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Well, yes, obviously

In philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s brilliant essay collection, The Right to Sex, she discusses her surprise at her Oxford University students’ reaction to sex-negative feminism of the 1970s and 80s: having seen the effects of pornography on their own lives, they were deeply sympathetic. They weren’t the only ones. New Statesman columnist Louise Perry is publishing The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which argues for “a new sexual culture built around dignity, virtue and restraint”.

If you’re going to be radical, a rebel – and who doesn’t want to be able to claim that aura? – then you’ve got to be a radical, a rebel, against the prevailing orthodoxy. In a society where 5 years olds are taught to put condoms on bananas then being against libertine sex is to be that radical rebel.

You know, just the swing of the pendulum.

There is also the possibility that if sex is available anywhere, anywhen, the wimmins have less power over their menfolk – that exclusivity of supply can be used as a manner of direction after all.

12 thoughts on “Well, yes, obviously”

  1. I happened to stumble across this when looking around, and Louise Perry pretty much admits to this

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsEqhFC4Dzs&t=246s

    Personally, I don’t think the “sexual revolution” was really much more than good headlines. And OK, women can more easily have sex without birth because of the pill. But in general, women are not going dogging and getting gangbanged. Most of them are having serial monogamous relationships. Society is pretty much fine.

    There’s two types of people in this anti-sexual revolution thing. Junior Anti-Sex League types like Louise Perry who are fit enough to find a bloke but have some hangups and will end up with a houseful of cats. And the sort of women who say “I didn’t used to agree with Mary Whitehouse, but I now think she was right”, because they’re no longer able to grab good men off older women and are now on the defensive, utterly terrified of their husbands running off with a younger woman and leaving them with a load of bills to pay and spiders to kill.

  2. BoM4- that link – ”
    I’m very dissident in the sense that I don’t think the way that women’s lives have changed in the last 100 years is a consequence of feminist campaigning.” – yes that at least is very dissident to hold, and she’s probably right.

  3. MC – she’s a classic English beauty who really should be wearing bonnets and writing flowery poetry in the Cotswolds.

    Eva Wiseman, not so much:

    Whitehouse was also a homophobic loon, outspoken against equal marriage and feminism, arguing that the BBC was at the centre “of a conspiracy to remove the myth of God from the minds of men”

    She was right.

    Anti-trans activists on social media claim trans people are “grooming” children

    They are right.

    with US extremist politicians, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene warning that Disney “wants to completely take your children and they want to indoctrinate them into sexual, immoral filth”

    She is right.

    No wonder there’s an anti-sex backlash, when today sex and the threat of sex is routinely framed as something intrinsically dangerous

    Let’s pretend the last 10 years or so of feminist shrieking about ‘rape culture’ never happened, eh?

    the model of sex designed by men

    Imagine being a sentient (?) mammal, and writing this. And getting paid to write this. And getting published in a national newspaper after writing this. Embarrassing.

  4. Oxford University students’ reaction to sex-negative feminism of the 1970s

    I was there but don’t know what this means – can anyone explain?

  5. @TMB I think it’s one of them self-invented words typical for the whole scene.
    There’s no “sex-negative feminism” in the many-many variants in the listing on wikipedia, only “sex-positive”. Which is the “right to hump anyone/thing we feel like when we like it” version that was the Flavour-du-jour at the time.

    As always, when it comes to terminology in this type of Basketweaving the words may well not mean what we think they do, so ymmv.

  6. BoM4

    “Junior Anti-Sex League types like Louise Perry who are fit enough to find a bloke but have some hangups and will end up with a houseful of cats.”

    She’s married with a child.

    And just stating the obvious truths that all those ‘women empowering’ changes over their reproductive systems worked to the advantage of men, as it gave them an excuse for disavowing their responsibilites.

  7. Gavin McInnes uses the analogy of a lock and key. Men are keys and women are locks.

    If a key can unlock a lot of locks, it’s a good key.

    If a lock can be unlocked by any key, it’s a bad lock.

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