Reviewing Louis Perry’s “Case Against the Sexual Revolution”
By Patricia Patnode
Louise Perry’s new book “The Case Against The Sexual Revolution,” isn’t proposing anything terribly new. The gist of the book is that readers should “Listen To [Their] Mother[s],” to quote its last chapter. The message is that what women do, particularly with their bodies, is consequential- regardless of whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Eating copious amounts of junk food daily poses negative health problems. Having lots of unprotected sex with different partners has its own repercussions.
Perry notes that society became disconnected from nature after the Enlightenment. As knowledge grew, fear of the unknown decreased. Technology produced comfort and information. Compared to the rest of human history, contemporary time is rather cushy. If you’re stranded on a mountain, a helicopter can rescue you. If the roads are icy and treacherous, salt and chemicals can prevent traffic accidents. But still, occasionally, something crazy will happen that reminds us that we can’t control everything- especially nature. People may die after being struck by lightening, which happened recently at The White House. Floods can still wash houses away.
We are seasonally reminded that nature is greater than us, so why are we so resistant to that reality in our own bodies? And why do women disproportionally wage this war against nature? This is the disenchantment that Perry focuses on. She points out that hormonal birth control has shifted cultural attitudes towards sex. It has reduced our mystic appreciation for the human condition and, by extension, sex. She disagrees with the idea that sex is “simply a leisure activity” having “meaning only if the participants choose to give it meaning.” Although her book makes a secular argument about the psychological meaningfulness of sex, parts of it could be mistaken for passages from the Catholic Humane Vitae encyclical.
Perry should, in my opinion, take the conclusion of her book further and outright say that we are spiritually designed to value sex and deeply connect with a sexual partner.
The closest we will ever come to understanding God is through creating new life. Parenthood is a profound experience and sex is the holy union of two people for the purpose of procreation. That some people must use birth control to sidestep this gift is obvious proof of its purpose. Pleasure isn’t an end in itself, it’s a means of drawing closer to God. As our society has moved away from our ordered understanding of our relation to God we have also moved away from good sex.
My favorite line from the book is, “The sexual revolution has not freed all of us, it freed some of us, selectively, at a price.” We need to balance our sexual freedom with other values and consider its serious tradeoffs.
Patricia Patnode is a columnist at The Conservateur and a Junior Fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. She can be found on Twitter @IdealPatricia.
Photo via @hannaschonberg
