temporarily. I’ve spoken to many women who participated in hookup culture when they were young
and years later came to realize just how unhappy it made them. As one friend put it, “I told myself so many lies, so many lies.”
SHE SUMS IT UP -- WITH AN ENCOURAGEMENT FOR MEN:
"How should we behave sexually? After millennia of effort, we are nowhere near reaching an agreement on the answer to that question. At a minimum,
however, a sophisticated system of sexual ethics needs to demand more of people — and as the stronger and hornier sex, men must demonstrate even greater restraint than women when faced with temptation.
"The word 'chivalry' is now deeply unfashionable, but it describes something of what we need. As the feminist theorist Mary Harrington
writes: 'Chivalrous’ social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist. But ... the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise.'"
SOURCES TO READ MORE AND GO DEEPER
To read the full article Perry wrote in the Wall Street Journal, go here.
To watch a fascinating and wide-ranging interview of Perry by Chris Williamson (on YouTube), who is interested in what her findings mean for young men, go here: By the way, if you scroll down in the information under the video, you'll see a table of contents, that will
allow you to jump ahead to various sections of the interview.
