Reviewing the Reviewers

Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Louise Perry, and The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

With a refreshingly independent mind and a powerfully spicy writing style, the Italian-Australian journalist Antonella Gambotto-Burke is one of the mightiest book reviewers in the Aussie press. Her weekly pieces in The Australian are well worth the price of a subscription, though some readers might be reluctant to reach for their wallets again after reading last week’s review of Louise Perry’s book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide for Sex in the 21st Century.

Having heard three or four long interviews with Louise Perry, I sensed that Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s review was a little off. I decided to buy the book and investigate further.

For whatever reason, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is absent from Sydney’s bookshops, forcing me to buy an e-book from the Australian publisher, Wiley and Co., which should drop the “e” from its name because those scoundrels took my twenty bucks without making it clear that I can’t read its e-books on an e-reader. After passing two separate login pages which were configured like traps in a James Bond film, I could only read the book on my laptop using Wiley’s cumbersome software.

Swearing so much that house prices in my area dropped by ten percent, yesterday I managed to read Louise Perry’s book and confirm my suspicions. Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s review is unfair.

She might be giving us an example of “Aussie impatience with Pommie whingeing,” which, as an enthusiastic participant in such sport, I have no problem with, but Louise Perry’s case deserves closer attention.

She starts by arguing that many of the differences between the sexes are based in biology and cannot be explained or modified by social factors alone, as proponents of the “blank slate” theory of development would argue. Antonella Gambotto-Burke responds thus:

Far from being utopian, the “blank slate” perspective – in contrast, say, to the primitive and fundamentally hateful concept of Original Sin – is based on extensive neurobiological study. The human brain is, at birth, mostly incomplete, with only the lower nervous system (autonomic functions such as blood flow, breathing, heart rate and so on) developed to any real degree. The rest is sculpted by the infant’s experience of caregiving, or by its absence.

Which pretty well junks Perry’s neo-religious thesis of intrinsic masculine wickedness.

Louise Perry spends a whole chapter outlining the research from evolutionary biology to bolster her claim that men are generally hornier and more aggressive than women, but Antonella Gambotto-Burke evidently never noticed these findings during her forays into neurobiological study.

As Camille Paglia would ask, if there is no biological basis to behaviour, where is the female Jack the Ripper?

With no scientific training, I’m not sure if research about our evolutionary origins is rigorous enough to draw any conclusions, but I certainly wouldn’t say that I could “junk” Louise Perry’s thesis (which never mentions Original Sin) so easily. Maybe I just lack confidence.

Antonella Gambotto-Burke continues:

Generally, [Louise Perry] comes at arguments from a Victorian crouch, presenting the feminine as the Heightened Angelic and the masculine as baboon-like with impulse control issues – a refined take on the “think with their dicks” premise of masculine behaviour. The further one sinks into Perry’s mind, the uglier the view.

The reviewer partly right. The Case Against the Sexual Revolution verges on representing the average man as a compound of Caligula and Genghis Khan. Only near the end of the book do we learn that he, the average man, can give physical and financial security to his family. It’s unclear if he’s capable of love.

But the reviewer is mostly wrong. To know why, you don’t have to read Michel Foucault, who argued that there were more discussions about sex during the Victorian period, especially in scientific and medical literature; you don’t have to read Victorian poems about sex like Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” or almost anything from Algernon Charles Swinburne; you only have to read the promotional materials for Louise Perry’s book, which deny that there’s such a thing as continuous moral progress.

Anyone who uses the word “Victorian” as a pejorative is guilty of what’s sometimes called the Whig Fallacy or Whig Interpretation of History, which idealises the series of human events as an inevitable “upward” progression leading to the most enlightened people on record: us.

C.S. Lewis, and Louise Perry following him, memorably called this belief in constant moral progress “chronological snobbery.”

These assumptions, damaging to women, are a bonanza to the pornography and pharmaceutical industries.

Antonella Gambotto-Burke calls Louise Perry’s argument “retrogressive,” as if it insists that we abandon our ovens and cook food on open fires. But Louise Perry argues that the sexual revolution has chiefly freed and gratified a small group of men, who can enact their erotic fantasies without consequence. Defeating this thesis requires arguments, not name-calling.

What is Louise Perry’s example of Victorian values, anyway? In the chapter “People Are Not Products,” she writes about Josephine Butler, an English woman who (successfully) campaigned to end the “convenient arrangements” of colonial brothels in the British Raj. Josephine Butler rejected any argument that justified the purchase of women, often coerced into the oldest profession, for sex. Motivated by Christianity, she quoted from the gospels to help women out of prostitution and into her home, where she treated them for the venereal diseases they contracted while being used as relief for tired colonial soldiers. Louise Perry also records the opinions of modern liberal feminists who condemn Josephine Butler for supposedly perpetuating the ideas of the British Empire and its helpless Indian subjects.

Stupid woman! Didn’t she know that being passed around like a spittoon is empowering? Damn Victorian values!

Antonella Gambotto-Burke is a little haughty when she asks, “why not tackle the ideological underpinnings of the problem…?” because Louise Perry’s book spends about two-hundred pages doing exactly that. Its emphasis is a Marxist one, focusing on how certain technologies (the contraceptive pill and mass communication) create and encourage the set of assumptions called the sexual revolution. These assumptions, damaging to women, are a bonanza to the pornography and pharmaceutical industries.

Why does the political left continue to support the most exploitative corporations on the planet? Don’t know.

The novels and poems of Kingsley Amis (an Olympic-standard skirt-chaser) describe the complications and misery caused by unconstrained sex, and would probably be the most illuminating material on the subject had not his gifted friend Philip Larkin confronted the same theme. Here is the end Larkin’s poem “High Windows,” which describes the generation that, thanks to contraceptives, can fornicate without end because it no longer cares about hell or God or priests:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:   
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

No constraints, yes, but also no progression, no goals, no ideals, no achievement, no fulfillment, no love. A more recent poem by Cynthia Huntington describes the perspective of women recycled and abandoned by itinerant playboys: “Where was everyone going / and why didn’t I get to ride along?”

Louise Perry argues that freedom isn’t the highest value, not all desires are healthy, and that something isn’t automatically good just because you choose it.

These are philosophical arguments, and the book would have been stronger had they been developed further. Luckily, an English author has made developed philosophical arguments against the sexual revolution.

ARISE, SIR ROGER.

Louise Perry isn’t the only English feminist arguing against some (or all) aspects of the sexual revolution: in this, she’s joined by Mary Harrington, Nina Power, and Julie Blindel. Despite their talents for expression and original research, their arguments against prostitution and pornography, and for parenthood and monogamous marriage, aren’t that different to those the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton made throughout his career.

The difference is that their arguments are gaining some thoughtful attention (and some not-so-thoughtful attention), whereas fashionable journalists mocked Sir Roger for his views on sexual morality. Maybe it took some more time for the effects of the sexual revolution to be fully appreciated. Maybe being a conservative man is bound to make your arguments unpalatable. Maybe the reward for citing Kant and Hegel is unpopularity.

Louise Perry risks unpopularity with her book that challenges liberal platitudes about sex and relationships. I’d love to know what her colleagues at the New Statesman think.

I’d love to know what people everywhere think of the following argument, which is potentially more controversial than Louise Perry’s.

The women’s movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were closely linked to the temperance movements. So much crime and misery is caused by alcohol that anyone serious about improving the lives of women should consider the arguments in favour of restricting the sale and consumption of that alluring poison.

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