Louise Perry > Quotes

“If sex isn't worth of its own moral category, then nor is sexual harassment or rape. If we accept that sex is merely a service that can be freely bought and sold, then we have no arguments left to make against the incels who want to 'redistribute' it or the army officials who want to offer their troops 'convenient arrangements'.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“We have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“So I am going to propose an alternative form of sexual culture – one that recognises other human beings as real people, invested with real value and dignity. It’s time for a sexual counter-revolution.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“In the contemporary United States, about half of women who have abortions report that they were using contraception when they became pregnant,18 and about a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortion.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“Men are encouraged into ‘cad’ mode, pursuing temporary relationships that offer all of the pleasures of cheap sex and none of the responsibilities of commitment.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“Sex workers can act as sources of sex advice only if we understand sex to be a skillset that must be learned and refined across different partners, with good sex a result not of intimacy but of good technique. In this framing, sex becomes something that one does to another person, not with another person. All of the emotion is drained away”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“just as Jeffrey Epstein supplying underage girls to famous and powerful men sounds like particularly bizarre fiction. And yet these things really happened.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“My perspective on this is often condemned as ‘carceral feminism’ by those who favour the abolition of prisons and policing, typically on the grounds of racial justice. My response to this accusation is that the women and children who make up the vast majority of rape victims are disproportionately likely to be both poor and non-white.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“I conformed to the beliefs of my class, including liberal feminist ideas about porn, BDSM, hook-up culture, evolutionary psychology, and the sex trade, which will all be addressed in this book. I let go of these beliefs because of my own life experiences, including a period immediately after university spent working at a rape crisis centre.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“Prostitution has never been a matter of personal choice or female empowerment. Rather, the role of 'buyer' versus 'seller' has always been determined not only by sex but also by race, nationality and - above all - class.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“We should treat our sexual partners with dignity. We should not regard other people as merely body parts to be enjoyed. We should aspire to love and mutuality in all of our sexual relationships, regardless of whether they are gay or straight. We should prioritise virtue over desire. We should not assume that any given feelings we discover in our hearts (or our loins) ought to be acted upon”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“posters that say ‘don’t rape’ will prevent precisely zero rapes, because rape is already illegal, and would-be rapists know that. We can scream ‘don’t rape’ until we’re blue in the face, and it won’t make a blind bit of difference. It has to be possible to say simultaneously that rape is reprehensible and that it is OK – in fact, essential – to offer advice that could help to reduce its incidence.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“Liberal feminism incorporates sexual disenchantment as an article of faith, insisting that it is a good thing that sex is now regarded as without inherent value in the post-sexual revolution era. But, in practice, liberal feminist women do not generally behave as if they believe in the truth of sexual disenchantment. Almost no one does.”
― Louise Perry

“Spears has since suffered a protracted and very public nervous breakdown, just like the countless other Monroes – some of whom we will meet over the course of this book – who have been destroyed in much the same way as the original icon.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“Once you permit the idea the people can be products, everything is corroded.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“In other words, almost all women are weaker than almost all men, and any feminist analysis of the power dynamic between men and women has to begin with the recognition of this fact.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“Put differently, there are different modes of male sexuality: the mode that encourages commitment and the mode that encourages promiscuity”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“But, while Hefner lived a long, grubby life in his mansion with his playmates, Monroe’s life was cut short by misery and substance abuse.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“liberal feminism can’t or won’t answer: Why do so many women desire a kind of sexual freedom that so obviously serves male interests? What if our bodies and minds aren’t as malleable as we might like to think?”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“Only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children - not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb in deciding whether or not he's worthy of your trust.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“I’m going to argue in this book that Western sexual culture in the twenty-first century doesn’t properly balance these interests – instead, it promotes the interests of the Hugh Hefners of the world at the expense of the Marilyn Monroes.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“I propose a different solution, based on a fundamental feminist claim: unwanted sex is worse than sexual frustration.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“The glamour of the playboy – or the ‘fuckboy’, in modern slang – doesn’t last forever.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“particularly when sex carries so many more risks for women, in terms of violence and pregnancy.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“Her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death, and her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer: no, Marilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.9”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“Teenage boys are raised on pop culture that presents having sex ‘like a man’ as the ultimate form of female sexual empowerment, and, in the porn to which they are typically exposed from childhood, women are shown begging men for painful or degrading sex acts.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“The libidinous public asks a lot of the women it desires. And when il all goes horribly wrong, as it usually does, this public labels these once-desired women 'crazy' and moves on”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“No one will expect to become incapable of having healthy intimate relationships for the rest of her life. Everyone knows that having sex is not the same as making coffee, and when an ideology of sexual disenchantment demands that we pretend otherwise the result can be a distressing form of cognitive dissonance.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“If we accept the evidence from evolutionary biology and move beyond the Brownmiller model, then we can understand that rapists are really just men who are aroused by violence, have poor impulse control, and are presented with a suitable victim and a suitable set of circumstances.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

“She isn’t special: she’s a normal woman who has just enough emotional insight to recognise that hook-up culture isn’t good for her but is lacking the political insight to recognise the existence of a bigger problem.”
― Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century