Briefly Reviewed: July-August 2024

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

By Louise Perry

Publisher: Polity

Pages: 200

Price: $19.95

Review Author: Preston R. Simpson

Louise Perry is onto something. The problem is that she doesn’t quite know what it is. Her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is difficult for Christians to read for at least two reasons. First, it contains extraordinarily explicit, crude, and repeated descriptions of sexual activity, some of it perverted. One gets the sense that it is deliberately overdone. My guess is that, while Perry is eventually going to offer advice that in part comports with what religious people would provide, she wants to show she is no prude and to place a comfortable distance between herself and small-minded Christians. The second reason is that believers will see in the book a young woman who knows from experience and observation the damage modern sexual practice has done but who has no fundamental moral grounding on which to base her prescriptions. The Christian reader keeps hoping she will find her way to the foundation she needs, but she never gets there.

Perry’s main argument is that modern feminists have made two major errors. One is to take the position that as long as any activity is consensual, it is permissible. The second is to believe, despite considerable contrary evidence, that women are exactly like men in their sexual desires and goals. Regarding the latter, Perry observes that many more men than women look for casual sex, and “in the post-sexual revolution era, the solution to this mismatch has often been to encourage women…to overcome their reticence and have sex ‘like a man.’” Her thesis is that “this solution has been falsely presented as a form of sexual liberation for women, when in fact it is nothing of the sort, since it serves male, not female, interests.”

Perry is probably right that a main instigating factor of the sexual revolution was the availability of contraception that women could control: the Pill, the diaphragm, and the IUD. But like many technological innovations, contraception has had unintended results. As Mary Eberstadt observes, “The promise of sex without consequences may be the strongest collective temptation humanity has ever faced” (National Review, Dec. 30, 2022).

Much of Perry’s effort is spent exposing inconsistencies in the modern, liberal, feminist approach to sex. (“Liberal feminist” is her term for the prevailing view, from which she clearly diverges in some respects.) Liberal feminists maintain that the approach to everything from #MeToo abuses to prostitution, from pornography to campus rape, is simply to ensure that proper consent is obtained. Perry will have none of this. Though prostitutes, porn performers, and would-be actresses who submit to Hollywood moguls’ offers of screen parts in exchange for sex have all technically given consent, the consent is given against the woman’s “moral intuition.”

Perry cites memoirs of pornstars who, while they were making lots of money, extolled the liberation the industry provided but who later decried the shame, degradation, and humiliation to which they were subjected. Prostitutes are hailed by liberal feminists as “sex workers” engaged in consensual business transactions as legitimate as any car dealer or florist. But Perry points out that those who take this view have almost certainly never met or spoken to a common prostitute (as opposed to the rare, very highly paid ones). Most prostitutes are poor, drug-addicted, and/or trafficked. Perry observes, “The whole point of paid sex is that it must be paid for. It is not mutually desired by both parties — one party is there unwillingly, in exchange for money, or sometimes other goods such as drugs, food or shelter. The person being paid must ignore her own lack of sexual desire, or even her bone-deep revulsion.” The hypocrisy of the “sex work is just work” view was exposed when landlords in the United Kingdom were found to be offering housing in exchange for sex instead of rent payments. Liberal politicians were outraged, but Perry asks why it is okay to offer sex for money but not sex in exchange for rent. She suggests it could be that this blew up during a housing crisis in which the daughters of these same liberal politicians and journalists were having trouble finding housing in university cities.

Thus, we learn that while liberal feminists say they believe in sexual disenchantment — the idea that sex is no different from any other transaction — no one actually believes this. Everyone feels jealousy when a partner has sex with someone else. Everyone knows that a boss’s asking for sex in exchange for a promotion is different from his asking for overtime in exchange for a promotion.

Perry’s conclusion, from research and personal experience, is that women have a very different ingrained approach to sex than men do. I don’t think this will come as a surprise to anyone except some feminists, and as mentioned above, they probably know it but can’t, for ideological reasons, admit it.

Some of Perry’s conclusions would get an amen from Christians: “Monogamous marriage is by far the most stable and reliable foundation on which to build a family.” But some of her advice to young women is incomplete or lacking in a fundamental basis: “Distrust any person or ideology that puts pressure on you to ignore your moral intuition.” This assumes that a woman’s moral intuition is correct. Perry gives no thought to a biblical foundation of morality, even though her advice partially overlaps with it. As for her advice to “get drunk or high in private and with female friends rather than in public or in mixed company,” no elaboration is needed. She advises, “Holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you or just looking for a hook-up.” But, since earlier she said that contraception is not reliable, this is a good way to end up a single mother or in an abortion clinic with the unpleasant sequelae Perry identifies elsewhere in the book. She follows this with more inconsistent advice. “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.” Why not wait until he is your husband? Then he will have the opportunity to be a good father to your children.

The mystery to this benighted male observer is why so many young women, especially on college campuses, do not have the self-confidence and self-esteem to avoid hook-up culture. Perry implies that she was part of this in her younger days, but she never performs any introspective analysis. She claims that women who want to save sex for marriage are at a competitive disadvantage in the marriage marketplace because so many of their peers are willing to put out. Yet she also observes that men have different criteria for women with whom they want to hook up as opposed to those they want to marry. In choosing a wife, they actually tend to look down on promiscuous women.

Perhaps women need something akin to Promise Keepers, the national men’s group that promotes chastity and marital fidelity. Some men recognize that they need reins on their baser desires and have made much of the need for accountability. Should women form the same kinds of groups? Imagine a freshman orientation class for women reminding them that men have different views of sex and suggesting that women form support groups to reinforce that they are not interested in casual sex. This would meet resistance from those who view men and women as exactly alike except for a few anatomical differences. The response would be to wield feminists’ own favorite weapon: free choice.

Angelic Vices and Demonic Virtues: Aquinas’s Practical Principles for Reaching Heaven and Avoiding Hell

By Fr. Basil Cole, O.P.

Publisher: TAN Books

Pages: 288

Price: $29.95

Review Author: Trent Beattie

Also reviewed:

The Paradise of the Soul: Forty-Two Virtues to Reach Heaven. By St. Albert the Great. TAN Books. 288 pages. $22.95.

Reason shows that the purpose of this life is to be freed from vice and filled with virtue. However, if this pursuit is unaided by thoroughly explored grace, it is likely that outward behaviors will be the focus rather than their underlying causes. What might result is superficial pruning, discontent, and new vices to compensate for those that were pruned. Grace teaches that a material act itself is not the main issue; the motivation behind it is. Once that is known, then consistently virtuous living is made much easier.

This was the motivation behind Dominican Fr. Basil Cole’s Angelic Vices and Demonic Virtues: Aquinas’s Practical Principles for Reaching Heaven and Avoiding Hell. In his introduction, Fr. Cole laments that “few people know themselves, let alone their enemies. In the spiritual life, ignorance is not bliss. That is why a study of the capital vices and their daughters is essential for understanding the virtues necessary to reach Heaven and the vices that can drag you to Hell.”

Pride has been called the mother of the vices, bringing about the daughters of vanity, lust, greed, envy, hatred, gluttony, and sloth. Clear knowledge of one’s top enemy is of primary concern to anyone serious about winning a battle. Yet how many can give a definition of the primordial enemy of pride? Another way to put the question is: What are the top characteristics of the first of all vices? Ven. Louis of Granada, also a Dominican, gives this definition in volume 2 of his Summa of the Christian Life: “Pride is the inordinate desire for one’s own excellence.” This seems a curious way to explain a vice at all, let alone the “Mother and Queen of the Vices,” as Fr. Cole labels pride. After all, isn’t everyone supposed to strive for personal excellence?

The paradox is that personal excellence in the moral sense is not achieved on one’s own but only with the help of Jesus Christ. It is a byproduct of denying our lower selves so that our higher selves can flourish. It is wanting to be the best we can be, but always within the will of God. Our egos must be razed before our souls can be raised.

Though the spiritual life is primarily interior, it expresses itself exteriorly. Because we cannot see the interior of others, and because we often do not see our own, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking superficially, as if acts themselves were the issue rather than the dispositions that lead to them. This is why a thorough study of virtue and vice is so necessary. What may appear to be a vice could be a virtue, and vice versa — or “virtue vicea.” Prayerfully and logically sifting through the teachings of the Church sheds light on these issues.

Fr. Cole attempts to clarify, for nonspecialists, what is often seen as an insurmountable list of obligations. This is also what Louis of Granada did, as well as Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ, St. Francis de Sales in Introduction to the Devout Life, and St. Alphonsus Liguori in The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ. (Alphonsus advances even further into virtuous living in his masterpiece, The True Spouse of Jesus Christ.)

A common theme in the discussion of virtue is the appreciation of humility and charity. Louis of Granada calls humility “the foundation of all the virtues and the disposition for the reception of graces.” This foundational virtue counteracts the venom of pride and enables a soul to grow in love for God and neighbor (charity), which is an actual participation in the very life of the Most Holy Trinity. This is, obviously, an immensely desirable goal, but its attainment is often met with challenges. Apart from the Cross of Christ, there is, ultimately, no genuine personal excellence, which means that humility and charity are necessarily accompanied by penance.

If our deliberate thoughts, words, and deeds are gravely immoral, they can amount to the perishing of our souls. This is why, despite interior dispositions being most important, outward occasions of sin must be avoided by those of us who sincerely desire eternal happiness. If someone begins with a good will but naïvely assumes this makes him immune from exterior penance, he is in for a fall. Not only will his interior become corrupted by bad thoughts, but bad words and bad deeds will follow unless he extricates himself from their source: the occasion of sin.

Another Dominican, St. Albert the Great, was a polymath and bishop best known for having been the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Albert writes the following in TAN Books’ rerelease of The Paradise of the Soul: Forty-Two Virtues to Reach Heaven: “If anyone imagines that he can indulge in an abundance of fine food and drink and be surrounded by luxuries and yet not be led into vices or assailed by temptations, then he is deceiving himself!” Albert later states that true exterior penance “consists in voluntarily abstaining from certain permitted and lawful things in order to obtain mercy for having done acts which are not permitted.” Though he places an emphasis on refraining from certain goods, this renowned teacher of Aquinas also includes proactive works such as almsgiving, a great remedy for greed.

Christ bluntly states that unless souls do penance, they will perish (cf. Lk. 13). We need not look far for troubles; they will find their way to us. When they do, we should rejoice rather than run, since they can be, if taken prayerfully, the very means of our transformation from a sinner into a saint.

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