I’m Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, the book that almost no one wanted to publish, but which has apparently changed an enormous number of lives for the better – not least my own.
I don’t think anyone expected The Case Against the Sexual Revolution to make much of an impact, but for some reason it did. In the nine months since it was published, I’ve had many, many hundreds of messages from people who tell me that the book has had a profound effect on them. In particular, I often hear from young women who tell me they had never in their lives come across the facts and ideas contained in the book – not just the basic information about human behaviour and sexuality, but also the moral message.
I don’t think this response to my work is the result of my own brilliance or originality, because nothing in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is blindingly original (as I pointed out several times in the book itself).
Rather, I think that it came along at an important moment. Almost everyone now acknowledges that our sexual culture is dysfunctional but, until recently, it has been difficult for anyone in a progressive milieu to speak honestly about why it is so dysfunctional, for fear of challenging the progressive narrative of feminist history.
I think often of the young woman who described turning down a miserable opportunity for a hook up because, having read my book, she said she felt “armed with permission” to defend her own sexual boundaries. Why would she need “permission” to do such a thing? Because we have all been lying to ourselves, and to each other, about the true nature of male and female sexuality.
But a war on reality can only be waged for so long before reality starts to reassert itself. There’s a line from David Brooks that I love:
While social repair does not happen at scale, it happens in rooms one by one and those things build up and slowly change norms and norms do scale.
I want this Substack to contribute, in a small way, to that process of social repair.
To that end, I will be hosting conversations with a wonderful range of guests, all of whom have something important and interesting to say about sexual politics: philosophers, evolutionary biologists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, feminist campaigners, and many more. We launched the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast in February 2023 and the response so far has been extraordinary, both in terms of the numbers of listeners we’ve attracted, and also the feedback we’ve had. We seem to be doing something right.
