CONTENTS

Cover
Endorsements
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Foreword
1. Sex Must Be Taken Seriously
Sexual liberalism and its discontents
Sexual disenchantment
Chronological snobbery
Notes
2. Men and Women Are Different
Human animals
Differences above the neck
Rape as adaptation
How to bear it
Notes
3. Some Desires Are Bad
 The sexual free market
The wrong side of history
Breaking taboos
The virtue of repression
Notes
4. Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering
The sociosexuality gap
A hand held in daylight
Cads and dads
Mutual incomprehension
Notes
5. Consent Is Not Enough
The ‘Queen of Porn’
The crimes of MindGeek
Limbic capitalism
Logging off
Notes
6. Violence Is Not Love
The idea of possessiveness
The Sutcliffean woman
Choking
We Can’t Consent to This
Notes
7. People Are Not Products
An ancient solution
$20 and $200
Luxury beliefs
The redistribution of sex
Cultural death grip syndrome
‘Thanks to OnlyFans’
Notes
8. Marriage Is Good
My money, my choice
A baby and someone
The protection of an ordinary marriage
The faithless soldier
The reinvention of marriage
Notes
Conclusion: Listen to Your Mother
Notes
End User License Agreement
‘Those feminists who assume this book is not for them – give it a go.
Brilliantly written, cleverly argued, packed with fascinating ideas and
information: agree or disagree with the central premise, it is fresh
and exciting.’

Julie Bindel, feminist and writer, author of Feminism for Women

‘This is a marvellously essential book, brilliantly argued. Perry has

written the most radical feminist challenge to a failed liberal
feminism. For love of womankind, and based on her profound
reading of scientific, cultural and historical material, Perry has
committed heresy; namely, she has dared argue that men and
women really are different, especially sexually – and that the so-
called sexual revolution failed women, especially young and poor
women, and in a most spectacular way. Hook-up culture, or “having
sex like a man”, is hardly liberating for most girls and women. What
Perry has to say about pornography, prostitution and the uber
eroticization of culture is both true and heartbreaking – but she is,
perhaps, at her best, her kindest, when she writes about feminism
and motherhood, about what both children and older women need in
order to survive and flourish. Brava for such good writing and for
such bold common sense.’

Phyllis Chesler, writer, feminist and psychologist, author of Women

and Madness

‘Brilliantly conceived and written, this highly original book is an

urgent call for a sexual counter-revolution. A book as stimulating as
the splash of icy water that wakes someone from a nightmare.’
 Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

‘Perry tackles the costs of the sexual revolution head-on. Wending

her careful way through liberal narratives of progress and
conservative hand-wringing over decline, Perry demonstrates that
beginning with the priorities of women changes too how we must
think about politics. Perry is a clearsighted and unflinching guide
through all of the major areas of contemporary sexual politics, from
dating to marriage and children, pornography, and violence against
women. We live, she suggests, in an era of “sexual disenchantment”.
What we need today is a new morality, a new set of virtues: the
sexual revolution failed, but women and children were the greater
losers. This is a brave and unflinching book: we have it in us to treat
each other once more with dignity, Perry suggests. The party’s over –
long live love, virtue, commitment and kindness.’

Nina Power, author of What Do Men Want?

‘For a generation now, we have been sold the lie that feminism
means celebrating “sex work”, violent pornography and casual hook-
ups. To feel otherwise brands a woman not just as uncool and uptight
but as an enemy of social justice. How the hell did the misogynist
global sex trade manage to enlist feminism as head cheerleader?
Enter the laser intellect of Louise Perry, who, in this thoughtful,
timely and witty book, exposes the travesty of “sex positive”
feminism as neither positive nor sexy and argues for new thinking
that puts women’s true interests, desires and happiness at its heart.’

Janice Turner, Times columnist and feature writer

Dedication
For the women who learned it the hard way
The Case Against the Sexual
Revolution

A New Guide to Sex in the

21st Century
LOUISE PERRY

polity
Copyright © Louise Perry 2022

The right of Louise Perry to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in
accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2022 by Polity Press

Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism
and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5000-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953231

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites
referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked
the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or
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For further information on Polity, visit our website:

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Acknowledgements
I owe enormous thanks to my agent, Matthew Hamilton, and my
editor, George Owers, without whom this book would never have
been written. I am also indebted to the many people who read and
commented on various proposals and drafts: Julie Bindel, Diana
Fleischman, David Goodhart, Camille Guillot, Jessica Masterson,
Dina McMillan, Nina Power, Katharina Rietzler, Rajiv Shah,
Kathleen Stock and Randy Thornhill. I owe particular thanks to the
brilliant Mary Harrington, who provided constant support and ideas,
and to my other ‘reactionary’ feminist friends: Alex Kaschuta,
Katherine Dee, Helen Roy and Mason Hartman. I am eternally
grateful to Fiona MacKenzie, my friend and colleague, who founded
We Can’t Consent to This. And I owe thanks also to Eve and Max for
sticking by me, despite my terrible opinions – I really do appreciate
it.

I depend, as ever, on the love and companionship of my husband and

family, including my beloved son, who was born during the writing of
this book, and my most faithful reader, my mum, who has read every
word I’ve ever published.
The little respect paid to chastity in the male world is, I am
persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral
evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies
that degrade and destroy women.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of

Woman

he said they’d found a brothel

on the dig he did last night

I asked him how they know

he sighed:

a pit of babies’ bones

a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel

Hollie McNish, ‘Conversation with an archeologist’

Foreword
by Kathleen Stock

What did the sexual revolution of the 1960s ever do for us? In this
brilliant book, Louise Perry argues that it depends which ‘us’ you’re
talking about. The invention of the contraceptive pill reduced
women’s fear of unwanted pregnancy, enabling them to provide the
kind of sex a lot of men prefer: copious and commitment-free. Many
women claim to enjoy this kind of sex too. But, as Perry explains,
there’s good reason to disbelieve at least some such reports. For we
now live in a culture where, though it isn’t taboo for a man to choke a
woman during sex, or anally penetrate her, or ejaculate on her face
while filming it, it is taboo for a young woman to express discomfort
about the nature of the sexual bargain she’s expected by society to
make. This bargain says: sacrifice your own wellbeing for the
pleasures of men in order to compete in the heterosexual dating
marketplace at all.

As Perry documents in sometimes shocking vignettes, whatever ill

effects the sexual revolution had for women in the twentieth century
have been supersized in the digital age of the twenty-first. There is
little doubt that contemporary sexual culture is destructive for
younger women in particular. It sells them a sexbot aesthetic,
pressures them into promiscuity, bombards them with dick pics and
violent pornography, and tells them to enjoy being humiliated and
assaulted in bed. It says that, as long as they choose it, being
exploited for money is ‘sex work’ and that ‘sex work is work’. It also
tells women not to mix up sex with love and to stay disconnected and
emotionless from partners. It encourages them to change their
bodies in ways that match pornographic ideals. And, worst of all, it
says that to comply with all of this is empowering – ignoring the
obvious fact that telling women to subdue their minds and submit
their bodies to physically stronger strangers can be lethal.

Perhaps surprisingly, the taboo around discussing the costs of the

sexual revolution is enabled by popular feminism. This is because
popular feminism is a version of liberal feminism, and liberal
feminism in its populist guise is focused mostly on a woman’s ‘right
to choose’ or ‘consent’, construed incredibly thinly. Everything and
anything goes as long as you choose or consent to it at the time. What
this misses out, of course, is that people can be pressured – by peers
or partners or wider cultural forces – into believing that they want
things which later they come to recognise as bad for them. In a
culture dominated by male sexuality, there’s an obvious interest in
convincing women that they want to have sex like men do, and many
women go along with things they later come to regret.

At this point, the inner liberal feminist in many readers may be

howling: but what if I genuinely want all that stuff? Well, good for
you if you genuinely do. But, as Perry shows, even if this sort of sex
works for some women, there are many other women for whom it
does not. And they aren’t ‘prudes’, or ‘frigid’, or ‘asexual’, or ‘in a
moral panic’, or any of the other insulting words produced by the
culture to keep the whole man-pleasing machinery working. Nor
need they be religious. There are plenty of reasons to be wary of
contemporary sexual mores that are perfectly secular.

Both liberal feminism’s narrow focus on choice and its incapacity to

discuss deep differences between women and men stem from its
intellectual forefather: liberalism, a political tradition heavily focused
on freedom of choice as the thing definitive of personhood. The
fantasy of a liberal subject is of an ostensibly sexless individual,
defined mostly by the presence of a free will, untethered by family
ties or community expectations and pursuing private preferences in a
relatively unfettered way. I say ‘ostensibly sexless’, because – in a
point made by second-wave feminists and brought up to date by
Perry – this idealised figure of a liberal subject sounds more like a
man roaming around getting his oats than a woman whose life is
intertwined with the kids that are the outcome of her own sexual
activity.

How then can we start talking about what might work for women,
specifically? Perry turns to biology and evolutionary psychology,
asking: What does a woman tend to desire, given the kind of female
animal she is, with the specific reproductive capacities she tends to
have? (Talk of animals is not insulting. We are all animals, though
hubris tries to make us forget it.) Given the vexed history of
discussion about nature vs nurture within feminism, this move
towards the natural is a bold one. But Perry’s approach deserves
open-minded attention – especially when you remember that,
according to the currently more popular narrative, human bodies as
well as minds are plastic. Yes: such is liberal feminism’s fear of limits
upon personal freedom that – in tandem with its BFF capitalism – it
now construes facts about healthy bodies as obstacles to freedom.
Don’t like your breasts? Buy new ones, or cut them off altogether!
(Delete as appropriate.) Incredibly, in some feminists, the degree of
denial stretches even to telling us that biology itself is a myth or a
construct. Yet, as Perry argues, once we acknowledge the ‘hard limits
imposed by biology’, we can make informed inferences about female
wellbeing in particular – rooted in the real, and not what is projected
or fantasised by men.

Perry’s background as a journalist, commentator, and campaigner

against ‘rough sex’ criminal defences perfectly places her to tackle
these issues, and she does so with characteristic style and
fearlessness. Her book does several things that are unusual for a
modern feminist text. It refuses the easy wins of the Cool Girl
Feminist, swimming against the pink tide of sex-positive vacuity to
spell out some uncomfortable truths. It is uninterested in liberal
feminist buzzwords such as freedom and equality, focusing instead
on women’s needs and wellbeing, independently from a
consideration of men. Whether you ultimately agree or disagree with
Perry’s analysis, the book takes the interests of women deadly
seriously and carves out a space for them to talk properly about the
costs of the sexual culture in which they must sink or swim. It’s
essential for the wellbeing of young women that we do this, and we
should all be grateful to Perry for advancing this important
conversation.
1
Sex Must Be Taken Seriously
Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe – those two icons of the sexual
revolution – never actually met, but they were born in the same year
and laid to rest in the same place, side by side.1 In 1992, Hefner
bought the crypt next door to Monroe’s in the Westwood Memorial
Park Cemetery in Los Angeles for $75,000,2 telling the Los Angeles
Times: ‘I’m a believer in things symbolic … [so] spending eternity
next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up.’3 At the age of ninety-one,
Hefner got his wish. The long-dead Monroe had no say in the matter.
But then she had never been given much say in what men did to her
over the course of her short life.

Marilyn Monroe was both the first ever cover star and the first ever
naked centrefold in the first ever edition of Hefner’s Playboy
magazine, published in December 1953. ‘Entertainment for MEN’
was the promise offered on the front cover, and the magazine
evidently delivered on that promise, since it was a commercial
success from its very first issue.

Marilyn Monroe’s naked photos were four years old by the time of
their publication. In 1949, the 23-year-old Monroe had been paid
$50 for a two-hour photo shoot with pin-up photographer Tom
Kelley, who had promised that he’d make her unrecognisable, and
almost delivered on his promise.4 The woman curled up on a red
velvet bedspread is not obviously Monroe, since her hair was a little
more brunette at the time, her pained face was half hidden behind an
outstretched arm, and her pale, pretty body was indistinguishable
from the bodies of most of the other models in Playboy (which would
not feature a black centrefold until 1965 – the eighteen-year-old
recipient of this dubious honour, Jennifer Jackson, later described
‘Hef’ as ‘a high-class pimp’).5

The clothed Monroe on the cover of the magazine beckoned in

readers with the promise of a ‘FULL COLOR’ nude photo of the
actress for the ‘first time in any magazine’, and Hefner later said that
her centrefold was the key reason for the publication’s initial success.
Monroe herself was humiliated by the photo shoot, which she
resorted to only out of desperate need for money, signing the release
documents with a fake name.6 Hefner didn’t pay her to use her
images and didn’t seek her consent before publishing them.7 Monroe
reportedly told a friend that she had ‘never even received a thank-
you from all those who made millions off a nude Marilyn
photograph. I even had to buy a copy of the magazine to see myself in
it.’8

The courses of these two lives show us in perfect vignette the nature
of the sexual revolution’s impact on men and women. Monroe and
Hefner both began in obscurity and ended their lives rich and
famous, having found success in the same city and at the very same
historical moment. 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. As the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin later
wrote:

She grinned, she posed, she pretended, she had affairs with
famous and powerful men. A friend of hers claimed that she had
so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her
reproductive organs were severely injured. She died alone,
possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time … 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

Monroe’s life followed a similar trajectory to that of her pin-up

predecessor Bettie Page, who survived into old age but spent her
final decades in a psychiatric institution. So too the pop star Britney
Spears, who at the age of sixteen gyrated in a school uniform and
begged viewers to ‘hit me baby one more time’. 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.

In particular, today’s female porn performers – the most successful

of whom now inhabit much the same cultural space that Monroe
inhabited in her day – are far more likely than their peers to have
been sexually abused as children, to have been in foster care, and to
have been victims of domestic violence as adults10 – all misfortunes
that Monroe suffered too.11 The libidinous public asks a lot of the
women it desires. And when it all goes horribly wrong, as it usually
does, this public labels these once-desired women ‘crazy’ and moves
on. There is never a reckoning with what sexual liberation does to
those women who follow its directives most obediently.

Hugh Hefner experienced ‘sexual liberation’ very differently from

Monroe, as men typically do, although his example is no more
worthy of emulation. As a younger man, he was the true playboy –
handsome, charming and envied by other men. He lived the fantasy
of a particularly immature adolescent boy, hosting parties for his
celebrity friends in a garish ‘grotto’ and then retiring upstairs with
his harem of identical twenty-something blondes. He supposedly
once said that his best pick-up line was simply the sentence ‘Hi, my
name is Hugh Hefner.’12

Unlike Monroe, Hefner lived to grow old and, as he did so, lost much
of his glitter. By the end of his life, he was more often publicly
portrayed as a pathetic figure, and various former playmates
provided the press with unflattering accounts of life in the Playboy
mansion. Jill Ann Spaulding, for instance, wrote of the elderly
Hefner’s uninspiring sexual performance: ‘Hef just lies there with his
Viagra erection. It’s just a fake erection, and each girl gets on top of
him for two minutes while the girls in the background try to keep
him excited. They’ll yell things like, “Fuck her daddy, fuck her
daddy!”’13

Other women spoke of soiled mattresses, a bizarre playmate uniform

of matching pink flannel pyjamas, and carpets covered with dog
faeces.14 It was revealed that Hefner took an obsessive and coercive
attitude towards his many girlfriends, dictating how they wore their
hair and make-up, keeping a detailed log of all his sexual
encounters,15 and becoming angry if refused sex.16 His acolytes
forgave ‘Hef’ when he was still young and attractive, but as time went
on he was revealed to be little more than a dirty old man. The
glamour of the playboy – or the ‘fuckboy’, in modern slang – doesn’t
last forever.

Hefner’s reputation may have diminished over time, but he never

experienced any guilt for the harm he perpetrated. Asked at the age
of eighty-three by the New York Times if he regretted any of the
‘dark consequences’ of the Playboy revolution he set in motion,
Hefner was confident in his innocence: ‘it’s a small price to pay for
personal freedom.’17 By which he meant, of course, personal freedom
for men like him.

After his death in 2017, the original playboy was described again and
again in the press as a ‘complex figure’. The Huffington Post wrote of
his ‘contradictory feminist legacy’,18 and the BBC asked ‘was the
Playboy revolution good for women?’19 One British journalist argued
that Hefner had ‘helped push feminism forwards’:

[Hefner] took a particularly progressive stance to the

contraceptive pill and abortion rights, which the magazine often
plugged, and kept readers up-to-date with the struggles women
were facing; leading up to the legalisation of abortion in 1973,
Playboy featured at least 30 different commentaries on the Roe
V. Wade case and large features from doctors.20

None of these eulogists seemed to recognise that Hefner’s

commitment to decoupling reproduction from sex had nothing to do
with a commitment to women’s wellbeing. Hefner never once
campaigned for anything that didn’t bring him direct benefit, and,
when fear of pregnancy was one of the last remaining reasons for
women saying ‘no’, he had every reason to wish for a change that
would widen the pool of women available to him.

Marilyn Monroe was scraped out again and again by backstreet

abortionists because she died almost a decade before the Pill was
made available to unmarried women in all American states. Playboy
magazine existed for twenty years in a country without legalised
abortion. The sexual revolution began in a society fresh from the
horrors of the Second World War and enjoying a new form of
affluence, but its outriders initially bore a lot of illegitimate children
and suffered a lot of botched abortions. The 1966 film Alfie stars a
gorgeous young Michael Caine bed-hopping around London and
enjoying the libertine lifestyle promised by the swinging sixties. But
his actions have consequences and, in the emotional climax of the
film, Alfie cries as he is confronted with the grisly product of a
backstreet abortion he has procured for one of his ‘birds’.

The story of the sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed
from the burdens of chastity and motherhood, although it is that. It
is also a story of the triumph of the playboy – a figure who is too
often both forgotten and forgiven, despite his central role in this still
recent history. Second-wave feminists were right to argue that
women needed contraception and legalised abortion in order to give
them control over their reproductive lives, and the arrival of this
technology was a good and needful innovation, since it has freed so
many women from the body-breaking work of unwanted
childbearing. But the likes of Hefner also wanted this technology,
and needed it, if they were to achieve the goal of liberating their own
libidos while pretending that they were liberating women.

Sexual liberalism and its

discontents
In Sophocles’ Antigone – a play particularly attentive to the duty and
suffering of women – the chorus sing that ‘nothing that is vast enters
into the life of mortals without a curse.’ The societal impact of the Pill
was vast and, two generations on, we haven’t yet fully understood
both its blessing and its curse. There have been plenty of periods in
human history in which the norms around sex have been loosened:
the late Roman Empire, Georgian Britain, and the Roaring Twenties
in America are the best remembered. But these phases of
licentiousness were self-limited by the lack of good contraception,
and thus straight men in pursuit of extramarital sex were mostly
obliged to seek out sex either with women in prostitution or with the
small number of eccentric women who were willing to risk being cast
out permanently from respectable society. The Bloomsbury set, for
instance, who famously ‘lived in squares and loved in triangles’, had
plenty of illicit sexual encounters. They also produced a lot of
illegitimate children, and were protected from destitution only as a
result of the privileges of their class.

But the sexual revolution of the 1960s stuck, and its ideology is now
the ideological sea we swim in – so normalised that we can hardly
see it for what it is. It was able to persist because of the arrival, for
the first time in the history of the world, of reliable contraception
and, in particular, forms of contraception that women could take
charge of themselves, such as the Pill, the diaphragm, and
subsequent improvements on the technology, such as the
intrauterine device (IUD). Thus, at the end of the 1960s, an entirely
new creature arrived in the world: the apparently fertile young
woman whose fertility had in fact been put on hold. She changed
everything.

This book is an attempt to reckon with that change, and to do so

while avoiding the accounts typically offered by liberals addicted to a
narrative of progress or conservatives addicted to a narrative of
decline. I don’t believe that the last sixty years or so should be
understood as a period of exclusive progress or exclusive decline,
because the sexual revolution has not freed all of us, but it has freed
some of us, and selectively, and at a price. Which is exactly what we
should expect from any form of social change ‘that is vast’, as this
one certainly is. And although I am writing against a conservative
narrative of the post-1960s era, and in particular those conservatives
who are silly enough to think that returning to the 1950s is either
possible or desirable, I am writing in a more deliberate and focused
way against a liberal narrative of sexual liberation which I think is
not only wrong but also harmful.

My complaint is focused more against liberals than against

conservatives for a very personal reason: I used to believe the liberal
narrative. As a younger woman, I held the same political opinions as
most other millennial urban graduates in the West – in other words,
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. If
the old quip tells us that a ‘conservative is just a liberal who has been
mugged by reality’, then I suppose, at least in my case, that a post-
liberal feminist is just a liberal feminist who has witnessed the reality
of male violence up close.

I’m using the term ‘liberal feminism’ to describe a form of feminism

that is usually not described as such by its proponents, who
nowadays are more likely to call themselves ‘intersectional feminists’.
But I don’t think that their ideology actually is intersectional,
according to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s original meaning, in that it does
not properly incorporate an analysis of other forms of social
stratification, particularly economic class. The advantage of using
‘liberal feminism’ instead is that it places these twenty-first-century
ideas within a longer intellectual history, making clear that this is a
feminist iteration of a much grander intellectual project: liberalism.

The definition of ‘liberalism’ is contested – indeed, the first line of

the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry tells us that
‘liberalism is more than one thing’ – which means that, whatever
definition I choose to work with, I’ll leave some critics unhappy. But
I’m reluctant to bore readers by offering a long-winded defence of my
working definition, so I’ll be brief.
I’m not using ‘liberal’ as short-hand for ‘left wing’ – in fact, far from
it. The American post-liberal political theorist Patrick Deneen
describes economic liberalism and social liberalism as intertwined,
with a liberal cultural elite and a liberal corporate elite working hand
in hand: ‘Today’s corporate ideology has a strong affinity with the
lifestyles of those who are defined by mobility, ethical flexibility,
liberalism (whether economic or social), a consumerist mentality in
which choice is paramount, and a “progressive” outlook in which
rapid change and “creative destruction” are the only certainties.’21

Post-liberals such as Deneen draw attention to the costs of social

liberalism, a political project that seeks to free individuals from the
external constraints placed on us by location, family, religion,
tradition, and even (and most relevant to feminists) the human body.
In that sense, they are in agreement with many social conservatives.
But post-liberals are also critical of the other side of the liberal coin:
a free market ideology that seeks to free individuals from all of these
constraints in order to maximise their ability to work and to
consume. The atomised worker with no commitment to any place or
person is the worker best able to respond quickly to the demands of
the market. This ideal liberal subject can move to wherever the jobs
are because she has no connection to anywhere in particular; she can
do whatever labour is asked of her without any moral objection
derived from faith or tradition; and, without a spouse or family to
attend to, she never needs to demand rest days or a flexible schedule.
And then, with the money earned from this rootless labour, she is
able to buy consumables that will soothe any feelings of unhappiness,
thus feeding the economic engine with maximum efficiency.
Liberal feminism takes this market-orientated ideology and applies it
to issues specific to women. For instance, when the actress and
campaigner Emma Watson was criticised in 2017 for showing her
breasts on the cover of Vanity Fair, she hit back with a well-worn
liberal feminist phrase: ‘feminism is about giving women choice …
It’s about freedom.’22 For liberal feminists such as Watson, that
might mean the freedom to wear revealing clothes (and sell lots of
magazines in the process), or the freedom to sell sex, or make or
consume porn, or pursue whatever career you like, just like the boys.

With the right tools, freedom from the constraints imposed by the
female body now becomes increasingly possible. Don’t want to have
children in your twenties or thirties? Freeze your eggs. Called away
on a work trip postpartum? Fed-Ex your breastmilk to your newborn.
Want to continue working fulltime without interruption? Employ a
live-in nanny, or – better yet – a surrogate who can bear the child for
you. And now, with the availability of sex reassignment medical
technologies, even stepping out of your female body altogether has
become an option. Liberal feminism promises women freedom – and
when that promise comes up against the hard limits imposed by
biology, then the ideology directs women to chip away at those limits
through the use of money, technology and the bodies of poorer
people.

I don’t reject the desire for freedom – I’m not an anti-liberal, and
goodness knows that women have every reason to chafe against the
constraints imposed on us by our societies and our bodies, both in
the past and in the modern world. But I am critical of any ideology
that fails to balance freedom against other values, and I’m also
critical of the failure of liberal feminism to interrogate where our
desire for a certain type of freedom comes from, too often referring
back to a circular logic by which a woman’s choices are good because
she chooses them, just like Sex and the City’s Charlotte York yelping
‘I choose my choice, I choose my choice!’

In this book I’m going to ask – and seek to answer – some questions
about freedom that 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? What do we lose when we
prioritise freedom above all else? And, above all, how should we act,
given all this?

Some of my conclusions might not be welcome, since they draw

attention to the hard limits on our freedom that can’t be surmounted,
however much we try. And I start from a position that historically
has often been a source of discomfort for feminists of all ideological
persuasions: I accept the fact that men and women are different, and
that those differences aren’t going away. When we recognise these
limits and these differences, then sexual politics takes on a different
character. Instead of asking ‘How can we all be free?’, we must ask
instead ‘How can we best promote the wellbeing of both men and
women, given that these two groups have different sets of interests,
which are sometimes in tension?’

Sexual disenchantment
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. And the influence of liberal
feminism means that too many women don’t recognise this truth,
blithely accepting Hefner’s claim that all of the downsides of the new
sexual culture are just ‘a small price to pay for personal freedom’.

Which suits the likes of Hefner very nicely, since playboys like him
have a lot to gain from the new sexual culture. It is in their interests
to push a particularly radical idea about sex that has come out of the
sexual revolution and has proved remarkably influential, despite its
harms. This is the idea that sex is nothing more than a leisure
activity, invested with meaning only if the participants choose to give
it meaning. Proponents of this idea argue that sex has no intrinsic
specialness, that it is not innately different from any other kind of
social interaction, and that it can therefore be commodified without
any trouble. The sociologist Max Weber described the
‘disenchantment’ of the natural world that resulted from the
Enlightenment, as the ascendence of rationality stripped away the
sense of magic that this ‘enchanted garden’ had once held for pre-
modern people. In much the same way, sex has been disenchanted23
in the post-1960s West, leaving us with a society that (ostensibly)
believes that sex means nothing.

Sexual disenchantment is a natural consequence of the liberal

privileging of freedom over all other values, because, if you want to
be utterly free, you have to take aim at any kind of social restrictions
that limit you, particularly the belief that sex has some unique,
intangible value – some specialness that is difficult to rationalise.
From this belief in the specialness of sex comes a host of potentially
unwelcome phenomena, including patriarchal religious systems. But
when we attempt to disenchant sex, and so pretend that this
particular act is neither uniquely wonderful nor uniquely violating,
then there is another kind of cost.

That cost falls disproportionately on women, for biological reasons

that I’ll come back to in the next chapter. And liberal feminists do
seem to recognise this disproportionate impact, as demonstrated by
the popularity of the Me Too movement, which began in earnest in
2017. This outpouring of rage and sorrow was evidence of a sexual
culture that wasn’t working for women. The stories that came out of
Me Too included plenty of unambiguously criminal behaviour, but
there were also a lot of women who described sexual encounters that
were technically consensual but nevertheless left them feeling
terrible because they were being asked to treat as meaningless
something that they felt to be meaningful. The boss who expects
sexual favours as a condition of promotion, or the date who expects a
woman to ‘put out’ when he pays for dinner, are both more than
willing to accept the principle of sexual disenchantment and thus
view sex as a meaningless product to be exchanged on a free market
(‘You suck me off, I give you some good of equivalent value’). One
student wrote, for instance, of hooking up with one of her peers:
 He slid inside me and I didn’t say a word. At the time, I didn’t
know why. Maybe I didn’t want to feel like I’d led him on. Maybe
I didn’t want to disappoint him. Maybe I just didn’t want to deal
with the ‘let’s do it, but no, we shouldn’t’ verbal tug-of-war that
so often happens before sleeping with someone. It was easier to
just do it. Besides, we were already in bed, and this is what
people in bed do. I felt an obligation, a duty to go through with
it. I felt guilty for not wanting to. I wasn’t a virgin. I’d done this
before. It shouldn’t have been a big deal – it’s just sex – so I
didn’t want to make it one.24

‘It’s just sex’ summarises the sexual disenchantment idea perfectly.

This young woman wasn’t beaten, she didn’t get pregnant, and she
actually quite liked the young man she had sex with, at least at first.
So why did she experience this sexual encounter as such a big deal?
Because sexual disenchantment isn’t actually true, and we all know
it, including the liberal feminists who expend so much energy on
arguing, for instance, that ‘sex work is work.’ You can tell because,
when it became clear that Harvey Weinstein had been offering
women career opportunities in exchange for sexual favours, these
same liberal feminists immediately condemned him – not only for
the violence and threats he had used in the course of committing his
crimes but also for requesting sexual favours from his subordinates
in the first place.

There was an intuitive recognition that asking for sex from an

employee is not at all the same as asking them to do overtime or
make coffee. I’ve made plenty of coffees for various employers in the
past, despite the fact that coffee-making wasn’t included in my job
description, and I’m sure most readers will have done the same. But,
while it might sometimes be annoying to receive this request, no
worker who makes coffee for their boss will expect to end up
dependent on drugs or alcohol as a consequence. No one will expect
to become pregnant or acquire a disease that causes infertility. No
one will expect to suffer from PTSD or other mental illness. 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.

And liberal feminists don’t have the conceptual framework necessary

to resolve this distress. The Guardian’s Jessica Valenti, for instance,
described the phenomenon of violating sex that doesn’t actually meet
the legal threshold for rape in a column written at the height of Me
Too: ‘It’s true that women are fed up with sexual violence and
harassment; but it’s also true that what this culture considers
“normal” sexual behavior is often harmful to women, and that we
want that to stop, too.’25

But an anthology of essays on the subject of Me Too, edited by

Valenti and published in 2020, demonstrates the inability of her
brand of liberal feminism to respond properly to the problem she
identifies.26 The contributors to the anthology all want sexual
violence to end, and rightly so. But they’re queasy about using the
power of the state to arrest and imprison rapists, and they don’t want
women to have to change their behaviour in order to avoid exposure
to dangerous men, since even raising this possibility is regarded as
‘victim blaming’.

Rather than propose alternatives – vigilante justice, anyone? – the

writers avoid contending with difficult questions at all. They limit
themselves to milquetoast ideas such as helping men to overcome
their ‘masculine insecurities’ (Tahir Duckett) or creating community
spaces in which perpetrators can seek ‘healing and justice’ (Sarah
Deer and Bonnie Clairmont). Contributors such as the campaigner
Andrea L. Pino-Silva write of the need to ‘talk seriously about ending
sexual violence’ but propose nothing more concrete than workshops
on university campuses that, among much else, ‘celebrate and
empower queerness’. Pino-Silva believes that such workshops won’t
work unless they also tackle every form of oppression under the sun,
from colonialism to biphobia. I don’t believe these workshops will
work at all, so I suppose that’s one point we can agree on.

Some contributors not only reject ideas that might go some way
towards alleviating the problem of sexual violence, they actually
propose ideas that will make the problem worse. Sassafras Lowrey
encourages rape survivors to seek out sexual partners with a taste for
violence, otherwise known as ‘joining the BDSM community’, and
Tina Horn presents prostitution as a benign career route for young
women. This is the central principle of liberal feminism taken to its
logical conclusion: a woman should be able to do anything she likes,
whether that be selling sex or inviting consensual sexual violence,
since all of her desires and choices must necessarily be good, no
matter where they come from or where they lead. And if anything
bad comes from following this principle, then we return to the only
solution that liberal feminism has to offer: ‘teach men not to rape.’

But then what else can liberal feminists advise? They have made the
error of buying into an ideology that has always best served the likes
of Hugh Hefner and Harvey Weinstein, his true heir. And from this
they derive the false belief that women are still suffering only
because the sexual liberation project of the 1960s is unfinished,
rather than because it was always inherently flawed. Thus they
prescribe more and more freedom and are continually surprised
when their prescription doesn’t cure the disease.

This fact becomes clear when we look at the twenty-first-century

university campus, where the gospel of sexual liberation is preached
loudest and where BDSM societies27 and ‘Sex Weeks’28 are the new
normal.29 At the beginning of term, freshers are given a lecture on
the importance of consent and sent on their way with ‘I heart
consent’ badges and tote bags. The rule they’re taught is simple
enough: with consent, anything goes. And yet this simple rule is
broken again and again, both through rape and through the more
subtle forms of coercion that so many women recounted during Me
Too. Few liberal feminists are willing to draw the link between the
culture of sexual hedonism they promote and the anxieties over
campus rape that have emerged at exactly the same time.

If they did, they might be forced to recognise that they have done a
terrible thing in advising inexperienced young women to seek out
situations in which they are alone and drunk with horny men who
are not only bigger and stronger than they are but are also likely to
have been raised on the kind of porn that normalises aggression,
coercion and pain. But in liberal feminist circles you’re not supposed
to talk about the influence of online porn, or BDSM, or hook-up
culture, or any of the other malign elements of our new sexual
culture, because to do so would be to question the doctrine of sexual
freedom. So young women are forced to learn for themselves that
freedom has costs, and they are forced to learn the hard way, every
time.

Chronological snobbery
This book began as a standard piece of cultural analysis, but I
realised when I began writing that it needed to go further. It wasn’t
enough just to point out the problems with our new sexual culture
and leave it at that – I needed to offer readers some real guidance on
how to live. Advice on sex is too often trivialised and shoved to the
back of the magazine, with feminist arguments over sexual culture
dismissed as so much girly bickering. But what we’re concerned with
here is not only the most important relationships in most people’s
lives but also the continuation of our species. So when I chose the
title of this chapter, I was thinking not only of the problem of sexual
disenchantment but also of the role of the advice columnist, who is
rarely taken as seriously as she should be. Having sex should be
taken seriously, and so should talking about it. It’s a serious matter.

The advice I’m offering applies almost exclusively to heterosexuals,

particularly heterosexual women, because the effect of the sexual
revolution on relations between the sexes is the subject of this book.
And none of it is ground-breaking: anyone who has spent enough
time living in the world and learning from her mistakes should be
able to cobble together a set of rules that look much like mine. But
while a lot of my advice will seem like common sense to most older
readers, my experience of talking face-to-face with men and women
under the age of thirty is that it is shocking enough to make a
person’s jaw drop (literally, in several cases).

I would probably have been just as shocked a decade ago, because I

didn’t know any of this when I was a younger woman. I thought,
stupidly, that I understood life better than anyone else, as teenagers
typically do, and I realised my mistake only years later, having
learned the hard way and having watched my friends do the same.
This wasn’t because my parents or other adults in my life failed me –
far from it – and I wasn’t in any way unusual among my peers. But I
was raised in a liberal environment that leant too heavily on a
simplistic ‘progress’ narrative of history, and the problem with this
narrative is that it encourages us to ignore both the ways in which
things may have become worse over time and the advice offered by
older generations. C. S. Lewis coined the phrase ‘chronological
snobbery’ to describe ‘[T]he uncritical acceptance of the intellectual
climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone
out of date is on that count discredited.’30

Older people are dismissed by snobbish twenty-first-century liberals

as not only foolish and uninteresting but also (far worse) as
‘problematic’. While in most cultures the elderly are regarded as
sources of wisdom, and thus granted particular respect, in the
modern West they are more likely to be disregarded and
condescended to, shut away in nursing homes and assumed to be of
no use to anyone.

At the end of every year, a rush of articles in liberal publications

advise twenty-somethings on how best to withstand the problematic
opinions voiced by older relatives over Thanksgiving or Christmas
dinner (‘It’s your responsibility to challenge bigoted relatives over
the holidays’, advised Teen Vogue, for instance, in 2019). The
fetishisation of youth in our culture has given us the false idea that it
is young people who are best placed to provide moral guidance to
their elders, despite their obvious lack of experience. And for anyone
nudging forty, be assured that the ‘problematic’ bell also tolls for
thee. The articles that have appeared regularly since 2018 on the
‘homophobia, sexism and fat-shaming’ in the sitcom Friends prove
the need for constant renewal within the progress model.31 When
popular culture less than three decades old is already condemned as
unacceptable, what hope have people who are more than three
decades old of keeping pace? They can’t, that’s the point – the model
demands that we reject them.

Within living memory, we have witnessed a very sudden break with

the norms of the past, and the necessity of this break is constantly
justified in the liberal media through reference to the bad old days.
This kind of present-centrism is parodied beautifully in a 2020 TV
adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in which the
‘Savage Lands’ – more like an Indian reservation in the novel – are
reimagined as a theme park devoted to twenty-first-century
American decline. Twenty-sixth-century New London visitors load
onto a tour bus and gawp at the ‘house of correction’ (a prison) and
the ‘house of monogamy’ (a church), and witness a re-enactment of
what is presented as the most important event in the savages’
calendar, ‘the annual day of black’ (Black Friday), in which shoppers
tear each other to pieces in their lust for bargains.

A tour guide informs visitors cheerfully that the key elements of

savage culture included ‘jealousy, competition, greed and strife.’
She’s not wrong, of course. The Savage Lands theme park is designed
to demonstrate to New Londoners the perils of the old way of life,
and its inclusion in the drama is designed to show us how tempting
the twenty-sixth century could seem when set beside the twenty-first.
These future people have successfully rid themselves of many of our
flaws: their lack of privacy ensures a lack of crime; their lack of
family ensures a lack of in-group preference; and their lack of
monogamy ensures a lack of sexual jealousy. The cost that citizens
pay for all this stability is that they must live under an authoritarian
regime that suppresses any discontent with the pleasure drug soma.
This regime encourages the citizens of New London to visit the
Savage Lands theme park because demonising the past serves to
justify the status quo. Conservatives in our own era who idealise the
past achieve much the same effect in reverse, because the past is a
political weapon that can readily be used to colour our perspective on
the present.

I reject the poisonous dichotomy that insists that the past must be
either all good or all bad. I don’t think that we should imitate any
sexual culture of the past, but nor do I think that what we have seen
over the last sixty years has been a process of relentless
improvement. What’s clever about the Savage Lands of Brave New
World is that the theme park representation is honest, up to a point.
The twenty-first century is an era of ‘jealousy, competition, greed and
strife’ that is easy enough to condemn. But there is also a dishonest
side to the Savage Lands, in that highlighting the evils of the past
also serves to distract from the evils of the present. Today’s
progressive representation of life in the 1950s serves much the same
purpose.

In 2016, an extract from a 1950s home economics book offering ‘tips

to look after your husband’ went viral on social media. The housewife
was advised that, when her husband got home from work, she should
have dinner on the table, her apron off and a ribbon in her hair, and
that she should always make sure to let her husband ‘talk first’.32
This advice was not unusual for housewife manuals of the time, or
indeed those of earlier eras, all of which advise women to make their
housekeeping look effortless, hiding grime and exertion from their
menfolk.

How reactionary, we think now, how stupid and backward! But then
take a look at a small sample of Cosmopolitan magazine guides
published within the last decade: ‘30 ways to please a man’,33 ‘20
ways to turn on your man’,34 or ‘How to turn him on – 42 things to
do with a naked man’35 (this last guide includes ‘rim him’ and ‘dole
out some flavored lube’). In what sense are these guides not
encouraging precisely the same degree of focus on male desires,
except in this case it is sexual pleasure rather than domestic comfort?
The only difference I can see is that the arse licking is now literal.
Women are still expected to please men and to make it look
effortless. But while the 1950s ‘angel of the house’ hid her apron, the
modern ‘angel of the bedroom’ hides her pubic hair. This waxed and
willing swan glides across the water, concealing the fact that beneath
the surface she is furiously working to maintain her image of
perfection. She pretends to orgasm, pretends to like anal sex, and
pretends not to mind when the ‘friends with benefits’ arrangement
causes her pain. I’ve spoken to women who suffered from vaginismus
for years without telling their partners that being penetrated was
excruciating. I’ve also spoken to women who have had abortions
after hook-ups and never told the men who impregnated them
because, while sharing the inside of their bodies was expected,
revealing the inconvenient fact of their fertility felt too intimate. We
have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience
to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation.

This pretence hurts the Marilyn Monroes, particularly when they are
poor and friendless, and I want above all in this book to speak to the
young women who have been lied to by liberal feminism and so risk
following a very, very dangerous example.

But the would-be Hugh Hefners are also hurt by the pretence, albeit
in a less obvious way. Mouldering away in the Playboy mansion
doesn’t kill a person, but it does corrode them. True happiness is not
to be found on a soiled mattress being ridden by a woman who
doesn’t even like you.

Liberal ideology flatters us by telling us that our desires are good and
that we can find meaning in satisfying them, whatever the cost. But
the lie of this flattery should be obvious to anyone who has ever
realised after the fact that they were wrong to desire something, and
hurt themselves, or hurt other people, in pursuing it. 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.

Notes
1. Gianluca Mezzofiore, ‘No, that viral picture doesn’t show Hugh
Hefner lighting a cigarette for Marilyn Monroe’, 28 September
2017, https://mashable.com/2017/09/28/marilyn-monroe-hugh-
hefner-fake-picture-playboy/?europe=true.

2. Jack Shepherd, ‘Hugh Hefner dead: Playboy founder is being

buried next to Marilyn Monroe’, 28 September 2017,
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news.

3. Jeff Gottlieb, ‘For sale: eternity with Marilyn Monroe’, 14 August

2009, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-aug-14-me-
marilyn14-story.html.

4. Brad Witter, ‘Marilyn Monroe didn’t actually pose for the first
issue of Playboy’, 8 September 2020,
www.biography.com/news/marilyn-monroe-playboy-first-issue-
didnt-pose.

5. Scott Johnson, 4 October 2017,

www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/playboys-first-black-
 playmate-reflects-hugh-hefners-legacy-1045838.

6. Witter, ‘Marilyn Monroe didn’t actually pose’.

7. ‘Hugh Hefner will be buried next to Marilyn Monroe’, 29

September 2017, www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2017/09/29/hugh-
hefner-buried-next-marilyn-monroe-fans-not-happy/.

8. Megan C. Hills, ‘How Hugh Hefner built an entire empire without

Marilyn Monroe’s consent’, 29 September 2017,
www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/celebrity-news/hugh-hefner-
marilyn-monroe-541688.

9. Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women. New York: Perigee Books,

[1978] 1983, p. 18.

10. Corita Grudzen, Daniella Meeker, Jacqueline Torres et al.,

‘Comparison of the mental health of female adult film performers
and other young women in California’, Psychiatric Services 62
(2011): 639–45.

11. Sam Kashner, ‘Marilyn and her monsters’, 5 October 2010,

www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/11/marilyn-monroe-201011.

12. ‘Hugh Hefner quotes’, 28 September 2017,

https://heavy.com/entertainment/2017/09/hugh-hefner-quotes-
on-life-death-playboy-is-alive-dead/.

13. Olivia Bahou, 11 June 2015, www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-

love/news/a41845/worst-things-playmates-said-about-playboy-
mansion/.
14. Ibid.

15. Sharon Waxman, 28 September 2017, www.thewrap.com/hugh-

hefner-legacy-no-feminist-hero/.

16. Graeme Culliford, ‘Sickening pimp secret’, 2 October 2017,

www.thesun.co.uk/news/4585472/brit-model-lured-girls-to-the-
playboy-mansion-to-have-orgies-with-hugh-hefner/.

17. Brooks Barnes, ‘The loin in winter’, 23 October 2009,

www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/business/media/24hefner.html?
pagewanted=2&sq=hefner&st=cse&scp=1.

18. Emma Gray, ‘The contradictory feminist legacy of Playboy’s Hugh

Hefner’, 29 September 2017,
www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/playboy-hugh-hefner-feminist-
contradiction_n_59cd07c4e4b0210dfdfc822d?ri18n=true.

19. Nalina Eggert, ‘Hugh Hefner death: was the Playboy revolution
good for women?’, 28 September 2017,
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41426299.

20. Pascale Day, ‘Opinion’, 28 September 2017,

https://metro.co.uk/2017/09/28/hugh-hefner-might-have-been-
a-sleaze-but-playboy-helped-push-feminism-forwards-6963213/?
ito=cbshare.

21. Patrick J. Deneen, June 2015,

www.firstthings.com/article/2015/06/the-power-elite.

22. See www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/05/emma-watson-

vanity-fair-cover-feminism.
23. Thanks to the American writer Aaron Sibarium for coining the
term ‘sexual disenchantment’ here: see
https://americancompass.org/the-commons/three-theses-about-
cuties/.

24. https://medium.com/@totalsratmove?p=2194a96bdbb6.

25. Jessica Valenti, ‘#MeToo is about more than stopping rape’, 31

January 2018,
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/me-too-we-
demand-more-jessica-valenti.

26. Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman, Believe Me: How Trusting
Women Can Change the World. New York: Basic Books.

27.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_with_BDSM
_clubs.

28. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Week_at_Yale.

29. Allie Grasgreen, ‘Fifty shades of crimson’, 5 December 2012,

www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/05/kink-clubs-
harvards-well-established-healthy-students.

30. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. London: HarperCollins, 2012.

31. See www.glamour.com/story/12-friends-moments-that-will-

totally-make-you-cringe-now.

32. Laura House, ‘Plan dinner the night before, NEVER complain
and speak in a soft voice’, 7 December 2016,
 www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4011366/Cringeworthy-
1950s-marriage-advice-teaching-housewives-look-husbands.html.

33. www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/g3765/ways-to-please-
a-man/.

34. www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/sex/tips/g1508/turn-him-
on-sex-tips/.

35. www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-
love/confessions/advice/g1788/how-to-turn-him-on/.
2
Men and Women Are
Different
A Natural History of Rape by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer
is not a book that feminists are supposed to like.1 It isn’t even a book
that feminists are supposed to read. Following its publication in
2000, the authors of this academic book were widely denounced in
the media and for a while received so many credible death threats
that they were advised by the police to check their cars for bombs
regularly.2 Thornhill and Palmer’s efforts to offer an evolutionary
explanation for rape were not – to put it mildly – generally well
received.

But when I first came across the book, I read it compulsively, all in
one sitting, and was left by the end feeling both disconsolate and
oddly satisfied. I was working at the time at a rape crisis centre. My
job was to work one-to-one with women and girls who had been
raped, but I also had a teaching role, training volunteers for our
helpline and going into schools to teach consent workshops. The
ideology that I was expected to teach leant heavily on a very
particular academic model of rape, and over time I had developed
doubts about this model. A Natural History of Rape was a revelation
to me because it articulated those doubts and gave them substance. I
learned that I hadn’t been wrong to think that there was a problem
with the conventional feminist understanding of rape – the problem
really was there, and it couldn’t be wished away.

The 1975 book Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller remains the
foundational feminist text on the subject of rape. Indeed, it has
become a classic, so much so that in 1995 it was selected by the New
York Public Library as one of 100 most important books of the
twentieth century.3 Its fame is deserved, since Brownmiller’s analysis
was revolutionary, if flawed, and arrived at a crucial historical
moment during the height of the feminist second wave. In particular,
Brownmiller’s claim that rape has historically more often been
conceptualised as a property crime committed against a woman’s
male kin rather than as a crime committed against the woman
herself was both true and timely. This is why marital rape – the
abuse of a husband’s ‘property’ – was only relatively recently
criminalised in the West, and it remains legal in many non-Western
countries. The fight for its criminalisation has been one of the great
feminist campaigning efforts of the last century and has not yet been
fully won. Against Our Will helped to galvanise that effort in the
1970s and 1980s, which was a very fine achievement. For that alone,
the book merits praise.

Brownmiller’s argument is summed up in a famous quote from

Against Our Will, in which she describes rape as ‘nothing more or
less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep
all women in a state of fear.’4 Brownmiller’s model understands rape
as an expression of political, as well as physical, dominance. Thus
she suggests that the vast over-representation of men among
perpetrators of rape is a product not of biology but, rather, of
patriarchy: a social system which privileges male interests over
female ones. According to this view, rapists are not born but made –
they are the products of a culture that encourages men to see women
as their sexual playthings. And so, to end rape, we must first end
patriarchy.

Over the last fifty years, this argument has remained influential
among feminists of every ideological persuasion. For instance Jill
Filipovic, writing in The Guardian in 2013, expresses a mainstream
feminist idea when she insists that rape is ‘about both power and
violence. Rapists use sex organs as the locus of their violence, but
rape isn’t about sex, at least not in the sense of being motivated by
sexual attraction or an uncontrollable sexual urge.’5 This sentiment is
often expressed in one, succinct phrase: ‘rape is about power, not
sex.’

I often repeated this view as a rape crisis worker – in fact, I probably

used the exact phrase. I felt that to say otherwise – to suggest that
rapists are motivated by sexual desire, not just a desire for control –
would be to excuse them, which of course I didn’t want to do, given
that I was daily witnessing the terrible and lasting harm done by
rape. Plus there really is some truth to the claim – workplace sexual
harassment, for instance, is almost never perpetrated by junior men
against more senior women. Instead it follows a predictable gradient:
perpetrated by those with more power against those with less.

But I realise now that I wanted to believe that power was the whole
story in large part because I found the alternative hypothesis too
depressing for words. In a new preface to Against Our Will, written
in 2013, Brownmiller (ungenerously) represented this alternative:

Some evolutionary biologists believe quite strongly in the grim

inevitability of ‘men will be men.’ A vocal handful of neo-
Darwinians theorize that rape is a cost-effective strategy for
males (embedded with drives for aggression, promiscuity, and
reproduction) to spread their genes widely with a minimal
amount of parental investment. What a fancy argument for rape,
and for the failure to pay child support, as natural behavior!6

If we think that rape is ‘natural behaviour’ then we must – according

to Brownmiller’s view here – also think of it as, firstly, permissible
and, secondly, inevitable. This first claim is a textbook example of the
naturalistic fallacy: the false belief that because something is natural
it must necessarily be good. But the second claim is more difficult. If
rape is indeed a product of evolution, does that make it inevitable?
Well, not necessarily, but it certainly does make it more difficult to
eradicate, which is, I think, a key reason for the historical reluctance
of feminists to accept the scientific argument that Brownmiller is so
contemptuous of. Instead, most feminists continue to favour
socialisation theory as the preferred way of explaining male and
female behaviour, both good and bad. This theory is popular among
liberal feminists, whom I discussed at length in the last chapter, but
it is also popular among the other key group of feminists still active
in the twenty-first century: radical feminists, generally defined as
those feminists who call for the radical restructuring of a society
understood to be male supremacist.
Socialisation theory insists that there are no innate psychological
differences between men and women, and that any differences we
observe must be the product of nurture, not nature. There is some
evidence in support of this theory. In her bestselling book Delusions
of Gender, the Australian academic and author Cordelia Fine
outlines the long history of researchers’ attempts to find definitive
proof for innate differences, concluding that the case for socialisation
theory is ultimately much stronger. She makes clear that there is
plenty of evidence that males and females experience very different
treatment throughout their lifetimes. For instance, in one typical
study described by Fine:

Mothers were shown an adjustable sloping walkway, and asked

to estimate the steepness of slope their crawling eleven-month-
old child could manage and would attempt. Girls and boys
differed in neither crawling ability nor risk taking when it came
to testing them on the walkway. But mothers underestimated
girls and over-estimated boys – both in crawling ability and
crawling attempts – meaning that in the real world they might
often wrongly think their daughters incapable of performing or
attempting some motor feats, and equally erroneously think
their sons capable of others.7

These differences in socialisation start from the moment a child is

born, and we don’t know exactly how much of an effect they have
long term. However, it seems likely that they do have some effect and
that the observed psychological differences between the sexes are
therefore at least partially attributable to childhood socialisation.
Thus feminism in the post-second-wave era has often paid close
attention to childrearing, for instance objecting to toys or advertising
that promote gender stereotypes.

At the heart of this resocialisation project is a fundamentally utopian

idea: if the differences we see between the sexes are entirely
socialised, then they must also be entirely curable through cultural
reform, which means that, if all of us, right now, could accept the
feminist truth and start raising our children differently, then within a
generation we could remake the world.

It’s a nice idea, and I used to sincerely believe in it. But the evidence
put forward by the authors of A Natural History of Rape, as well as
many other scientists, forces us to reckon with a possibility that is a
lot less appealing: what if it’s not that easy? What if hierarchy, and
viciousness, and violence are baked in? What if the feminist task is
much, much harder than we’ve previously acknowledged?

Human animals
Brownmiller writes in Against Our Will that ‘no zoologist, as far as I
know, has ever observed that animals rape in their natural habitat,
the wild.’8 This statement is wrong – egregiously wrong, in fact,
because plenty of other animals commit rape, and they also behave
in all of the other horrible ways in which human beings sometimes
behave. This grim fact has been revealed in many studies published
within the last forty-seven years, but it was already well known by
1975. A few years earlier, for instance, the British primatologist John
MacKinnon had published his pioneering account of fifteen and a
half months spent observing wild orangutans and had described
many instances of ‘unwilling females being raped by aggressive
males.’9 Other researchers have since observed the same behaviour
among orangutans,10 as well as among other animals.11 We are not
the only species that rapes.

Socialisation theory depends upon a furtive form of human

exceptionalism, by which we are understood to be both uniquely
detached from the normal processes of natural selection and
uniquely corruptible by cultural influence. We do bad things,
according to this analysis, not because we are as fallible as any other
animal, but because we have chosen to invent cultures that corrupt
innocent little babies and turn them to wickedness. This ‘blank slate’
view gives ultimate authority to society in moulding the human
character, for good and ill.

There is a more credible way of understanding the world, but it is one

that offers much less scope for human perfectibility and so is much
less appealing to utopians. Instead of unwittingly imitating the
religious fundamentalists of the nineteenth century who resisted
Darwin, we could instead understand human beings to be animals –
more specifically, members of the Hominidae, the Great Apes, a
taxonomic family of primates that includes seven other extant
species. As the feminist and evolutionary biologist Sarah Blaffer
Hrdy writes:
 We are not ready-made out of somebody’s rib. We are
composites of many different legacies, put together from
leftovers in an evolutionary process that has been going on for
billions of years. Even the endorphins that made my labor pains
tolerable came from molecules that humans still share with
earthworms.12

As a consequence of these many different legacies, coupled with

evolutionary selection pressures favouring these traits, we sometimes
demonstrate kindness, gentleness and friendliness. At other times we
kill, torture and rape. And, like other hominids, male and female
members of our species are different in certain important ways –
both physiologically and behaviourally.

Let’s start with some of the physiological differences. Adult women

are approximately half as strong as adult men in the upper body and
two-thirds as strong in the lower body.13 On average, men can bench
press more mass than women can by a factor of roughly two and a
half14 and can punch harder by a similar factor.15 In hand grip
strength, 90 per cent of females produce less force than 95 per cent
of males.16 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.

And men can out-run women, as well as out-punch them. Sex

differences are less marked in sports that favour endurance rather
than strength alone, but they are nevertheless considerable. In
Olympic swimming and track events, women’s performances hover
at around 90 per cent of men’s, a figure sometimes referred to as the
‘golden ratio’ of athletics.17 This may sound minor, but it translates
into stunning differences at the upper end of the distribution, where
elite athletes are to be found. At the 2016 summer Olympics, for
instance, Elaine Thompson of Jamaica won gold with a time of 10.71
seconds. In the same games, Usain Bolt, also of Jamaica, won with a
time of 9.81 seconds. Although there was less than a second’s
difference between these two athletes, if men and women had been
running in the same event, then Thompson wouldn’t even have made
it into the final race. In fact, she would have been easily out-run by
Jamaican boys competing in the under-seventeen category,18 just as
the United States women’s national football team in 2017 were
beaten by the Dallas under-fifteen boys’ team,19 composed of boys
who had just crossed the crucial puberty line and so had begun to
develop the strength and power of adult men. The women’s category
has traditionally been protected in elite sports because, if it were not
protected, there would be no women in elite sports – men would out-
compete them every time.

For most people this observation is common sense, particularly those

who have any experience of competing in sports or even just play
fighting with siblings of the opposite sex. In the twenty-first century,
the only group pushing back against the fact of physical differences
between the sexes are liberal feminists, some of whom suggest that
the women’s category in sports should be opened to trans athletes
who have transitioned from male to female and have undergone
some degree of medical intervention to reverse the effects of male
puberty. Some liberal feminists go even further, arguing that the
women’s category ought to be dissolved altogether. The British
feminist Laurie Penny, for instance, wrote in 2016 on the controversy
over the inclusion of trans athletes in that year’s summer Olympics:
‘Strict gender segregation is seldom questioned, which conveniently
allows women’s events to be sidelined while ensuring that no
sportsman will ever be beaten by a woman. But dividing sports by
gender isn’t natural or inevitable.’20

Female athletes including Paula Radcliffe, Sharron Davies and Kelly

Holmes – for whom sex differences are more than a merely
philosophical problem – have strongly objected to this idea,21 with
Davies, for instance, insisting that, ‘[in order] to protect women’s
sport, those with a male sex advantage should not be able to compete
in women’s sport.’22 Contrary to Penny’s claims, no sportsman wants
to maintain sex segregation in sport because he’s afraid of being
beaten by a woman – anyone with any practical experience of sport
knows that such a fear would be fanciful.

But recognising these kinds of physical limitation does not sit well
with a liberal feminist project that aims to challenge any restrictions
on human freedom. If we acknowledge that there are immovable
differences between the sexes in terms of strength and speed, then
we are also forced to acknowledge not only that natal males cannot
fairly compete in women’s sports, but also that natal females
experience a permanent physical disadvantage. And the
consequences of this disadvantage go well beyond sports, particularly
when male upper body strength is set beside the fragility of the
female throat and skull. In the modern West, it has become
increasingly possible to become detached from the sexually
dimorphic body when one does not do a manual job, compete in
sports or bear children. But the unwelcome truth will always remain,
whether or not we can bear to look at it: almost all men can kill
almost all women with their bare hands, but not vice versa. And that
matters.

Differences above the neck

In contrast to their liberal counterparts, radical feminists are fully
willing to accept the fact of innate physical differences between the
sexes. Conventionally, however, neither liberals nor radicals are
willing to go a step further and accept an even more difficult fact –
that there are also innate differences ‘above the neck’. Radical
feminists committed to socialisation theory can acknowledge the
existence of male upper body strength, but they refuse to
acknowledge its cause.

The growth of broad, muscly shoulders in boys costs the body energy
that could be spent on other natural processes. This tells us that,
during our evolutionary history, boys who developed strong upper
bodies experienced a selection advantage. In the present day, we
know that men with heavily muscled upper bodies are considered
more attractive to straight women from a wide range of cultural
backgrounds,23 and we also know that men with this body type have
a fighting advantage – both against other animals and against other
men. It is impossible to explain this fact unless we recognise that
fighting must have played an important role in men’s evolutionary
history, which also obliges us to recognise that sex-specific behaviour
must also have been subject to natural selection.
But we often run into difficulties when we try to apply this insight to
the real world, because readers sceptical of the evolutionary account
of gendered behaviour will probably be thinking right now about
individual men they know who don’t have especially broad shoulders
and have never shown any interest in fighting of any kind. It’s very
easy to hear ‘men and women are on average a certain way’ and
understand this to mean ‘men and women are always like this’,
which anyone with any experience of the world will know is not true.
There are lots of men and women who are physically dissimilar from
other members of their sex, and very many more who don’t fit
masculine or feminine stereotypes in terms of their interests and
behaviour. In fact, I’d go further, and suggest that almost no one is a
walking gender stereotype – I have some stereotypically feminine
traits and some stereotypically masculine ones, and I’m sure you do
too.

But this kind of anecdotal evidence does not disprove the claim that
there are some important average differences between the sexes, and
that at the population level these differences have an effect. We can
insist simultaneously that there are plenty of exceptions to the rule,
and moreover that there is nothing wrong with being an exception to
the rule, while also acknowledging the existence of the rule.

We are a sexually dimorphic species, but not quite as sexually

dimorphic as some others. For instance, the male northern elephant
seal, found in the eastern Pacific Ocean, is three times heavier than
the female, and these males and females also have strikingly different
behaviour patterns in terms of diet and migration. Not
coincidentally, this species is also highly polygynous, with a single
male inseminating as many as fifty females in a mating season. In
contrast, the male harbour seal, found along Arctic and European
coasts, is almost the same weight as the female and is mostly
monogamous, with males and females demonstrating similar
behaviour. We are closer to harbour seals than we are to elephant
seals, since our females weigh on average just 25 per cent less than
our males and most of our societies are only mildly polygynous. But
there is some degree of sexual dimorphism that, while it may be
tempered by cultural conditions, remains evident in every human
society.

The complication is that we are in one particular way different from

harbour seals and northern elephant seals: as a species, we are
uniquely intelligent. This means that, unlike other animals, we can
choose to defy our instincts, at least to some extent, and, also unlike
other animals, we have been able to spread ourselves across the
planet and adjust to a wide range of environments. This kind of
variation in material conditions can sometimes cause human
societies to develop in very different directions. For instance, in a few
cultures, mating customs look strange to us. The Na in China are
famous for having no institution of marriage and deliberately
suppressing long-term pair bonding, and a few Amazonian groups
believe that a child can have two or more biological fathers. The
anomalous mating customs of the twenty-first-century West – the
subject of this book – are the product not of climate or terrain but,
rather, of new technologies not available to people in the past, as I
argued in chapter 1.
But all of this variation is built upon a biological substrate. Liberal
feminists and trans activists may do their best to deny this, but it is
still true that only one half of the human race is capable of getting
pregnant, and – failing the invention of artificial wombs – this will
remain true indefinitely. What’s more, even if we were somehow to
remove the human body entirely from reproduction, we would still
be left with our human brains, which remain the products of our
evolution. Natural selection has not kept pace with rapid social
change. The brains we have now are little different from the brains of
our nineteenth-century ancestors, or indeed those of our hunter
gatherer ancestors, since hunting and gathering was humanity’s first
and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 per cent of
human history.

The effect of natural selection on psychological differences between

men and women is politically thorny for a very good reason – it can
easily be misused. Evolutionary psychologists are sometimes accused
by their critics of telling Just So Stories that sound intuitively
convincing but have no real evidence behind them, and there is some
truth to this accusation. Some amateur theorists, and even some
professionals, have run riot with their imaginations, and it is, sadly,
the anti-feminists who have proved to be the most provocatively
imaginative.

An unfortunate effect of the feminist rejection of evolutionary

psychology is that most feminists have deliberately stepped away
from the discipline and so played only a minor role in shaping it. In
fact, the very idea of there being evolved psychological differences
between the sexes has become so taboo in some circles that even
voicing the possibility is taken to be an indication of anti-feminist
sentiment. In 2017, Google engineer James Damore circulated an
internal memo in which he suggested that the under-representation
of women at Google might partly be a consequence of (in his words)
‘differences in distributions of traits between men and women’.24
The scientific research that Damore cited was perfectly sound, but he
was nevertheless fired for violating Google’s code of conduct,
provoking a media storm.

The result of the taboo is that the people willing publicly to support
the evolutionary account often fall into one of two categories – either
they are not sensitive to the existence of the taboo (Damore, being
autistic, was probably in this category),25 or they are genuinely anti-
feminist. It is telling that so many of the lay enthusiasts for
evolutionary psychology tend to focus on one particular issue,
sometimes obsessively: affirmative action designed to increase the
representation of women in STEM. Part of the backlash against
Damore was a result of the fact that women who work at male-
dominated organisations such as Google often experience everyday
sexist insults that range from mild condescension to outright sexual
harassment, and many have therefore quite legitimately become
sensitive to clumsy talk of ‘male brains’ and ‘female brains’ that can
provide cover for claims of female inferiority.

I happen to agree with Damore that the under-representation of

women in STEM is probably partly attributable to innate biological
differences, but that, as Damore wrote in his original memo, ‘many of
these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between
men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given
these population level distributions.’26 What we’re talking about
when it comes to interest in the highly specialised world of tech is
two bell curves that overlap, and, just as in endurance sports, it’s
only at the tails that any average difference becomes obvious.

But while sex differences in STEM are no doubt important to people

who work in those fields, in the great scheme of things they are a
sideshow. There are some much bigger and more important
psychological differences between the sexes that deserve our urgent
attention, but what I often find when I speak to a certain kind of
male enthusiast for evolutionary psychology is that they are not
interested in discussing these issues. I say that I think Damore was
unfairly treated and they nod along happily. But when I raise the
issue of male violence they are suddenly nowhere to be seen, since
this issue casts men in a rather less flattering light.

Or, worse, they fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy. In 2020, Will
Knowland, an English teacher at Eton College – the oldest and
poshest school in the UK – attracted a great deal of media attention
when he was dismissed for producing a video titled ‘The Patriarchy
Paradox’ as part of a course on critical thinking intended for older
students.27 Knowland later alleged that he was disciplined because
‘the Head Master felt that some of the ideas put forward in my
lecture – such as the view that men and women differ psychologically
and not all of those differences are socially constructed – were too
dangerous for the boys to be exposed to.’28 I’ve no doubt this was
indeed why Knowland fell foul of the authorities at Eton, at least in
part, but while I am sympathetic to James Damore, given his
treatment by Google, I am not sympathetic to Knowland. Some of his
claims are straightforwardly false, and he betrays a poor
understanding of feminism, for instance using the term ‘radical
feminism’ to mean ‘extreme feminism’ (always a giveaway). And
while his video covers some of the same ground that I have covered
in this chapter, for instance strength and aggression differences
between men and women, Knowland uses evolutionary biology to
argue both that women are inherently inferior to men (not only
smaller and weaker but also less creative and innovative), and that
men have been uniquely victimised throughout human history, while
women have been coddled.

I fully understand why so many feminists are repulsed by any

association with the ideology of anti-feminists such as Knowland.
But we should not respond to the misuse of a scientific discipline by
rejecting that discipline altogether. The evidence itself is morally
neutral and can be put to all sorts of political purposes, even feminist
ones. A Natural History of Rape hit me like a ton of bricks because it
alerted me to the feminist potential of evolutionary psychology, a
discipline I had previously rejected as inherently suspect.

Rape as adaptation
I wrote in chapter 1 that the central feminist question ought not to be
‘How can we all be free?’ but, rather, ‘How can we best promote the
wellbeing of both men and women, given that these two groups have
different sets of interests, which are sometimes in tension?’
Evolutionary psychology draws attention to the ways in which men
and women’s interests are in tension, which makes the discipline
difficult to reconcile with a liberal feminist emphasis on freedom or a
radical feminist emphasis on utopianism. But if we stop aiming for
either absolute freedom or utopia, and start thinking more
pragmatically about how best to protect women’s interests in the
here and now, then we can start to reconceptualise evolutionary
psychology as a useful tool.

I sought out A Natural History of Rape because I was bothered by

certain questions that socialisation theory couldn’t answer – why, for
instance, such a high proportion of rape victims are teenagers. My
own experience of working with victims had given me a glimpse of
the demographics, and more systematic research confirms what I
suspected to be the case: there is a very obvious peak in female
victimisation, with the risk increasing very rapidly after the age of
about twelve and decreasing again, almost as rapidly, after the age of
about thirty. The very young and the very old are sometimes
targeted, but this is rare: the modal victim is fifteen,29 and the
percentage of female victims who are older than thirty when they are
raped is in single digits.30 Could it really be a coincidence, I
wondered, that the age of peak rape victimisation is also the age at
which I personally attracted the most sexual harassment on the
street? It turns out this isn’t a coincidence, as the sociologists
Richard Felson and Richard Moran write:
 Social science has demonstrated a strong relationship between
age and sexual attractiveness. Heterosexual men are sexually
attracted to young women, while homosexual men are attracted
to young men. The age preference explains why adult film stars,
sex workers, exotic dancers as well as glamour models are often
young, and why their earnings decline as they age.31

Female rape victimisation and female sexual attractiveness peak at

exactly the same age – the two graphs map onto each other almost
perfectly. Socialisation theory can’t account for this because, if ‘rape
is about power, not sex’, why would rapists just happen to target the
age group that also just happens to be the most sexually desirable to
men?

And then there’s the age of the rapists themselves. This skew isn’t
quite as extreme as it is among female victims, but there is still a very
clear peak among young men: one typical study found 46 per cent of
rapists to be under age twenty-five, 17 per cent under age eighteen,
and 15 per cent under age fifteen.32 This fits not only with the age
profile of violent offenders in general – who are overwhelmingly
young men – but also with the peak of male sex drive.33 Again, if
‘rape is about power, not sex’, why would this be the case?

There was another issue I had been having doubts about when I first
opened A Natural History of Rape. In victim surveys, the proportion
of rape victims who are male is typically somewhere between 2 and 5
per cent, with almost all of these rapes committed by other men. It
had occurred to me, while looking over the data, that this is about the
same proportion of the male population that identifies as gay or
bisexual – a coincidence, according to the Brownmiller model, but
highly suggestive if we move beyond it, given that gay and bisexual
men commit rape about as often as straight men do, but the victims
of these rapists, of course, include other men and boys. Given this,
should we still understand rape to be an expression of political
dominance rooted in patriarchy, or should we instead consider a
much more obvious possibility: that rape is an aggressive expression
of sexual desire?

Resistance to this research evidence comes from two very different

groups, both of whom tend either to ignore the data or quibble with
it, and often end up – perversely – echoing each other. The first is
anti-feminist men’s rights activists, and the second is those feminists
who, in an effort to be as inclusive as possible, deliberately avoid
making any generalisations about either rapists or their victims.
While teaching workshops, a rape crisis colleague, for instance, used
to use the phrase ‘people of all genders sexually assault people of all
genders’ – a statement that is technically true, in the sense that you
can find examples of every possible configuration of victim and
perpetrator, but is misleading in its framing.

In every part of the world, something in the region of 98 to 99 per

cent of convicted sex offenders are male, and the women who make
up the remaining 1 to 2 per cent typically offend quite differently. For
instance, women are much more likely to offend alongside a male co-
offender (usually a husband or boyfriend), and women almost never
assault strangers. This is not to say that there are zero examples of
women committing stranger rape or other male-typical crimes – in a
world containing more than 7 billion people, rare events happen
every day – but it is foolish to the point of dishonesty to pretend that
there is not a very obvious pattern at play here.

No, I’m afraid that rape is a male crime, and not only in our species
but also in many others. And it has evolved for a startlingly obvious
reason: as Wrangham and Peterson put it, ‘rape has entered some
species’ behavioural repertoire because it can increase an individual
male’s success in passing on genes to the next generation (as all
evolved behaviours ultimately must).’34 In other words, it is one
method by which males can reproduce – it confers, in some
situations, a selection advantage.

This is the central thesis of A Natural History of Rape, a book that

applies evolutionary theory to the task of understanding the causes
of rape and the best methods of preventing it. We start from the
recognition that reproduction places more physical demands on
women than it does on men (sitting here writing this while six
months pregnant, I can personally attest to this). Pregnancy lasts
more than nine months and is followed by a dangerous labour, which
is followed by many more years of breast-feeding and infant care.
Men, however, really need to expend only the amount of effort it
takes to orgasm in order to reproduce. It may also be advantageous
for fathers to hang around after conception and increase the mother
and baby’s chances of survival, but it isn’t always necessary: a man
who can game the system by abandoning a woman after
impregnating her, and then riding off into the sunset to impregnate
many more women, is also successfully spreading his genetic
material. He carries the risk of retribution, including violence from
the woman’s male kin, but in some instances the benefits may
outweigh the risks. Put differently, there are different modes of male
sexuality: the mode that encourages commitment and the mode that
encourages promiscuity (much more on this in chapter 4).

When it was first published, A Natural History of Rape attracted a

great deal of criticism from feminists, some of whom misrepresented
the contents of the book.35 Many critics misunderstood the argument
that was being made or else refused to accept that Thornhill and
Palmer were sincere in their condemnation of rape, despite the fact
that the authors were at pains throughout the book to highlight the
harm caused by rape and chose to dedicate the work to ‘the women
and girls in our lives’.

Too few of these feminist critics recognised how useful the book
could be in designing policies that actually work to prevent rape, and
indeed in thinking more broadly about how a sexual culture might
impact men and women differently. I strongly believe that this
hostility to evolutionary biology is a mistake, which is why, in the rest
of this book, I’m regularly going to use the work of evolutionary
biologists in the course of making feminist arguments – once we
accept that men and women are different, many other things follow.

How to bear it
What proportion of men have the desire to rape? Not all, I’m happy
to report, although the proportion is still disturbingly high, as the
evolutionary biologist David Buss writes:
 Individual men differ in their proclivity toward rape. In one
study, men were asked to imagine that they had the possibility of
forcing sex on someone else against her will with no chance of
getting caught, no chance that anyone would find out, no risk of
disease, and no possibility of damage to their reputation. Thirty-
five percent indicated that there was some likelihood that they
would force sex on the woman under these conditions, although
in most cases the likelihood was slight. In another study that
used a similar method, 27 percent of the men indicated that
there was some likelihood that they would force sex on a woman
if there was no chance of getting caught. Although these
percentages are alarmingly high, if taken at face value they also
indicate that most men are not potential rapists.36

A smaller proportion of men admit to having actually committed

rape, usually phrased in surveys as something like ‘forced an
unwilling partner into sex’ – in the United States and the UK, this
figure hovers at around 10 per cent. In her work, the social
psychologist and domestic abuse expert Dina McMillan also uses the
figure of 10 per cent37 as a rough ballpark for the proportion of the
male population that are reliably dangerous. There is a core minority
who will be sexually aggressive in most circumstances and a larger
minority who will be sexually aggressive in some circumstances. This
still means, thankfully, that the majority of men are not potential
rapists – the infamous #NotAllMen hashtag is actually true.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy for potential victims to identify potential

rapists. Thornhill and Palmer do point out that, as we’d expect,
‘incarcerated rapists exhibit significantly more sexual arousal in
response to depictions of sexual coercion involving physical force
than men who have not been convicted of sex offences.’38 And Buss
adds that, in terms of personality, rapists tend to be more impulsive,
hostile, disagreeable, promiscuous, hyper-masculine, and low in
empathy compared with other men.39 In other words, it is sometimes
possible to spot rapists, or at least to make generalisations about
them. But not always.

So, how to avoid them? Most feminists – both liberal and radical –
dislike this question, and I do understand why. Every now and again,
a police force will release some kind of campaign about rape
prevention – in 2015, for instance, Sussex Police produced posters
that advised women to stick together on nights out, to keep their
friends safe40 – and invariably these efforts invite a feminist
backlash. The Sussex Police posters were met by a petition for their
removal, with the feminist authors of the petition writing that ‘the
people who have the most power to prevent rape and sexual assault
from happening are not friends or bystanders but rather the
perpetrators of the crime – the rapists.’41

Which is true, of course it is! But here’s the point: rapists don’t care
what feminists have to say. I sympathise with the feminist instinct to
object to even the slightest suggestion of victim blaming, particularly
by police, since police forces across the world invariably have
tarnished histories, and there continue to be all sorts of problems
with the criminal justice system, which is why I have spent most of
my adult life campaigning to improve both the law on sexual violence
and its implementation. But 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. I could hardly have more contempt for
rapists – I joke with my friends that I want to market a range of tiny
guillotines to deal with rapists in a very direct manner – and yet I’m
exhausted by a feminist discourse that can’t move beyond just saying
over and over again that rape is bad. Yes, rape is bad. We know that.
Now let’s actually do something about it.

There are two ways of reducing rape. The first is to constrain would-
be rapists, for instance by imprisoning them, and the second is to
limit opportunities for them to act on their desires. Prosecution rates
for sexual crimes are appallingly low in every part of the world – in
the UK, less than 1 per cent of rapes result in a conviction – which is
partly due to low reporting rates, partly due to failures within the
criminal justice system, and partly due to the fact that it is inherently
difficult to prosecute rape committed by anyone other than a
stranger and against anyone other than a child. It’s always going to
be challenging to prove beyond reasonable doubt the presence or
absence of consent, even in a perfect system, and we don’t have one
of those.

I would like convicted rapists to spend much longer in prison – their

whole lives, if needs be – because I have very little faith in the
effectiveness of sex offender rehabilitation programmes. One such
programme, run in prisons in England and Wales for more than a
decade, was actually found to slightly increase rates of reoffending.42
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.
If wanting to protect these potential victims from violence makes me
a ‘carceral feminist’, then I wear the label with pride.

The feminists who describe me as ‘carceral’ are able to present only

one alternative to imprisonment: resocialisation, typically attempted
through consent workshops for children and young adults. I’ve both
designed and taught these workshops and I don’t think they’re
entirely useless, because they can achieve two things: they can teach
participants (including potential victims) what is and is not illegal,
and they can offer schools or other institutions the opportunity to
declare a zero tolerance attitude. If, for instance, a student is caught
sharing revenge porn having attended an official consent workshop,
he or she can’t plausibly claim not to have known that this was both
illegal and punishable by expulsion.

However, consent workshops are very unlikely to prevent rape,

because rape is not caused by a lack of education. Hundreds of
thousands of years of sexual violence – not only in our own species
but also in many others – is not a consequence of some kind of
misunderstanding, swiftly cleared up during a 45-minute workshop
in which kids are told in words of one syllable not to rape one
another. Nurture does have a role to play: as we’ll see in chapter 5,
for instance, there is good reason to believe that violent porn can
intensify an existing arousal pattern. But putting one’s faith in
resocialisation is not only foolish but dangerous.

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. Those circumstances can include a victim who is
drunk, high, or otherwise vulnerable, the absence of witnesses, and
no fear of any legal or social repercussions. Both women and men in
the sex trade are spectacularly vulnerable (much more on this in later
chapters). And young women between the ages of about thirteen and
twenty-five are the prime group likely to be targeted.

If you wanted to design the perfect environment for the would-be

rapist, then you couldn’t do much better than a party or nightclub
filled with young women who are wearing high heels (limiting
mobility) and drinking or taking drugs (limiting awareness). Is it
appalling for a person even to contemplate assaulting these women?
Yes. Does that moral statement provide any protection to these
women whatsoever? No. I made this mistake many, many times as a
young woman, and I understand the cultural pressure. But, while
young women should feel free to get hammered with their girlfriends
or highly trusted men, doing so among strange men will always be
risky.

I think we all know this, just as we all know that it’s risky for young
women to hitch-hike, travel alone, or go back to a strange man’s
house. The sorry truth is that something in the region of 10 per cent
of men pose a risk, and those men aren’t always identifiable on first
sight, or even after long acquaintance. So my advice to young women
has to be this: avoid putting yourself in a situation where you are
alone with a man you don’t know or a man who gives you a bad
feeling in your gut. He is almost certainly stronger and faster than
you, which means that the only thing standing between you and rape
is that man’s self-control. I know full well that this advice doesn’t
protect against all forms of rape, including (but not limited to)
incestuous rape, prison rape, child rape and marital rape. I wish I
could offer some advice to protect against these atrocities, but I can’t.

Other feminists can gnash their teeth all they like, accuse me of
victim blaming, and insist that the burden should be on rapists, not
their victims, to prevent rape. But they have no other solutions to
offer, since feeble efforts at resocialisation don’t actually work. What
does sometimes work is a solution that is unreliable, unfair and
painfully, painfully costly: to reduce the opportunities available to
would-be rapists and to imprison those who either cannot or will not
resist their aggressive sexual impulses. Because rape isn’t only about
power, it’s also about sex.

Notes
1. Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape:
Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. Chicago: MIT Press, 2000.
2. Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One
Scholar’s Search for Justice. New York: Penguin, p. 124.

3. See www.nypl.org/voices/print-publications/books-of-the-
century.

4. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape.

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975, p. 6 [Kindle locations 238–9].

5. Jill Filipovic, 29 August 2013,

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/29/rape-about-
power-not-sex.

6. Brownmiller, Against Our Will [Kindle locations 92–3].

7. Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender. Cambridge: Icon, 2013, p. 198.

8. Brownmiller, Against Our Will [Kindle location 199].

9. John MacKinnon, ‘The orang-utan in Sabah today’, Oryx 11 (1971):

141–91, at p. 175.

10. B. M. F. Galdikas, Reflections of Eden: My Life with the

Orangutans of Borneo. London: Indigo, 1996; John C. Mitani,
‘Mating behaviour of male orangutans in the Kutai Game Reserve,
Indonesia’, Animal Behaviour 33 (1985): 392–402.

11. Thornhill and Palmer, A Natural History of Rape, pp. 82–3.

12. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers,

Infants, and Natural Selection. New York: Pantheon, 1999.
13. A. E. Miller, J. D. MacDougall, M. A. Tarnopolsky and D. G. Sale,
‘Gender differences in strength and muscle fiber characteristics’,
European Journal of Applied Physiology and Occupational
Physiology 66 (1993): 254–62.

14. Tal Amasay, Constance M. Mier, Katelyn K. Foley and Tonya L.

Carswell, ‘Gender differences in performance of equivalently
loaded push-up and bench-press exercises’, Journal of Sport 5
(2016): 46–63.

15. Paul Gabrielsen, ‘Why males pack a powerful punch’, 5 February

2020, https://phys.org/news/2020-02-males-powerful.html.

16. D. Leyk, W. Gorges, D. Ridder et al., ‘Hand-grip strength of young

men, women and highly trained female athletes’, European
Journal of Applied Physiology 99 (2007): 415–21.

17. Robinson Meyer, 7 August 2012,

www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/the-golden-
ratio-the-one-number-that-describes-how-mens-world-records-
compare-with-womens/260758/.

18. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARIFTA_Games#Boys_Under_1
7.

19. See www.truthorfiction.com/was-the-u-s-womens-national-

team-defeated-by-teenaged-boys-in-a-2017-soccer-match/.

20. See www.newstatesman.com/politics/sport/2016/07/olympics-

one-question-will-hang-over-female-athletes-are-you-real-
 woman.

21. ‘Dame Kelly Holmes, Paula Radcliffe and Sharron Davies to write
to IOC over transgender athletes’, 18 March 2019,
www.bbc.co.uk/sport/47608623.

22. Sean Ingle, 3 March 2019,

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/mar/03/sports-
stars-weigh-in-on-row-over-transgender-athletes.

23. Aaron Sell, Aaron W. Lukazsweski and Michael Townsley, ‘Cues

of upper body strength account for most of the variance in men’s
bodily attractiveness’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B:
Biological Sciences 284 (2017),
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.1819.

24. ‘Google’s ideological echo chamber’, July 2017,

https://web.archive.org/web/20170809021151/https://diversity
memo.com/.

25. Paul Lewis, ‘I see things differently’, 17 November 2017,

www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-damore-
google-memo-interview-autism-regrets.

26. ‘Google’s ideological echo chamber’.

27. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTHgMxQEoPI.

28. Camilla Turner, 26 November 2020,

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/11/26/exclusive-eton-college-
dismisses-teacher-amid-free-speech-row/.
29. Richard B. Felson and Patrick R. Cundiff, ‘Sexual assault as a
crime against young people’, Archives of Sexual Behavior 43
(2014): 273–84.

30. Thornhill and Palmer, A Natural History of Rape, p. 72.

31. Richard Felson and Richard Moran, 2 January 2016,

https://quillette.com/2016/01/02/to-rape-is-to-want-sex-not-
power/.

32. T. A. Gannon, R. M. Collie, T. Ward and J. Thakker, ‘Rape:

psychopathology, theory and treatment’, Clinical Psychology
Review 28 (2008): 982–1008.

33. Thornhill and Palmer, A Natural History of Rape, p. 134.

34. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes

and the Origins of Human Violence. London: Bloomsbury, 1997,
p. 140.

35. Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger, pp. 118–20.

36. David Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human

Mating. New York: Basic Books, [1994] 2016, p. 256.

37. Dina McMillan, 13 April 2018,

https://singjupost.com/unmasking-the-abuser-dina-mcmillan-at-
tedxcanberra-full-transcript/.

38. Thornhill and Palmer, A Natural History of Rape, p. 76.

39. Buss, The Evolution of Desire, p. 256.

40. ‘Sussex Police defends “victim blaming” campaign poster’, 8
April 2015, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-32216176.

41. See www.change.org/p/sussex-police-withdraw-your-rape-

prevention-posters-which-blames-victims-of-sexual-assault.

42. ‘Sex offender treatment scheme led to increase in reoffending’,

30 June 2017, www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/30/sex-
offenders-on-group-treatment-programme-more-likely-to-
reoffend.
3
Some Desires Are Bad
The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt likes to invent
scenarios that test our moral intuitions. He will ask research
participants to listen to a story, give their opinion on it, and then
explain their reasoning. Here is one such scenario: imagine a man
goes to a supermarket and buys himself a whole dead chicken. He
takes it home, has sex with it, and then eats it. No one else ever finds
out. Did he do anything wrong?

Haidt has several other scenarios concerned with sexual ethics. Is it

OK for a brother and sister to have sex, if they use multiple forms of
contraception, and no one else knows about it? Or, to use a real
scenario, is it OK for a man to consent to being eaten by another man
for the purposes of sexual gratification?1 He has found that
participants’ responses tend to be affected by their political
allegiances. Social conservatives generally give swift, confident
answers, because they are able to appeal to values such as sanctity
and authority. For them, having sex with a dead chicken or a sibling
obviously violates religious or traditionalist moral principles and is
therefore unacceptable. End of story.

Liberals have more difficulty: they want to say that the acts are
wrong, because they are instinctively disgusted by them, but the
scenarios are designed to prevent any appeal to J. S. Mill’s harm
principle: ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will,
is to prevent harm to others.’ In the chicken example, for instance, it
is difficult to identify anyone who has been harmed by the man’s
behaviour, since the chicken, being dead, can’t be harmed, and other
people, being ignorant of the act, can’t be harmed either. The man is
simply exercising his sexual autonomy, which means that, as Haidt
puts it, ‘if your moral matrix is limited to the ethic of autonomy, then
you’re at high risk of being dumbfounded by this case.’

Not everyone is dumbfounded, though. The American anthropologist

Gayle Rubin, for instance – a key figure in the academic discipline of
Queer Theory, which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s – would, I
imagine, be unbothered by the chicken scenario, just as she is
unbothered by unusual sexual behaviour in general. As she writes:

In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. A person is not

considered immoral, is not sent to prison, and is not expelled
from her or his family, for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an
individual may go through all this and more for enjoying shoe
leather. Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a
person likes to masturbate over a shoe?2

Rubin is radical in her liberalism. She famously rejects the idea of

‘good’ or ‘bad’ sexual behaviour, interpreting such moralising as
inherently oppressive. To her mind, sex does not need to involve
either love or commitment, and it certainly needn’t have any
connection to marriage or reproduction. The only thing that matters
to liberal feminists such as Rubin is whether or not all parties are
able and willing to consent to a particular sex act. All other sexual
morality must be discarded – indeed, one group that was influential
early on in arguing for the destigmatisation of commercial sex made
the point crystal clear with their choice of name: COYOTE, ‘Call Off
Your Old Tired Ethics’.

Rubin’s Queer Theory owed a great debt to Michel Foucault’s

History of Sexuality, the first volume of which was published in
1978. And Foucault, in his turn, owed a great debt to Sigmund
Freud’s writing on sexual repression. This intellectual tradition is
interpreted by its proponents as a progressive undermining of
bourgeois sexual norms, which have historically functioned to keep
people with unusual sexual interests either locked out of respectable
society or else made permanently unhappy when they are forced to
hide their authentic sexual selves. The famous slogan of the May
1968 student protests in Paris, ‘Il est interdit d’interdire!’ (It is
forbidden to forbid), makes the point succinctly and has become
remarkably mainstream in the decades since, jumbled up with the
feminist attempt to free women from traditional sexual norms that
restricted female agency and pleasure. Thus the cause of Foucault,
Rubin, Freud, and womankind as a whole is assumed by liberal
feminism to be one and the same: ‘us’ (the revolutionaries) against
‘them’ (the traditionalists). Liberté, Égalité, Sexualité!

But I want to suggest a different framing – a class struggle, but not

between the revolutionaries and the traditionalists but between two
very different classes of people, with two very different sets of
interests.
The sexual free market
Critics of free market capitalism have correctly observed that, within
a society riven by gross inequalities of wealth and power, the
pleasures of freedom are not equally available to all. As the economic
historian and socialist R. H. Tawney wrote in 1931:

Equality implies the deliberate acceptance of social restraints

upon individual expansion. It involves the prevention of
sensational extremes of wealth and power by public action for
the public good. If liberty means, therefore, that every individual
shall be free, according to his opportunities, to indulge without
limit his appetite for either, it is clearly incompatible, not only
with economic and social, but with civil and political, equality,
which also prevent the strong exploiting to the full the
advantages of their strength … freedom for the pike is death for
the minnows.3

Of course the factory owner supports free marketisation, and of

course his wage slave disagrees – the pike and the minnow have
different economic interests. This is also true in the sexual
marketplace, which was once strictly regulated but has now been
made (mostly) free.

However, in this case, the classes are not the workers and the
bourgeoisie but, rather, men and women – or, more precisely, the
group of people who have done particularly well out of the free
marketisation of sex are men high in the personality trait that
psychologists call ‘sociosexuality’: the desire for sexual variety.
The psychologist David Schmitt describes the importance of
sociosexuality:

Those who score relatively low on this dimension are said to

possess a restricted sociosexual orientation – they tend toward
monogamy, prolonged courtship, and heavy emotional
investment in long-term relationships. Those residing at the
high end of sociosexuality are considered more unrestricted in
mating orientation, they tend toward promiscuity, are quick to
have sex, and experience lower levels of romantic relationship
closeness.4

In a study of male and female sociosexuality across forty-eight

countries, Schmitt and his team found large sex differences to be ‘a
cultural universal’, regardless of a nation’s level of economic and
social equality between the sexes. Although there is of course
variation within the sexes, with some individual women high in
sociosexuality and some individual men low in it, the two bell curves
are substantially different. This difference is explained by what
evolutionary biologists term ‘parental investment theory’ – put
simply, women can produce offspring at a maximum rate of about
one pregnancy per year, whereas promiscuous men can theoretically
produce offspring every time they orgasm. Although there are some
limited circumstances in which multiple short-term mating might be
advantageous for women – in conditions of danger and scarcity, for
instance, in which sex might be exchanged for resources and
protection – in general, natural selection has favoured women who
are choosy about their mates.
We see this play out in male and female sexual behaviour. The
research is clear: we know that men, on average, prefer to have more
sex and with a larger number of partners, that sex buyers are almost
exclusively male, that men watch a lot more porn than women do,
and that the vast majority of women, if given the option, prefer a
committed relationship to casual sex. Sexual fetishes (also known as
‘paraphilias’) are also much more commonly found in men than in
women and, although the cause of this difference is not well
understood, men’s greater average sociosexuality seems to be a
factor.5 All in all, the evidence demonstrates that the acts that have
become much more socially acceptable over the last sixty years are
acts that men are much more likely to enjoy. It is a good time to be a
fetishist, a sex buyer, a porn user and a playboy – it is the highly
sociosexual who have done best out of sexual liberalism, and these
people are overwhelmingly male.

There have also been other beneficiaries of sexual liberalisation –

most importantly, lesbian, gay and bisexual people, whose
relationships are now, for the first time, not only decriminalised but
also granted state recognition in many countries. The decline in
homophobia across the West within the last century is truly
remarkable. In 1983, fully half of respondents told the British Social
Attitudes Survey that ‘sexual relations between adults of the same
sex’ were ‘always wrong’.6 By 2012, this proportion had more than
halved, and, a year later, legislation introducing same-sex marriage
in England and Wales was passed under a Conservative government.
Since 2001, dozens of other countries have legalised same-sex
marriage, including the United States in 20157 – a prospect that was
almost unthinkable at the height of the AIDS crisis in 1989, when
Andrew Sullivan was the first to make the case for this reform in a
prominent American publication.8

Any historical event as radical as the sexual revolution is going to

have a diverse range of effects, both positive and negative, but the
key point I want to stress in this book is that it is wrong to interpret
this historical period as an example of ‘progress’ in any
straightforward sense. I am a ‘progress’ apostate: I do not believe
that there is any such thing as the gradual, inevitable marching
towards the good that Martin Luther King Junior so famously
described as the ‘arc of the moral universe’ bending towards justice.
Every social change has trade-offs, which are obscured by a
simplistic narrative that leaves no space for complexity.

Sex is relational. This means, of course, that the loving partner needs
another loving partner. But this also means that the fetishist with a
taste for sadomasochism, voyeurism or dirty underwear needs other
people to participate in his fetish, just as the sex buyer needs sex
sellers and the porn user needs porn producers. This isn’t a problem
for a theorist such as Gayle Rubin, who would point out that plenty
of people (mostly, by necessity, women) are available to provide for
these desires – sometimes readily, sometimes in return for financial
compensation. But this underestimates the extent to which
participants in the sexual free market may be subjected to more or
less subtle coercion, just as workers in an economic system act in
response to incentives and constraints.
Rubin and her allies would no doubt be appalled by any association
between themselves and the British prime minister Margaret
Thatcher, but their approach to sexual ethics is nicely summed up by
Thatcher’s declaration, during a 1987 interview, that ‘there’s no such
thing as society.’ The phrase has since become notorious in British
politics, often interpreted by Thatcher’s critics as expressive of a
greedy and often brutal individualism that she is taken to represent.
Despite her party allegiance, Thatcher was not a conservative with a
small ‘c’ because she did not seek to conserve. She deliberately
pursued a process of creative destruction, stripping out the old to
make way for the new. Her supporters insist that this was a necessity
– that the coal mining industry, for instance, had no more life left in
it – but her critics point out that the disruption brought about by her
aggressive interventions has led to long-term misery, particularly in
areas of Britain that are now post-industrial, and that this misery
ultimately led to the further disruption heralded by the Brexit
referendum of 2016.

Thatcher did not obey G. K. Chesterton’s directive, laid out in this

famous passage:
 In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming
them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which
will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a
certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a
fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of
reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this;
let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of
reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I
certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then,
when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of
it, I may allow you to destroy it.’9

Chesterton points out that the person who doesn’t understand the
purpose of a social institution is the last person who should be
allowed to reform it. The world is big and dynamic – so much so that
literally no one is capable of fully understanding it or predicting how
its systems might respond to change. The parable of ‘Chesterton’s
Fence’ ought to encourage caution in would-be reformers, because
there is such a thing as society, and it is more complex than any of us
can fathom.

But the sexual Thatcherites do not recognise the delicate and

relational nature of a sexual culture and therefore cannot see that
society is composed of both pikes and minnows, as well as people
who may play both roles at different times (‘half victim, half
accomplice’, as Simone de Beauvoir put it). Their analysis can only
understand people as freewheeling, atomised individuals, all out
looking out for number one and all up for a good time. Thus when
they see a taboo – against, say, having sex with chicken corpses –
they assume that, if no obvious purpose for the taboo springs to
mind, it must therefore be unnecessary. They falsely assume that,
with all such taboos removed, then we would all be liberated and
capable of making entirely free choices about our sexual lives,
sampling from a menu of delightful options made newly available by
the sexual revolution (‘What will sir have today – the chicken?’).

But in fact our choices are severely constrained, not only because we
are impressionable creatures who absorb the values and ideas of our
surrounding culture but also because sex is a social activity: it
requires the involvement of other people. If I am, for instance, a
young female student looking for a boyfriend at my twenty-first-
century university, and I don’t want to have sex before marriage,
then I will find my options limited in a way that they wouldn’t have
been seventy years ago. When sex before marriage is expected, and
when almost all of the other women participating in my particular
sexual market are willing to ‘put out’ on a first or second date, then
not being willing to do the same becomes a competitive
disadvantage. The abstinent young woman must either be
tremendously attractive, in order to out-compete her more
permissive peers, or she must be happy to restrict her dating pool
only to those men who are as unusual as she is. Being eccentric
carries costs.

The ‘progress’ narrative disguises the challenge of

interconnectedness by presenting history as a simple upward
trajectory, with all of us becoming steadily more free as old-
fashioned restrictions are surmounted. But there is another way of
understanding history – a way that is perhaps less reassuring but
which is able to incorporate the inevitable fact of conflict and trade-
offs.

The wrong side of history

We should reject the progress narrative, looking instead to those
such as the Marxist critic Raymond Williams who remind us that
societies are always in a state of flux. At any one time, Williams
writes, there will be dominant, residual and emergent cultural
elements existing simultaneously and in tension with one another.10
We tend to celebrate those historical figures who were part of
emergent strains that later became dominant: the people credited
with being ahead of their time and later vindicated, sometimes only
(and most romantically) in death. But we usually pay less attention
to the people who found themselves part of residual elements that
may once have been dominant but eventually faded away. We
venerate the people whose ideologies won out, perhaps imagining
ourselves to be among their number. We think a lot less about the
people who lost.

The infamous campaigner Mary Whitehouse is one of history’s

losers. Born in 1910, she never let go of her Edwardian sensibilities,
even as the society she knew collapsed around her ears. She spent
thirty-seven years organising letter-writing campaigns in an effort to
halt the arrival of what she called the ‘permissive society’, horrified
as she was by the displays of sex and violence that suddenly appeared
on British television screens from the 1960s onwards. A
contemporary of Whitehouse’s described her in the Financial Times
as a ‘little Canute, exhorting the waves of moral turpitude to
retreat’.11 She didn’t campaign for change, she campaigned for stasis.
And she failed utterly, in a grand display of public humiliation.

Some of Whitehouse’s concerns look rather silly now. She and her
fellow campaigners expended a huge amount of energy on the kind of
sauciness that nowadays seems quaint. The double entendres in
songs such as Chuck Berry’s ‘My Ding-a-Ling’ and sitcoms such as It
Ain’t Half Hot Mum all provoked letters, as did a suggestively placed
microphone during Mick Jagger’s appearance on Top of the Pops.

One of Whitehouse’s first forays into public life was an anonymous

1953 piece for the Sunday Times that advised mothers on how best
to inhibit homosexuality in their sons. This open homophobia was
combined with a crusade against blasphemy that often called upon
archaic legislation. In 1977, she pursued a private prosecution
against Gay News for printing a poem that described a Roman
centurion fantasising about having sex with the body of the crucified
Christ. The editor was convicted of blasphemous libel, and the QC
who represented him later wrote that Whitehouse’s ‘fear of
homosexuals was visceral’ – he may well have been right.12

Her reputation as a bigoted fuddy-duddy means that, if Whitehouse

is remembered now, it is usually as a punchline. And indeed in her
own lifetime she was the subject of constant ridicule. One of her
books was ritually burned on a BBC sitcom, her name was used in
jest as the title of the hit comedy show The Mary Whitehouse
Experience, and a porn star mockingly changed her name to ‘Mary
Whitehouse’ by deed poll (this second Mary Whitehouse later
committed suicide). Sir Hugh Greene, director general of the BBC
between 1960 and 1969, openly despised Whitehouse, so much so
that he purchased a grotesque naked portrait of her to hang in his
office. The story goes that Greene would vent his frustration by
throwing darts at the portrait, squealing with delight if he managed
to hit one of Whitehouse’s six breasts.13

Arch-progressive Owen Jones, columnist at The Guardian, is among

those who now use Whitehouse’s name as short-hand for being on
the ‘wrong side of history’ (a phrase Jones often employs).14 Such a
framing presents Whitehouse as villainy incarnate, set against the
romantic heroes of Raymond Williams’s emergent strain – in this
case, Sir Hugh Greene and his permissive allies. But this historical
narrative only works if one is deliberately selective. Whitehouse has
found herself condemned by ‘history’ on the issues of homosexuality,
blasphemy, and the phallic use of microphones on Top of the Pops.
But on one issue she was remarkably prescient: Whitehouse was one
of the few public figures of her day who gave a damn about child
sexual abuse.

At the same time that Sir Hugh Greene was lobbing darts at
Whitehouse’s naked portrait, his organisation was enabling abuses
perpetrated against women and children by many famous men,
including – most notoriously – the TV presenter Jimmy Savile. It
was only after Savile died, unpunished, in 2011 that the scale of his
crimes became clear. It is now believed that, over the course of at
least forty years, BBC staff turned a blind eye to the rape and sexual
assault of up to 1,000 girls and boys by Savile in the corporation’s
changing rooms and studios.15 He abused many more victims, young
and old, male and female, in hospitals, schools, and anywhere else he
could seek them out. Savile’s celebrity status enabled his sexual
aggression, allowing him access to vulnerable victims, particularly
children, and discouraging investigation.

Savile made little effort to conceal what he got up to, and indeed
would often joke about it. Answering the phone to journalists, he
would apparently greet them, unprompted, with the phrase ‘She told
me she was over sixteen’, invariably met with nervous laughter.16 In
his autobiography, published in 1974, Savile openly admitted to some
of his crimes, for instance writing of a time, before he became a TV
presenter, when he had been running nightclubs in the north of
England and a police officer asked him to look out for a young girl
who had run away from a home for juvenile offenders. Savile told the
officer that, if the girl showed up at one of his clubs, he would be sure
to hand her over to the authorities – ‘but I’ll keep her all night first as
my reward.’ The girl did show up at one of his clubs, and he did
spend the night with her, but no criminal action was ever taken.17
Savile told this story openly, as if it were funny, and seemingly
without fear of consequences.

When the Savile scandal broke in the early 2010s, the same refrain
was repeated by commentators again and again: ‘It was a different
time.’18 And indeed it was, although we sometimes forget quite how
different attitudes towards child sexual abuse really were during the
1970s and 1980s. In Britain, members of the Paedophile Information
Exchange were openly campaigning for the abolition of the age of
consent and found themselves welcomed warmly in some
establishment circles, with Margaret Thatcher’s government refusing
demands to ban the group.19 In the United States, NAMBLA (the
‘North American Man Boy Love Association’) was founded at the end
of the 1970s and attracted support from figures including the poet
Allen Ginsberg and the feminist Camille Paglia.20

In some European countries at this time, child pornography was

freely available, having been legalised at the same time as other
forms of pornography from the end of the 1960s.21 In Sweden, for
instance, it emerged in 2009 that the Royal Library in Stockholm
was in possession of a collection of child pornography acquired
(legally) between 1971 and 1980 and still being loaned (illegally) to
members of the public into the twenty-first century22 – an
uncomfortable reminder of Sweden’s hyper-liberal past.

In 1977, a petition to the French parliament calling for the

decriminalisation of sex between adults and children was signed by a
long list of famous intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques
Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir,
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and – that esteemed radical and father
of Queer Theory – Michel Foucault.23 In 2021, the writer Guy
Sorman alleged in an interview with The Times that Foucault had
also acted on this political principle, sexually abusing children aged
between about eight and ten during the period when he lived in
Tunisia in the late 1960s. Sorman claimed that this fact was known
to his fellow journalists, ‘but nobody did stories like that in those
days. Foucault was the philosopher king. He’s like our god in
France.’24
All of these figures now find themselves (as Owen Jones would term
it) on ‘the wrong side of history’, since the 1990s saw a sharp swing
back against efforts to normalise paedophilia. During the 1970s it
was primarily ‘regressive’ conservatives who opposed groups such as
the Paedophile Information Exchange, with Mary Whitehouse, for
instance, lobbying hard for the private member’s bill that became the
Protection of Children Act 1978. Eventually, Whitehouse was joined
by progressives in her condemnation of child sexual abuse, but her
contribution was erased and the shameful history of the liberal
tolerance for paedophilia in the decades following the sexual
revolution was mostly forgotten, to be rediscovered, piecemeal,
during investigations such as the one into Jimmy Savile.

Paedophilia is now condemned by liberals and conservatives alike,

alongside a clutch of other paraphilias, including necrophilia and
bestiality. For liberals, the wall between licit and illicit sexual
behaviour is now built upon an emphasis on consent, which I’ll
explore in greater depth in the coming chapters. The problem with
paedophilia, according to this argument, is that children can’t
consent, and therefore any sexual activity involving them will always
be unacceptable. Thus, if the paedophilia apologism of sexual
revolutionaries such as Foucault and Rubin is remembered at all, it is
as a brief and embarrassing detour from the progressive path – a
kink (so to speak) in the arc of the moral universe’s bend towards
justice.

But, upon closer scrutiny, the consent argument falls apart. Liberals
may be able to accept the banning of child porn without any qualms,
since it necessitates the abuse of real children in its production, but
what about images that the police term ‘pseudo-photographs’ that
appear to depict real children? What about illustrations? What about
adults dressing up and pretending to be children during sex? What
about porn performers who appear to be very young? What about
porn performers who deliberately make themselves look even
younger? What about Belle Delphine, the 21-year-old social media
star, who sells pornographic images of herself wearing braces and
girlish clothes and in 2021 was criticised for sharing images of
herself seemingly dressed as a child and pretending to be raped by a
man dressed as a kidnapper? Defending herself against her critics,
Delphine insisted: ‘I am not apologising for anything, what I did
wasn’t wrong, and much more normal than people think. Look at one
of the most common sexual outfits and fantasies, schoolgirl. If you
wear that are you promoting paedophilia now?’25

Within the liberal framework, how can we respond to Delphine’s

question with the answer that, for most of us, is intuitive: ‘Yes,
schoolgirl fantasies do promote paedophilia’? An ethical system
based solely on consent does not allow space for this kind of moral
intuition, which puts liberals into an awkward position, as Jonathan
Haidt’s research has shown. It is difficult to invoke J. S. Mill’s harm
principle when faced with a wide range of alarming sexual scenarios:
consensual incest, cannibalism, sex with dead chickens, and sex acts
that are at the very least paedophilic-adjacent, if not outright
paedophilic.

Breaking taboos
When you set out to break down sexual taboos, you shouldn’t be
surprised when all taboos are considered fair game for breaking,
including the ones you’d rather retain. The claim from Foucault and
his allies was never that violently coercing children into sex is OK.
Rather, they claimed that sexual desire develops earlier in some
children than in others and that it is therefore possible in some cases
for children to have sexual relationships with adults that are not only
not traumatic but mutually enjoyable. The claim, therefore, was not
that consent is unimportant but, rather, that children are sometimes
capable of consenting. And they pointed out, correctly, that
paedophiles are a maligned sexual minority who suffer greatly as a
result of the taboo maintained against them. Their project, therefore,
was not a detour from the progressive path but in fact logically in
keeping with it. The principles of sexual liberalism do, I’m sorry to
say, trundle inexorably towards this endpoint, whether or not we
want them to.

And, indeed, after the intense backlash against paedophilia advocacy

in the 1990s and early 2000s, we are now starting to see some
slippage back towards the thinking of the 1970s. In 2020, Netflix
released a film called Cuties (originally Mignonnes), written and
directed by the French-Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré.
The protagonist is eleven-year-old Amy, who lives with her
Senegalese family in a poor district of Paris. When Amy’s father
announces his intention to take a second wife, Amy and her mother
are heartbroken, and the rupture pushes Amy away from her
conservative religious community and into the orbit of a group of
girls who call themselves the Cuties.
The Cuties are not nice girls. They bully Amy and each other, they
physically attack other children, they steal, they lie, and they also
twerk. Aged eleven, they have formed an amateur dance troupe and
adopted skimpy outfits and a gyrating style that is a world away from
anything Amy has experienced before. The girls aren’t directly
groomed by anyone, and in fact we never see any overt acts of sexual
aggression. They learn to grind and pout via the internet, particularly
a social media marketplace in which pre-teen sexualisation is well
rewarded with likes and follows. In one scene, Amy sits among older
women in prayer, while under her veil she furtively watches video on
her stolen smartphone of adult women slapping each other’s naked
buttocks. Thrilled by the aesthetic, Amy teaches the other girls to add
more explicit moves to their routine, and in one particularly
unwatchable scene the children encourage each other to jiggle their
tiny backsides and hump the floor in an imitation of pornified
ecstasy.

This scene goes on forever, as do half a dozen other similar scenes,

one of which was widely shared online when the film became a
crucial wedge issue in an international culture war – so much so that
#CancelNetflix trended on Twitter on and off for weeks, and some
American Republicans demanded that Netflix executives face a
criminal investigation for, as Representative Jim Banks put it,
‘distribution of child pornography’.26 Both Netflix and Doucouré
defended the film by pointing out that it was intended as a
commentary on the harms of child sexualisation. The problem was
that it also featured a lot of actual child sexualisation, and the
original marketing for the film played on this theme, with the four
very young actresses dressed in glorified bikinis and arranged in
suggestive poses. Gritty depictions of child sexualisation are not
entirely new. Taxi Driver (1976), Pretty Babies (1978) and Thirteen
(2003) all portrayed pre-pubescent girls in sexually inappropriate
scenarios. But Cuties went further than any of these films in not only
suggesting sexualisation but actually showing it, and at length.

Nevertheless, Cuties received positive reviews in outlets including

the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker and The
Telegraph,27 whose critic praised this act of provocation in ‘an age
terrified of child sexuality’ and later tweeted his delight that the film
had ‘pissed off all the right people’. The word ‘hysterical’ recurred in
these reviews, alongside the suggestion that the outrage over Cuties
was wholly disproportionate, derived solely from a conservative
moral panic over paedophilia.

There is something about paedophilia anxiety that is currently

considered rather low status among the liberal elites. It is associated,
particularly in America, with sinister groups such as QAnon and,
particularly in Britain, with the tabloid newspapers. In 2000, Yvette
Cloete, a thirty-year-old South African working as a trainee
paediatrician in the Welsh county of Gwent, came home to find the
word ‘Paedo’ painted on her front door. Police believed this to have
been the work of local teenagers. Cloete gave a couple of interviews
to the press in which she suggested that the vandals might have
confused the word ‘paediatrician’ with ‘paedophile’, and the story
took off, eventually becoming an urban legend. Among my peers, I
have several times heard a version in which a local mob, whipped up
by an anti-paedophilia campaign in the News of the World,
physically attacks the paediatrician and even burns her house to the
ground. As the journalist Brendan O’Neill wrote in 2010, the incident
‘has been transformed by opinion-formers into proof that some
communities are so dumb, morally bereft and easily swayed by
paedophile-baiting tabloids like the News of the World that they end
up confusing a good woman who helps children with evil men who
rape them.’28

The story was popularised and distorted because it scratched a

certain itch for snobbish progressives, presenting anti-paedophilia
anxiety as an obsession of the ignorant and credulous working
classes, a group very much considered to be on ‘the wrong side of
history’. But, while it is certainly true that the conspiracy theories
generated by groups such as QAnon are false, it is also true that there
have been some shocking examples of child sexual abuse taking place
at scale and without detection. Jimmy Savile abusing up to a
thousand children on BBC premises would sound like a conspiracy
theory if we didn’t know it to be true, just as Jeffrey Epstein
supplying underage girls to famous and powerful men sounds like
particularly bizarre fiction. And yet these things really happened.

The virtue of repression

In an episode of The Simpsons called ‘I Am Furious (Yellow)’, first
aired in 2002, Homer Simpson decides to become a less angry
person. Every time Homer finds himself feeling angry, he represses
the emotion, and a lump appears on his neck. Soon enough, Homer’s
neck is covered in lumps and his calm demeanour is becoming
increasingly fragile. At the end of the episode, Bart and Milhouse
play a prank on Homer, and all of this repressed anger is suddenly
released in an uncontrolled rampage. Later in hospital, the doctor
informs the Simpson family that Homer’s attempts at emotional
repression could have proved lethal since, without the opportunity
for release, ‘the anger would’ve overwhelmed his nervous system.’
Repression, it seems, is not only difficult but also dangerous.

This is a comical representation of a particular understanding of

Freud that is popular in the contemporary West and which is applied
to sexual repression just as much as to emotional repression. This
model understands sexual desire to be a fixed quantity which must
be periodically released, either through actual intercourse or through
some other kind of ‘safety valve’, such as porn.

The problem with this model is that it does not recognise the
necessity of sexual repression. Even in a post-1960s sexual free
market, the law often requires us to repress our sexual impulses. If
you want to have sex with someone, but they either won’t or can’t
consent, then the law obliges you to repress your desire. You are also
forbidden from having sex with an animal or having sex with a
corpse, and, in England and Wales, as well as in most other
jurisdictions, you can’t legally watch porn that features bestiality or
necrophilia. What’s more, you may risk imprisonment if you
masturbate or have sex in a public place, a fact that outrages the
Queer Theorist Pat Califia, who asks:
 Why is sex supposed to be invisible? Other pleasurable acts or
acts of communication are routinely performed in public –
eating, drinking, talking, watching movies, writing letters,
studying or teaching, telling jokes and laughing, appreciating
fine art. Is sex so deadly, hateful, and horrific that we can’t
permit it to be seen? Are naked bodies so ugly or so shameful
that we can’t survive the sight of bare tushes or genitals without
withering away?29

Unfortunately for Califia, public opinion has not aligned with this
particular act of taboo-breaking. Every society requires that some
kinds of sexual impulse be repressed – what varies is where exactly
the line is drawn.

The word ‘Victorian’ is often used in association with sexual

repression, most likely because, in the historical pendulum swing
back and forth on the issue of licentiousness, Victorian Britain is our
most recent example of an intense swing towards the prudish.
Although, as revisionist historians such as Matthew Sweet have
pointed out, the popular characterisation of the Victorians as
scandalised by unclothed table legs is not quite true,30 and this was
in fact a society riven with contradictions – for instance combining a
sometimes sickeningly sentimental attitude towards children with
widespread child prostitution and, until 1875, an age of consent set at
just twelve.

But there is no doubt that the Victorians did indeed set the repressive
bar higher than we now do, and that this resulted in terrible
cruelties, primarily against gay men and unmarried mothers. Sexual
repression is a blunt instrument, but it is not one we can do away
with altogether, as the errors of the 1970s show. The radical desires
of sexual liberals do not work in a world in which human sexuality is
not always beautiful but often wicked and repulsive. The desire to
free the minnows is a good one, but reckless action can result in
freedom for the pikes as well. In an interconnected society, the one
impacts the other.

But the progressive narrative disguises this truth and, in doing so,
does terrible harm to the minnows: that is, the people who have been
offered up as sacrifices to the cause of sexual freedom. A society that
prioritises the desires of the highly sociosexual is necessarily one that
prioritises the desires of men, given the natural distribution of this
trait, and those men then need to call on other people – mostly
young women – to satisfy their desires.

The sexual Thatcherites will dismiss this problem by insisting that

the minnows are perfectly capable of exercising their own freedom by
saying ‘no’. They might even suggest that I am being patronising in
describing anyone as a ‘minnow’ in the first place. But I imagine that
many readers will be able to recall instances when this attempt at
exercising agency in the face of sexual coercion has not worked for
them, or for someone else, in the same way that most of us can recall
instances when someone we know has been taken advantage of by an
employer in some way. The sexual playing field is not even, but it
suits the interests of the powerful to pretend that it is.

When we strip back all sexual morality to the bare bones, leaving
only the principle of consent, we leave the way clear for some
particularly predatory pikes. As the example of paedophilia advocacy
shows, the consent framework is nowhere near robust enough to
protect the vulnerable from harm. Given the profound importance
and complexity of sexual relationships, a much more sophisticated
moral system is required, and the Foucaults and Rubins of the world
are not best placed to describe it.

Reverting to traditionalism doesn’t solve the problem. Although I

reject the chronological snobbery of progressivism that dismisses the
dead as stupid and malevolent, the world we live in now is very far
removed from the world in which the ancient religious codes were
formulated. Our ancestors were confronted with material conditions
that are wildly different from our own: they had no reliable
contraception, lived in smaller and less complex societies,
experienced very high birth and death rates, and by necessity
assigned starkly different social and economic roles to men and
women. Imitating the past cannot teach us how to live in the twenty-
first century.

Appealing to moral intuition takes us some of the way. Sexual

liberalism asks us to train ourselves out of the kind of instinctive
revulsion that often has a protective function. I opened this chapter
with some extreme examples of sexual behaviour that may be
disturbing but are difficult to condemn within the liberal framework.
There are plenty of real-life examples that are hardly less extreme.
For instance, in 2021, the American actor Armie Hammer made
headlines when several of his exes came forward to accuse him of
coercive behaviour. One former girlfriend, Courtney Vucekovich,
described Hammer as ‘obsessive’ and reported that he ‘did some
things with me that I wasn’t comfortable with.’31 Another, Paige
Lorenze, spoke about Hammer’s ‘controlling’ behaviour, which gave
her a ‘kind of feeling sick to my stomach’.32

The odd thing about this particular #MeToo case is that it really
shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. Hammer had a long
history of openly admitting to having violent and degrading sexual
tastes – not only did he tell Playboy back in 2013 that he liked
choking women,33 he also confessed to his girlfriends that he had a
thing for cannibalism. Several of these women have since told
journalists that Hammer enjoyed inflicting pain on them during sex
and that he also spoke about his desire to break their bones, eat their
skin and barbecue their flesh.

You’d think this might have been a red flag. And yet the women who
had sexual relationships with Hammer seem to have imbibed the
sexually liberal belief that there is a bright line between how a person
behaves in the bedroom and how they behave outside of it. So while
they didn’t exactly like Hammer’s interest in cannibalism, they didn’t
feel able to object to it either. They suppressed their moral intuition
and, in doing so, were pulled into the orbit of a dangerous and
abusive man. As we’ll see in chapter 6, this is a predictable
consequence of the liberal attitude towards BDSM, which is
particularly ruinous to naive, agreeable minnows.

Sexual liberalism is misguided in not only disregarding but actively

resisting moral intuition. And yet at the same time, much like the
principle of consent, intuition is too simplistic to be serviceable on its
own. We may be able to broadly agree on the most outrageous
examples (cannibalism, say), but one person’s gut instinct won’t
always be the same as another person’s. Sibling or parental incest –
supposedly a universal taboo, according to many anthropologists –
has become a popular category on mainstream porn platforms,
which suggests that a not insubstantial minority of users have some
interest in it. Moral intuition can be a starting point, but it can also
sometimes be a poor guide.

I can’t pretend that this is an easy issue to resolve, because ‘How

should we behave sexually?’ is really just another way of asking ‘How
should we behave?’ and, after millennia of effort, we are nowhere
near reaching an agreement on the answer to that question.
Nevertheless, here is my attempt at a contribution: 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 feeling we discover in our hearts
(or our loins) ought to be acted upon.

Armie Hammer should have repressed his desire to hurt his sexual
partners and Jimmy Savile should have repressed his desire to
sexually violate children. Doing so would have done them no harm,
because some degree of sexual repression is good and necessary. The
world would be a better place if such men were more ashamed of
their desires and acted on that shame by mastering themselves. But
it’s not only the most appalling abusers who could do with putting
virtue before desire. All of us are likely to be tempted by our worst
instincts every now and again, and we are much more likely to
indulge them in a culture that encourages hedonism.

Aziz Ansari, like Armie Hammer, is a celebrity who found himself

caught up in a Me Too scandal – but, unlike Hammer, his
misbehaviour was more ambiguous. On the night of 25 September
2017, Ansari went on a date with a woman publicly known only as
‘Grace’. They went back to his house and then had some sexual
contact that left Grace feeling deeply uncomfortable. Although she
gently pulled away, mumbling her reluctance, Ansari tried again and
again to initiate sex. Eventually, at his request, she gave him a blow
job. He never used any force, and she never actually said ‘no’, but
Grace was left feeling used. The next day, she texted Ansari telling
him as much and he apologised for having ‘misread things’. Several
months later, she published her account on the website babe.34

Ansari’s behaviour did not meet the legal threshold for rape because
Grace did technically consent to their encounter. Ansari clearly
assumed that Grace would want to have sex with him – both because
of his celebrity status and because having sex after a first date is now
normative among young, ‘sexually liberated’ Westerners. And Grace
was therefore put in a position in which she had to make the case
against their having sex, and she found it almost impossible to do so.
Much like the student I quoted in chapter 1, she instinctively wanted
to defend her sexual boundaries, but she was thwarted by a culture in
which ‘it’s just sex’ is the dominant view. They were two consenting
adults who had just been on a date, and sex was the expected way to
end the night, so how could she say ‘no’?
Following the publication of Grace’s account, liberal feminist
commentators tried to condemn Ansari within the consent
framework, suggesting that, against the available evidence, their
encounter hadn’t been truly consensual. Given that the need for
consent is the only moral principle left standing under the reign of
sexual disenchantment, this was the principle that had to be put to
work. The problem is that the presence of consent is such a very, very
low bar – an absolute bare minimum requirement, not an ideal.
Ansari had managed to jump this bar, but he had also failed to
behave well. In another era, his behaviour might have been described
as immoral or ungentlemanly, but these are not words that liberal
feminists feel comfortable using, given the icky associations with
religious conservatism. The only vocabulary left available to them is
that relating to consent, because the ideological toolbox put together
by liberal feminism contains just one blunt implement, which –
unsurprisingly – isn’t up to the job.

A sophisticated system of sexual ethics needs to demand more of

people, and, as the stronger and hornier sex, men must demonstrate
even greater restraint than women when faced with temptation. The
word ‘chivalry’ is now deeply unfashionable, but it describes
something of what I’m calling for. As the feminist theorist Mary
Harrington writes:
 ‘Chivalrous’ social codes that encourage male protectiveness
toward women are routinely read from an egalitarian
perspective as condescending and sexist. But … the cross-
culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and
propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry
overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in
the name of feminism deeply unwise.35

In the coming chapters, I’ll explore some of the self-interested

reasons why men might choose, as R. H. Tawney phrased it almost a
century ago, ‘the deliberate acceptance of social restraints upon
individual expansion’. But the motivation to demonstrate sexual
virtue ought to go beyond self-interest. It isn’t against the law to
cheat on a partner, or to accept sexual favours from a person you
don’t respect, or very subtly to coerce someone into sex – as Aziz
Ansari did with Grace – but it isn’t decent either. There are a lot of
sexual behaviours that are neither criminal nor good and about
which the consent framework has very little to say. Somewhere in the
uneasy space between sexual liberalism and traditionalism, it has to
be possible to navigate a virtuous path.

Notes
1. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are
Divided by Politics and Religion. London: Allen Lane, 2012, pp.
170–6.
2. Richard Guy Parker and Peter Aggleton, eds, Culture, Society and
Sexuality: A Reader. London: Psychology Press, 1999, p. 171.

3. R. H. Tawney, Equality. 4th edn, London: Allen & Unwin, [1931]

1952, pp. 181–2.

4. David P. Schmitt, ‘Sociosexuality from Argentina to Zimbabwe: a

48-nation study of sex, culture, and strategies of human mating’,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 247–75; discussion,
275–311.

5. S. J. Dawson, B. A. Bannerman and M. L. Lalumière, ‘Paraphilic

interests: an examination of sex differences in a nonclinical
sample’, Sexual Abuse 28 (2016): 20–45.

6. See www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-
30/personal-relationships/homosexuality.aspx.

7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_same-
sex_marriage.

8. Andrew Sullivan, 28 August 1989,

https://newrepublic.com/article/79054/here-comes-the-groom.

9. G. K. Chesterton, The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic. London: Sheed

& Ward, 1929, ch. 4.

10. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1977.

11. Ben Thompson, ‘Ban this filth!’, 9 November 2012,

https://web.archive.org/web/20121112141447/http://www.ft.com
 /cms/s/2/093c3726-24e1-11e2-86fb-
00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Bv5X322utv%23axzz2Bv5X3utv.

12. Geoffrey Robertson, 24 May 2008,

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-mary-whitehouse-story-mary-
quite-contrary-dgqdtrf2qxq.

13. Mary Kenny, ‘In defence of Mary Whitehouse’, 7 June 2010,

www.spectator.co.uk/article/in-defence-of-mary-whitehouse.

14. See
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2020/sep/22/from-
mary-whitehouse-to-the-proms-owen-jones-on-how-woke-
became-a-dirty-word-video.

15. Daniel Boffey, ‘Revealed: how Jimmy Savile abused up to 1,000

victims on BBC premises’, 18 January 2014,
www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/18/jimmy-savile-abused-
1000-victims-bbc.

16. See https://order-order.com/2012/10/02/piers-morgan-

laughed-off-saviles-underage-sex-joke/.

17. John F. Burns and Ravi Somaiya, 2 November 2012,

www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/world/europe/shield-of-celebrity-
protected-savile-for-decades.html?auth=login-smartlock.

18. Louis Theroux, ‘Looking back on Jimmy Savile’, 1 October 2016,

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37517619.

19. Scott D’Arcy and Dan Bloom, ‘Paedophile Information Exchange:

Leon Brittan “opposed banning pro-child sex campaign group”’, 4
 June 2015, www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/paedophile-
information-exchange-leon-brittan-5825108.

20. Tim Stanley, 1 March 2014,

https://web.archive.org/web/20140306014809/http://blogs.tele
graph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100261734/allen-ginsberg-camille-
paglia-and-the-literary-champions-of-paedophilia/.

21. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Climax_Corporation.

22. See www.rt.com/news/child-porn-in-open-access-at-swedish-

national-library/.

23. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_
consent_laws.

24. Matthew Campbell, 28 March 2021,

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/french-philosopher-michel-foucault-
abused-boys-in-tunisia-6t5sj7jvw.

25. Louise Griffin, 13 January 2021,

https://metro.co.uk/2021/01/13/belle-delphine-responds-as-
shes-accused-of-fetishising-rape-13894142/?ito=cbshare.

26. See
https://twitter.com/RepJimBanks/status/1304556525789351937.

27. For reviews, see

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/11/people-
freaking-out-about-cuties-should-try-it-they-might-find-lot-like/;
www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/cuties-movie-
 review-1056197/; www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-
row/cuties-mignonnes-the-extraordinary-netflix-debut-that-
became-the-target-of-a-right-wing-campaign;
www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/cuties-netflix-reviewa-provocative-
powder-keg-age-terrified/.

28. See www.pressgazette.co.uk/a-tale-told-too-much-the-

paediatrician-vigilantes/.

29. Patrick Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. San
Francisco: Cleis Press, 2000, p. 26.

30. Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians. London: Faber &

Faber, 2002.

31. Francesca Bacardi, 14 January 2021,

https://pagesix.com/2021/01/14/armie-hammers-ex-courtney-
vucekovich-he-wanted-to-barbecue-and-eat-me/.

32. Mike Vulpo, 26 January 2021,

www.eonline.com/news/1231009/armie-hammers-ex-paige-
lorenze-details-their-polyamorous-bdsm-relationship.

33. Natasha Preskey, 20 March 2021, www.independent.co.uk/life-

style/armie-hammer-dms-sex-interviews-b1787196.html.

34. Katie Way, ‘I went on a date with Aziz Ansari’,

https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355.

35. Mary Harrington, ‘Feminism against progress’ (2021),

unpublished manuscript.
4
Loveless Sex Is Not
Empowering
In the first ever episode of Sex and the City, aired in 1998, the
Manhattanite columnist, socialite and everywoman Carrie Bradshaw
resolves to stop looking for ‘Mr Perfect’ and start enjoying herself. In
that effort, she hooks up with an ex-boyfriend, ‘a self-centred,
withholding creep’ to whom she no longer has any emotional
attachment. She drops round at his place mid-afternoon, enjoys his
offer of oral sex, and then leaves before he’s had a chance to orgasm
himself. Ignoring her disgruntled ex, Carrie tells us of her delight: ‘As
I began to get dressed, I realised that I’d done it. I’d just had sex like
a man. I left feeling powerful, potent and incredibly alive. I felt like I
owned this city. Nothing and no one could get in my way.’

In the hit TV show The Fall, aired in the mid-2010s, the gorgeous
police superintendent Stella Gibson also relishes the chance to have
sex ‘like a man’. Recently arrived in a new city where she has been
tasked with investigating a series of murders, she spots a hunky
sergeant – her junior both in rank and in age – and invites him back
to her hotel for sex. Discovering later that the man is married,
Gibson is ostentatiously unconcerned, justifying her sexual
adventurousness with a quote from the feminist Catharine
MacKinnon: ‘Man fucks woman; subject verb object.’ The implication
is clear: this woman fucks back.

These examples tell us something important about how sexual

liberation is conceptualised for women, with Sex and the City leading
the charge going into the twenty-first century and The Fall now
representing a new normal, with Stella Gibson ubiquitously
described in the press as a ‘strong female lead’ (‘She’s so comfortable
with herself’, added actress Gillian Anderson, discussing her
character in an interview for The Sun).1

Both of these protagonists demonstrate their sexual agency by having

loveless, brusque sex with men they don’t like. They show no regard
for their partners’ intimate lives and discard them immediately
afterwards. The purpose of the encounter is both physical
gratification and – explicitly in Bradshaw’s case, implicitly in
Gibson’s – psychological gratification. They treat their partners as
means, not ends, out of a desire for short-term pleasure. Thus it
seems that what the phrase having sex ‘like a man’ really means, at
least in these popular representations, is having sex like an arsehole.

Nevertheless, liberal feminism understands having sex ‘like a man’ as

an obvious route by which women can free themselves from old-
fashioned patriarchal expectations of chastity and obedience. If you
believe that there is nothing wrong, per se, with instrumentalising
other people in pursuit of your own sexual gratification, then this
makes sense. And if you believe that men and women are both
physically and psychologically much the same, save for a few hang-
ups absorbed from a sex-negative culture, then why wouldn’t you
want women to have access to the kind of sexual fun that men have
always enjoyed (the high-status ones, at least)? The position is purely
reactive: since women have historically been punished for this kind
of sexual behaviour, liberation must surely mean not only an end to
such punishment but also an endorsement of what was once
forbidden: fucking back.

The sex writer and TV producer Karley Sciortino is a particularly

enthusiastic proponent of this view. To her mind, the sexual double
standard – by which male promiscuity is viewed as neutral or
positive while female promiscuity is frowned upon – is the product of
socialisation within a culture that Sciortino considers to be
oppressively anti-sex. The solution, as she sees it, is to train ourselves
out of negative responses to what she would call ‘sluttiness’:

Today we’ve created an environment where (allegedly

predatory) male sexuality needs to be policed, and (allegedly
passive) female sexuality needs to be protected … It’s outdated,
it’s offensive, and it’s psychologically destructive for women,
because it has the power to mislead girls into thinking that
having one not-ideal sexual experience means that they have lost
part of themselves. Hello – pitying and victimising women
doesn’t help us: it just dismisses the importance of female sexual
agency.2

The ambiguous term ‘not-ideal’ is doing a lot of work here, because

Sciortino does acknowledge that the playing field is not entirely even,
with or without the continued existence of slut shaming. For one
thing, there is the difference in physical strength that means that any
heterosexual encounter will inevitably be more dangerous for the
woman. For another, there is the risk of pregnancy.

But the liberal feminist argument leads us to conclude that, if you are
going to destroy the sexual double standard, then you must use your
own body, and the bodies of other women, as a battering ram against
the patriarchal edifice. The advice to young women is that you must
‘fuck back’ if you want to be a good feminist, and mostly it will turn
out OK – and when it doesn’t? When a sexual encounter turns out to
be ‘not-ideal’, or worse? Well then, we must fall back on liberal
feminism’s old standby: ‘teach men not to rape.’

The problem with this position is that ‘fake it till you make it’ is not a
viable political strategy. We cannot just pretend that the world is safe
and that the existence of ‘predatory male sexuality’ is no more than
an outdated stereotype. As we saw in chapter 2, the global picture of
sexual violence actually conforms very closely to stereotype – it really
is men who perpetrate it, and it really is young women who are most
at risk. This isn’t a reality we can just wish away.

The sociosexuality gap

Men and women are not the same, either physically or
psychologically. Casual heterosexual sex inherently carries much
greater risks for women, and in return for much meaner rewards.
And yet the (perfectly reasonable) insistence that women should be
allowed to ‘fuck back’ without suffering criminalisation or social
ostracisation slips all too easily towards the insistence that they
therefore ought to. Carrie Bradshaw and Stella Gibson are, crucially,
aspirational characters: attractive, glamorous and professionally
successful. Their model is one that we are supposed to follow, and
Sciortino encourages her readers to do so. I don’t doubt that there
are some women who genuinely enjoy casual sex and who decide,
having weighed the risks and benefits, that it is in their best interests
to pursue it. What I question is the claim that a culture of casual sex
is somehow of benefit to women as a group.

I’ve written earlier in this book about what psychologists term

‘sociosexuality’ – the trait that determines a person’s interest in
sexual variety and adventure. The standard questionnaire used by
researchers to assess sociosexuality asks respondents the following
questions:3

With how many different partners have you had sex within the
past 12 months?

With how many different partners have you had sexual

intercourse on one and only one occasion?

With how many different partners have you had sexual

intercourse without having an interest in a long-term committed
relationship with this person?

Do you agree that sex without love is OK?

Can you imagine being comfortable and enjoying ‘casual’ sex

with different partners?

Do you only want to have sex with a person when you are sure
that you will have a long-term, serious relationship?
 How often do you have fantasies about having sex with someone
you are not in a committed romantic relationship with?

How often do you experience sexual arousal when you are in

contact with someone you are not in a committed romantic
relationship with?

In everyday life, how often do you have spontaneous fantasies

about having sex with someone you have just met?

Worldwide, there is a significant difference in average sociosexuality

between the sexes, with men generally much keener to sow their wild
oats than women are. And there is a compelling evolutionary
explanation for this difference.4 As the biologist Anne Campbell
writes:

Biologically speaking, men’s investment is completed at

conception and they are free to move on to pastures new. But
women, unlike men, are quality not quantity specialists. Their
investment is not limited to a few moments’ pleasure – they are
committed to the reproductive consequences and women
produce only a limited number of offspring … So great is the
commitment demanded by every child that women’s bodies and
minds are exquisitely crafted to invest only in the highest-
quality child that they can produce.5

Although it’s typical for men to invest a great deal of time and energy
into offspring produced within a socially recognised relationship (in
other words, a marriage), men also have an alternative mode of
sexuality in which they favour quantity of offspring over quality –
that is, inseminating as many women as possible and not hanging
around to deal with the consequences. This alternative mode is
favoured more by some individual men than others, depending on
their degree of sociosexuality – ‘cads’ versus ‘dads’ – but the
difference is not absolute. Some men may be drawn more towards
one sexual strategy than the other at certain points in their lives, or
in certain situations, or with certain partners. There is a remarkable
flexibility within male sexuality that women are not always aware of,
particularly within a political environment that denies the existence
of evolved psychological differences between the sexes.

It is crucial to remember that the sociosexuality difference between

the sexes is an average one: there are some women who are
exceptionally high in sociosexuality and there are some men who are
low in it. This means that, at the individual level, if you know a
person’s sex, you cannot know for certain whether or not they will be
highly sociosexual, although you can make an educated guess.

At the same time, it is also crucial to remember that individual

exceptions to the rule do not negate the rule. For instance, the
average differences in male and female sexuality become glaringly
obvious when we look at the gay and lesbian communities. Although
it may be controversial to point out how dramatically these two
sexual cultures differ, there is plenty of hard data that it would be
dishonest to ignore. Lesbian women are remarkably keen on
committed monogamy: the median lesbian woman in the UK reports
just one sexual partner within the last year,6 and a majority report
having known their sexual partners for months or years before they
first had sex.7 Lesbian women are also significantly more likely than
gay men to get married or enter into a civil partnership.8 In his
memoir about gay life in America in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, Andrew Sullivan writes of the lesbian community that
‘here is a culture of extraordinary stability and variety, a
monogamist’s dream’ – although, as he quite rightly notes, this is
nevertheless a community ‘which somehow has not found its
champions among the family-mongering religious right.’9

In contrast, Sullivan describes the ‘landscape of gay life’ as ‘almost a

painting in testosterone’,10 and surveys on gay men’s sexual
behaviour confirm this characterisation, with casual sex very much
more common in the gay community than in the lesbian community.
Although, having said this, the flexibility of male sexuality is even
more striking among gay men than it is among the straight. In one
representative survey from 2010, roughly a quarter of gay men report
being just as stably monogamous as the average lesbian, while
another quarter report more than thirteen male partners within the
last year,11 and a smaller (but not insignificant) minority report
hundreds of sexual partners across their lifetimes, which is almost
unheard of among lesbian women – there is, after all, no lesbian
equivalent of bathhouse culture. As the authors of the Gay Men’s
Sexual Survey put it: ‘There is a very wide range of sexual partner
change among men who have sex with men – many men have only
one partner, many men have a different partner each week (or more
often).’12

The minority of gay men who are highly sociosexual have a

significant effect on the data – one large survey from 2016, for
instance, found that the mean number of lifetime sexual partners is
six times and eight times higher among gay and bisexual men,
respectively, compared with straight men.13 Thus sexual behaviour
among gay men is an exceptionally good indicator of what happens
when the limiting factor of female sexual preference is entirely
removed.

Straight men’s sexual preferences are constrained by the fact that,

when women are given a choice, they are generally much pickier than
men and reject a much larger proportion of suitors. For instance, one
study from 1978 – since repeated, with exactly the same findings –
involved participants of average attractiveness approaching strangers
of a similar age and propositioning them for sex.14 As the authors
write: ‘The great majority of men were willing to have a sexual liaison
with the women who approach them. Not one woman agreed to a
sexual liaison.’

Some feminists would attribute this to a sex-negative culture in

which women suffer greater reputational damage when they are seen
as being too promiscuous, and it may also be the case that some of
the women involved in these studies might have wanted to accept the
proposition but refused out of fear for their physical safety. However,
these explanations cannot account for the fact that women are also
much pickier on dating apps and websites than men are, and that
men and women differ dramatically in their baseline levels of sexual
disgust.15 Disgust induces a physiological response that can be
measured through heart and respiration rate, blood pressure and
salivation, although the individual may not be aware of these
indicators,16 and studies find that, on average, the sexual disgust
threshold is much lower for women than it is for men.

Curiously, I am not aware of any word in the English language for a

particular emotion that every woman to whom I’ve spoken has
experienced at least once, but that the men to whom I’ve spoken
don’t seem to recognise at all. It is a combination of both sexual
disgust and fear – the bone-deep, nauseating feeling of being trapped
in proximity to a horny man who repulses you. Being groped in a
crowd, or leered at while travelling alone, or propositioned a little too
forcefully in a bar – all of these situations can provoke this horrible
emotion. It is an emotion that women in the sex industry are forced
to repress. In fact, as the prostitution survivor Rachel Moran has
written, the ability not to cry or vomit in response to sexual fear and
disgust is one of the essential ‘skills’ demanded by the industry.17

More than any other area of life, prostitution reveals the sometimes
vast differences between male and female sexual behaviour. Women
make up the overwhelming majority of sex sellers, for the simple
reason that almost all sex buyers are male (at least 99 per cent in
every part of the world), most men are straight, and the industry is
driven by demand. The absence of female sex buyers may partly be a
consequence of the physical risks involved in a sexual encounter with
a stranger, but this sex skew is also about the nature of male and
female desire.

Sex buyers, by definition, are people who seek out sex outside of a
committed relationship, usually with a person they have never met
before, and this kind of sexual encounter is far, far more likely to
appeal to people high in sociosexuality. People low in this trait are
just not interested in having sex with a stranger, and are certainly
not willing to pay money to do so or to risk punishment in countries
where prostitution is fully or partially illegal. Male and female
sociosexuality can be drawn (roughly) as two bell curves with a
substantial overlap. But, as with any normally distributed trait, any
average group difference will be most glaring at the tails. The people
exceptionally high in sociosexuality are overwhelmingly men, and the
people exceptionally low in it are overwhelmingly women. This
means that, as a rule, any sexual culture that encourages women to
‘fuck back’ will, more often than not, just encourage women to fuck
themselves over.

A hand held in daylight

The heterosexual dating market has a problem, and it’s not one that
can be easily resolved. Male sexuality and female sexuality, at the
population level, do not match. On average, men want casual sex
more often than women do, and women want committed monogamy
more often than men do. Hook-up culture demands that women
suppress their natural instincts in order to match male sexuality and
thus meet the male demand for no-strings sex. Some women are
quite happy to do this, but most women find it unpleasant, or even
distressing. Thus hook-up culture is a solution to the sexuality
mismatch that benefits some men at the expense of most women.

I propose a different solution, based on a fundamental feminist

claim: unwanted sex is worse than sexual frustration. I’m not willing
to accept a sexual culture that puts pressure on people low in
sociosexuality (overwhelmingly women) to meet the sexual demands
of those high in sociosexuality (overwhelmingly men), particularly
when sex carries so many more risks for women, in terms of violence
and pregnancy. Hook-up culture is a terrible deal for women and yet
has been presented by liberal feminism as a form of liberation. A
truly feminist project would demand that, in the straight dating
world, it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual
appetites.

This argument is a long way from the feminist mainstream in the

twenty-first century. Progressive media outlets churn out articles
with such headlines as ‘Your 7-point intersectional feminist guide to
hook ups’ and ‘5 fantastic ways to engage in feminist hookup culture’,
all arguing that, with consent, anything goes.18 But this approach
fails to recognise the relational nature of sex and the competitive
nature of the sexual marketplace, overstating the extent to which any
of us can make truly free choices in a system in which we are all
radically restricted. And it leaves no space for the sociosexuality gap
– after all, how could it? Liberal feminism can hardly bear to
recognise the existence of physical differences between the sexes, let
alone psychological ones.

In a darkly funny article published in 2020, Elle magazine wrestles

with some of the problems thrown up by hook-up culture,19 but it
does so within an ideological framework that cannot accommodate
the fact of sexual conflict. Rather than recognise the difference
between men and women on this most crucial of issues, the writers
instead attempt to carve out a new, gender-neutral sexual minority of
‘demisexuals’, a ‘select few members of society’, who just aren’t
enthused about casual sex:

Struggling to identify with her sexuality for years, in 2016

Washington Post writer Meryl Williams detailed how she came
across the term ‘demisexuality’ on Twitter and started an
investigation into what it meant, which ultimately helped her
come to terms with her own sexual orientation. ‘I’m just glad
that a term for my sexuality exists, even if it’s one I’ll probably
have to explain to my future partners,’ she wrote.

What Williams is actually describing here is typical female sexuality.

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.

A more depressing pop-feminist genre comes at the sociosexuality

gap from a different angle, advising women to work on overcoming
their perfectly normal and healthy preference for intimacy and
commitment in sexual relationships. Guides with titles such as
‘Here’s what to do if you start “catching feelings”’, ‘How to bio-hack
your brain to have sex without getting emotionally attached’ and
‘How to have casual sex without getting emotionally attached’ advise
readers to, for instance, avoid making eye contact with their partners
during sex, in an effort to avoid ‘making an intimate connection’.20
Readers are also advised to take cocaine or methamphetamines
before sex to dull the dopamine response, but to avoid alcohol, since
for women (but, tellingly, not men) this seems to increase ‘the
likelihood they will bond prematurely’. All sorts of innovative
methods of dissociation are advised, for example: ‘Another way to
prevent the intimate association between your fuck buddy and the
heightened activity in your brain’s reward center is to consciously
focus your thoughts on another person during sex.’ These guides are
all carefully phrased to present the problem as gender-neutral, but
research on male and female attitudes towards casual sex, combined
with what we know about the sociosexuality gap, makes clear that
what is really happening here is that it is overwhelmingly women
who are being advised to emotionally cripple themselves in order to
gratify men.

In the West, hook-up culture is normative among adolescents and

young adults – both popular culture and survey data indicate that
sexual behaviour outside of traditional committed romantic
relationships has become increasingly typical and socially
acceptable.21 And, although it is possible for young women to opt
out, research suggests that only a minority do so.22 Absent some kind
of religious commitment, this is now the ‘normal’ route presented to
girls as they become sexually active. And young people tend to be
very anxious about being ‘normal’.

Leah Fessler has written thoughtfully about her time as a student at

Middlebury College, an institution in which hook-up culture reigned
and where abstinence seemed to be the only way in which a female
student could avoid participating.23 Unwilling to commit to celibacy,
Fessler convinced herself that emotionless sex was the feminist thing
to do, and she did her best to ignore her unhappiness:
 After I began having sex with these guys, the power balance
always tipped. A few hookups in, I’d begin to obsess, primarily
about the ambiguity of it all. My friends and I would analyze
incessantly: Does he like me? Do you like him? He hasn’t texted
in a day. Read this text. I’m so confused. He said he didn’t want
anything, but keeps asking to hang out … With time, inevitably,
came attachment. And with attachment came shame, anxiety,
and emptiness.

The worst thing for women at Middlebury were the ‘pseudo-

relationships’:

the mutant children of meaningless sex and loving partnerships.

Two students consistently hook up with one another – and
typically, only each other – for weeks, months, even years. Yet
per unspoken social code, neither party is permitted emotional
involvement, commitment, or vulnerability. To call them
exclusive would be ‘clingy,’ or even ‘crazy.’

Fessler and her friends quietly admitted to each other that what they
really wanted was true intimacy: public recognition of a relationship,
an arm around the waist, ‘a hand held in daylight’. She wrote her
senior year thesis on hook-up culture at Middlebury, and, of the
straight women who participated in her research, 100 per cent of
interviewees and three-quarters of survey respondents stated a clear
preference for committed relationships. Only 8 per cent of women
who said they were presently in pseudo-relationships reported being
‘happy’ with their situation. Other studies consistently find the same
thing: following hook-ups, women are more likely than men to
experience regret, low self-esteem and mental distress.24 And, most
of the time, they don’t even orgasm.

Female pleasure is rare during casual sex. Men in casual

relationships are just not as good at bringing women to orgasm in
comparison with men in committed relationships – in first time
hook-ups, only 10 per cent of women orgasm, compared to 68 per
cent of women in long-term relationships.25 This is partly a
consequence of the fact that men who are familiar with their
partner’s bodies and sexual preferences are better placed to know
what they want, but another factor is the so-called sexual script for
casual encounters, which is more likely to prioritise male desire.

We know that, since the turn of the century, rates of anal sex and
fellatio have been rising among young adults while rates of
cunnilingus have declined, likely a consequence of the influence of
internet porn.26 These sex acts are much less likely to result in
female orgasm, with anal sex, in particular, usually offering pain
without pleasure for anyone lacking a prostate. One typical study has
found that 30 per cent of women experience pain during vaginal sex,
that 72 per cent experience pain during anal sex, and that ‘large
proportions’ do not voice this discomfort to their partners.27 These
figures don’t suggest a generation of women revelling in sexual
liberation – instead, a lot of women seem to be having unpleasant,
crappy sex out of a sense of obligation.

University campuses offer a particularly good venue for examining

hook-up culture, with thousands of young people cooped up
together, living and working in the same relatively closed
environment. We can, for instance, learn a lot by looking at how the
ratio between male and female students affects sexual cultures in
these environments, and doing so reveals that the rise in the
proportion of women in higher education since the second wave has
had a perversely anti-woman effect on the sexual culture. As male
students have become a scarcer resource, the balance of power seems
to have tipped towards them, and, as one researcher writes: ‘while
women may run the clubs, dominate in classes, and generally define
the character of the university, the law of supply and demand rules
the social scene. That’s why the women are both competitive in
seeking men and submissive in lowering their standards.’28

Hook-up culture is more common in environments in which men are

dominant, and, in a sexual marketplace in which such a culture
prevails, a woman who refuses to participate puts herself at a
disadvantage. As another group of researchers put it, ‘some
individual women may be capitulating to men’s preferences for
casual sexual encounters because, if they do not, someone else
will.’29

And yet this is not, generally, how most women who participate in
hook-up culture understand their behaviour – at least not at the
time. Looked at coolly, we may be able to recognise the existence of a
sexual marketplace with its own internal rules and incentive
structure, and we can readily identify different interest groups within
it. But that’s usually not how real people actually feel about their
sexual lives, which are not only intimate and messy but also bound
up with complicated issues of self-esteem.
The liberal feminist narrative of sexual empowerment is popular for
a reason: it is much more palatable to understand oneself as a sassy
Carrie Bradshaw, making all the decisions and challenging the
patriarchal status quo. Adopting such a self-image can be protective,
making it easier to endure what is often, in fact, a rather miserable
experience. If you’re a young woman launched into a sexual culture
that is fundamentally not geared towards protecting your safety or
wellbeing, in which you are considered valuable in only a very
narrow, physical sense, and if your only options seem to be either
hooking up or strict celibacy, then a comforting myth of ‘agency’ can
be attractive.

This myth depends on naiveté about the true nature of male

sexuality. Today’s young women are typically unaware that men are,
in general, much better suited to emotionless sex and find it much
easier to regard their sexual partners as disposable. Ignorant of this
fact, women can all too easily fail to recognise that being desired is
not at all the same thing as being held in high esteem. It isn’t nice to
think of oneself as disposable or to acknowledge that other people
view you that way. Often, it’s easier to turn away from any
acknowledgement of what is really going on, at least temporarily. I’ve
spoken to a lot of women who participated in hook-up culture when
they were young and only years later came to realise just how
unhappy it made them. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has travelled the
same emotional journey, but in the opposite direction.

If you’re a woman who’s had casual sexual relationships with men in

the past, you might try answering the following questions as honestly
as you can:
 1. Did you consider your virginity to be an embarrassing burden
you wanted to be rid of?

2. Do you ever feel disgusted when you think about consensual

sexual experiences you’ve had in the past?

3. Have you ever become emotionally attached to a casual sexual

partner and concealed this attachment from him?

4. Have you ever done something sexually that you found painful
or unpleasant and concealed this discomfort from your partner,
either during sex or afterwards?

If your score is zero, then congratulations – your high socio-sexuality

and good luck have allowed you successfully to navigate a
treacherous sexual marketplace. But if you answered ‘yes’ to any of
these questions (as I suspect you probably did), you are entitled to
feel angry at a sexual culture that set you up to fail.

Cads and dads

While most women assess both their short-term and their long-term
partners based on the same criteria, most men do not.30 A woman
will typically look for identical qualities in a hook-up as she does in a
husband: as the evolutionary biologist David Buss puts it, ‘in both
cases, women want someone who is kind, romantic, understanding,
exciting, stable, healthy, humorous, and generous with his resources.
In both contexts, women desire men who are tall, athletic, and
attractive.’31 Men, in contrast, tend to be very particular about the
criteria they look for in a potential spouse but much less so when
seeking out casual sex.

Sherry Argov, author of the best-selling dating advice book Why Men
Love Bitches, puts it frankly: ‘What men don’t want women to know
is that, almost immediately, they put women into one of two
categories: “good time only” or “worthwhile.” And the minute he
slides you into that “good time only” category, you’ll almost never
come back out.’32 There is a straightforward scientific reason for the
existence of these two categories: it is hard to dissuade men out of
their instinct to care about what evolutionary biologists call
‘paternity certainty’. Men in ‘cad’ mode aren’t concerned with the
welfare of their unknown offspring, since they are favouring quantity
over quality, but men in ‘dad’ mode care a great deal and will often
devote their lives to providing for their families.

But ‘dad’ mode carries a significant cost in the form of jealousy. In

our evolutionary history, men who unwittingly devoted themselves to
raising children not genetically related to them were at a selection
disadvantage, while those who practised what biologists call ‘mate
guarding’ – i.e. behaving jealously – could be certain that their
children were their own. The sexual double standard is the result of
this mate-guarding instinct.

As with all other features of our evolutionary heritage, there is room

for flexibility here. Plenty of men (and women) are utterly devoted to
their adoptive or step-children, regardless of their genetic link. And a
surprisingly high proportion of men privately express a sexual
interest in cuckolding which may seem confusing within a strict
evolutionary framework. However, in general the sexual double
standard is so prevalent and so fiercely held that it is considered by
some anthropologists to be a human universal.33

It was once much stronger in the West. Lawrence Stone writes in his
history of divorce in England that until quite recently the double
standard was formalised in law, with female adultery considered to
be ‘an unpardonable breach of the law of property and the idea of
hereditary descent’, whereas male adultery was ‘regarded as a
regrettable but understandable foible’.34 And the British sociologist
Anthony Giddens (born in 1938) describes the sexual culture that
prevailed in the mid-twentieth century:

Virginity on the part of girls prior to marriage was prized by

both sexes. Few girls disclosed the fact if they allowed a
boyfriend to have full sexual intercourse – and many were only
likely to permit such an act to happen once formally engaged to
the boy in question. More sexually active girls were disparaged
by the others, as well as by the very males who sought to ‘take
advantage’ of them. Just as the social reputation of the girls
rested upon their ability to resist, or contain, sexual advances,
that of the boys rested upon the sexual conquests they could
achieve.35

Although it may not be formalised in law or even explicitly spoken

about in the post-sexual revolution era, the sexual double standard
does persist. For adolescents, the association between lifetime
number of sexual partners and peer status varies significantly by sex,
such that greater numbers of sexual partners are positively
correlated with boys’ social status but negatively correlated with that
of girls.36 Among adults, promiscuity in men is generally viewed
neutrally, whereas a woman’s reputation among her peers is
damaged as her number of sexual partners increases.37 People may
be reluctant actually to say so outright, but privately there is a social
penalty suffered by women viewed as promiscuous.

When looking for a long-term partner, anonymous surveys suggest

that the vast majority of straight men prefer to choose a wife with a
limited sexual history and little interest in casual sex, past or present.
Women also prefer a husband who is not unusually promiscuous, but
their preference is not as strong, and most are willing to accept a
man who has historically enjoyed casual sex but has since settled
down.38

Importantly, however, men generally don’t mind a more extensive

sexual history when they’re looking for a hook-up, or what Sherry
Argov would call a ‘good time only’ partner. Then, in fact,
promiscuity may increase the appeal. With a high sexual disgust
threshold, a natural interest in sexual variety, no personal risk of
pregnancy, and no fear of slut shaming, casual sex offers men a
cornucopia of delights that are difficult to resist. And the liberal
feminist narrative of ‘fucking back’ provides comfort for any man
whose conscience might trouble him. With hook-up culture
established as normative, both men and women are funnelled into
patterns of behaviour that are grimly complementary. 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. Meanwhile, women compete with each other for
short-term male sexual attention, and may well win it, but in a form
liable to induce (in Leah Fessler’s words) ‘shame, anxiety, and
emptiness’.

Mutual incomprehension
Just like their female peers, men may not consciously realise that
this is what they’re participating in. And, in one sense, who can
blame them? 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. When young men start having sex offline, they
will likely encounter women – themselves schooled by porn and pop
culture – who hide their distress, fake their orgasms, work hard to
avoid ‘catching feelings’, and in all other ways strive to be what
Gillian Flynn has famously described as the ‘Cool Girl’, the woman
who is ‘above all hot’: ‘Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get
angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their
men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m
the Cool Girl.’39

We should hardly be surprised when, after all this, many men

assume that women really don’t mind being relegated to ‘good time
only’. The resulting dysfunction can be glimpsed in posts such as
this, on the r/relationships subreddit:
 I was hanging out with my friends with benefits on Thursday
after work. We been hooking up for six months. I was heating us
up some food and she started asking about what I look in a long
term girlfriend.

I told her that I want someone successful, and someone that I

think would make a good mom. She starts then talking about
how she has those qualities and I see how this conversation is
going so I change the topic.

She brings it up and starts asking me what should she focus on

to be the kind of girl guys want to marry one day. I told her she
is fine the way she is, she just needs to find the right guy. She
asked me why I don’t want to date her down the road when I am
looking for something.

I told her, that she is great, but she isn’t really girlfriend material
in my eyes. She started crying like crazy after that. I don’t know
what was going on we never had a thing, she never talked about
having feelings or anything.40

Or this post, on a different subreddit:

 I have been seeing my friends with benefits Kara for a while
now, almost 8 months. We used to work together, now before
you guys ask no she does not have a crush on me or emotionally
likes me.

She has been single for a while and wants a guy similar to me if
that makes sense, has a decent career etc, in decent shape.

Now honestly I think she is punching too high when it comes to

a relationship…. I told her that she should focus less on physical
traits like looks and be willing to look past them when dating
guys. She asked me if I was telling her to lower her standards
and I was like sort of. She got super offended.41

These men seem to be genuinely bewildered by the fact that the

women they have been having sex with for many months are
unhappy in these pseudo-relationships. And the women seem to have
drifted into this arrangement, not realising how little regard their
partners really have for them. This is a tragedy of mutual
incomprehension.

However, I cannot help but harbour a sneaking suspicion that many

men – perhaps all – do realise that operating in ‘cad’ mode is not
actually harmless. Male readers who have ever had heterosexual
casual sex might like to ask themselves these questions, a
counterpart to the questions I addressed to female readers earlier in
the chapter:

1. Have you ever had sex with a woman you’d be embarrassed to

introduce to your friends?
 2. Have you ever failed to contact a woman after sex?

3. Have you ever suspected that your casual partner was becoming
emotionally attached to you and failed either to commit to or
break off the relationship?

4. Have you ever encouraged a woman to do something sexually,

even though she showed reluctance?

The answer to all of these questions ought to be ‘no’, but a culture of

casual sex incentivises men to do such things, and generally with no
social penalty. If anything, men who fuck and chuck ‘good time only’
women can often expect to increase their social status among their
male peers, at least in the short term.

In a casual sex culture, the centre of gravity shifts towards the higher
end of the sociosexuality spectrum, and this disproportionately
benefits men. But that isn’t to say that there isn’t an eventual cost to
be borne by the men who throw themselves into such a culture. A
man’s period of youthful desirability isn’t as narrow as a woman’s
(which is really only twenty years, from late teens to late thirties), but
the playboy period is still time limited – perhaps a third of a modern
Western lifetime. A man in his twenties with a different partner every
week might have a certain glamour, but no man in his sixties or
seventies can sustain that kind of lifestyle – even if he were still able
to attract casual partners (a big ‘if’), his peers would regard him as a
dirty old man, with no glamour whatsoever. Casual sex harms men
too, though not as immediately, and not as obviously.
But casual sex harms women most of all. I realise that avoiding it will
often be difficult, given the pressures of the twenty-first-century
dating market, but, unless you are in the small minority of women
who are exceptionally high in sociosexuality (in which case you will
have scored ‘zero’ on my earlier list of questions), the risks of casual
sex are going to outweigh the benefits.

Being alone with an unknown, horny man will always be somewhat

dangerous for any woman, given the differences in size and strength.
And although it’s of course true that husbands and long-term
boyfriends also commit domestic violence, that’s no reason to do
away with the vetting process altogether. It’s better to date men that
are already part of one’s social network because, if they’ve developed
a reputation for treating their girlfriends badly, you are likely to hear
about this through mutual friends. When you date a stranger from
the internet, the only person who can give you information about his
sexual history is the man himself, and his account is unreliable.
What’s more, there is nothing stopping him from treating his date
badly and then melting back into the night, having suffered no social
consequences whatsoever. Mutual friends and acquaintances can
punish bad behaviour. Dating apps can’t.

The fact that a man wants to have sex with a woman is not an
indication that he wants a relationship with her. Holding off on
having sex for at least the first few months is therefore a good vetting
strategy for several reasons. Firstly, it filters out the men who are just
looking for a hook-up. Secondly, it gives a woman time to get to
know a man before putting herself in a position of vulnerability.
Thirdly, avoiding the emotional attachment that comes with a sexual
relationship makes it easier to spot red flags. Free from the
befuddling effects of hormones, it’s possible to assess a new
boyfriend’s behaviour with clearer eyes.

One of the factors that acts against women in heterosexual dating is

the gender gap in the personality trait that psychologists call
‘agreeableness’, colloquially more likely to be referred to as
‘niceness’. It has long been known by researchers that, on average,
women are much more agreeable than men. This sex difference could
be a result of nature, or nurture, or a combination of both – it doesn’t
especially matter, at least not for my purposes here. The point is that
there is a gap – and a substantial one – between men and women in
this most crucial of traits.42

Agreeable people are more likely to put their own interests last and,
against the evidence, more likely to think the best of people. I’m a
very agreeable person, which means, for instance, that I tend to avoid
interpersonal conflict and I’m terrible at negotiating pay. If you want
to know how agreeable you are, you can search online for ‘big five
personality test’ – it’s a useful thing to know about yourself, because
it can help to guide your behaviour. I now know that being
excessively agreeable is my path of least resistance, so I make a
conscious effort to be more assertive.

Agreeable people are particularly vulnerable to being taken

advantage of by disagreeable people and, given that women are on
average significantly more agreeable than men are, this has obvious
relevance to sexual politics. So my advice to agreeable women
assessing potential partners is not to ask yourself ‘Would this man
make a good boyfriend for me?’, because doing so risks allowing your
niceness to override your good sense. Ask yourself instead ‘Would
this man make a good father to my children?’ – not because you
necessarily intend to have children with this man, or indeed with
anyone, but because agreeable people find it easier to prioritise the
interests of people they love than to prioritise their own interests.
And if he wouldn’t make a good father, don’t have sex with him. It
means that he isn’t worthy of your trust.

Liberal feminism has valorised having sex ‘like a man’ as a route to

women’s liberation. But we will never be able to have sex like men,
because we will never be men. There is an inherent asymmetry to
heterosexuality that can’t be overcome, despite the existence of
modern contraception and other forms of technology that offer a
brittle illusion of sameness. We can either accept that fact, and act
accordingly, or we can keep sending young women out as cannon
fodder in the battle against sexist double standards and then, when
they return wounded, decry sexism all the louder. I’d also like to live
in a world in which women can do whatever they want, without fear
of what men might do to them. But we don’t live in that world. Our
present reality demands that both men and women accept the
existence of the sexual asymmetry, even if that means curtailing our
freedoms. And, unwelcome as that reality may be, we are obliged to
describe it truthfully.

Notes
1. Elaine McCahill, ‘There’s a tension’, 29 September 2016,
www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/1880453/the-falls-gillian-
anderson-discusses-sexual-chemistry-between-her-character-
and-jamie-dornans-serial-killer/.

2. Karley Sciortino, Slutever: Dispatches from a Sexually

Autonomous Woman in a Post-Shame World. New York: Grand
Central, 2018, pp. 10–11.

3. ‘The revised sociosexual orientation inventory (SOI-R) short

manual’, www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/SOI-R%20Manual.pdf.

4. David P. Schmitt, ‘Sociosexuality from Argentina to Zimbabwe: a

48-nation study of sex, culture, and strategies of human mating’,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 247–75; discussion,
275–311.

5. Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary

Psychology of Women. 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
[2002] 2013, p. 51.

6. J. V. Bailey, C. Farquhar, C. Owen et al., ‘Sexual behaviour of

lesbians and bisexual women’, Sexually Transmitted Infections 79
(2003): 147–50.

7. L. Henderson, D. Reid, F. Hickson et al., First, Service

Relationships, Sex and Health amongst Lesbian and Bisexual
Women. London: Sigma Research, 2001;
https://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/id/eprint/1402.
8. See www.economist.com/britain/2020/01/09/why-lesbian-
couples-are-more-likely-to-divorce-than-gay-ones.

9. Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex,

and Survival. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, pp. 162–3.

10. Ibid., p. 160.

11. Partnership Patterns and HIV Prevention amongst Men who

have Sex with Men (MSM),
www.nat.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/July-2010-
Partnership-Patterns-and-HIV-Prevention.pdf.

12. Ford Hickson et al., Testing Targets: Findings from the United
Kingdom Gay Men’s Sex Survey 2007,
https://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/id/eprint/1386840/1/report2
009f.pdf.

13. Catherine H. Mercer et al., ‘The health and well-being of men who
have sex with men (MSM) in Britain: evidence from the third
National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3)’,
BMC Public Health 16 (2016), article 525; doi:10.1186/s128 89-
016-3149-z.

14. R. D. Clark and E. Hatfield, ‘Gender differences in receptivity to

sexual offers’, Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality 2
(1989): 39–55.

15. L. Al-Shawaf, D. M. Lewis and D. M. Buss, ‘Sex differences in

disgust: why are women more easily disgusted than men?’,
Emotion Review 10 (2018): 149–60.
16. Diane M. Kedzierski, An Examination of Disgust, its Measures,
and Gender Differences in the Experience of Disgust Sensitivity.
PhD dissertation, Nova Southeastern University, Florida, 2013;
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cps_stuetd/43.

17. Rachel Moran, Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution.

Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2013.

18. See https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/07/feminist-hook-up-

culture/; www.mic.com/articles/57795/your-7-point-
intersectional-feminist-guide-to-hook-ups.

19. Katie O’Malley and Becky Burgum, ‘Demisexuality meaning and

how it affects physical intimacy and attraction’, 27 July 2021,
www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/culture/a32765/what-it-
means-to-be-demisexual/.

20. See
www.womenshealthmag.com/relationships/a30224236/casual-
sex-feelings/; www.vice.com/en/article/59mmzq/how-to-bio-
hack-your-brain-to-have-sex-without-getting-emotionally-
attached?utm_source=vicefbus; https://elle.in/article/how-to-
have-casual-sex-without-getting-emotionally-attached-according-
to-science/.

21. Justin R. Garcia et al., ‘Sexual hookup culture: a review’, Review

of General Psychology 16 (2012): 161–76.

22. Lisa Wade, ‘The rise of hookup culture on American college

campuses’, 25 August 2017, https://scholars.org/brief/rise-
 hookup-sexual-culture-american-college-campuses.

23. Leah Fessler, ‘A lot of women don’t enjoy hookup culture – so

why do we force ourselves to participate?’, 17 May 2016,
https://qz.com/685852/hookup-culture/.

24. R. L. Fielder and M. P. Carey, ‘Prevalence and characteristics of

sexual hookups among first-semester female college students’,
Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 36 (2010): 346–59.

25. E. A. Armstrong, P. England and A. C. K. Fogarty, ‘Accounting for

women’s orgasm and sexual enjoyment in college hookups and
relationships’, American Sociological Review 77 (2012): 435–62.

26. Caroline Heldman and Lisa Wade, ‘Hook-up culture: setting a

new research agenda’, Sexuality Research and Social Policy 7
(2010): 323–33.

27. D. Herbenick, V. Schick, S. A. Sanders et al., ‘Pain experienced

during vaginal and anal intercourse with other-sex partners:
findings from a nationally representative probability study in the
United States’, Journal of Sexual Medicine 12 (2015): 1040–51.

28. R. Whitmire, ‘A tough time to be a girl: gender imbalance on

campuses’, Chronicle of Higher Education 54 (2008): A23.

29. Heldman and Wade, ‘Hook-up culture’.

30. David Buss and David Schmitt, ‘Sexual strategies theory: an

evolutionary perspective on human mating’, Psychological
Review 100 (1993): 204–32.
31. David Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human
Mating. New York: Basic Books, [1994] 2016, p. 137.

32. Sherry Argov, Why Men Love Bitches. New York: Adams Media,
p. 55.

33. Donald E. Brown, Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill,

1991.

34. Lawrence Stone, The Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 7.

35. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality,

Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity, 1992,
p. 9.

36. Derek A. Kreager and Jeremy Staff, ‘The sexual double standard
and adolescent peer acceptance’, Social Psychology Quarterly 72
(2009): 143–64.

37. Michael J. Marks, Tara M. Young and Yuliana Zaikman, ‘The

sexual double standard in the real world’, Social Psychology 50
(2019): 67–79.

38. Daniel N. Jones, ‘The “chasing Amy” bias in past sexual

experiences: men can change, women cannot’, Sexuality &
Culture 20 (2016): 24–37.

39. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl. New York: Crown, 2012.

40. See
www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/72115r/i25m_told_
 my_friends_with_benefits24f_i_dont_see/.

41. See
www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/db03qr/aita_for_t
elling_my_fwb_that_i_think_she_should/.

42. Yanna J. Weisberg, Colin G. DeYoung and Jacob B. Hirsh,

‘Gender differences in personality across the ten aspects of the Big
Five’, Frontiers in Psychology 2 (2011): 178; doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00178.
5
Consent Is Not Enough
In 2015, Andrew Norfolk, chief investigative reporter for The Times,
gave a lecture on the four years he and his colleagues had spent
reporting on child sexual abuse committed by gangs in British cities,
including Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and Oxford. He described
the experiences of a victim whose case had stuck in his mind:

One of the victims was a girl from Essex, but she’d been put into
a children’s home in Rotherham, and she was the only resident
of that children’s home … In two months in that home she’d
gone missing fifteen times, for periods ranging from a day to a
fortnight, and on one of those missing nights she’d been taken to
a house, put blind drunk into a bedroom, and cars had started
arriving from all across Greater Manchester. Men were queueing
on the stairs and on the landing outside the bedroom and the
jury heard that fifty men had had sex with that girl in one night.
She was a child.1

At exactly the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Kacey
Jordan’s porn career was already under way. Aged eighteen, Jordan
had starred in porn films, including All Teens 3, Barely 18 38, Barely
Legal 80, Just Legal Babes 2 and Don’t Let Daddy Know 4. Despite
being legally an adult, Jordan looked unusually young – petite with
slim hips and small breasts – meaning that she was still able to star
convincingly in ‘teen’ porn into her early twenties. In her most
famous scene, fifty-eight amateurs (that is, ordinary men) took turns
to ejaculate over her naked, childlike body.

At the age of twenty-two, Jordan livestreamed a suicide attempt over

YouTube. She is now attempting to rebuild her life. In a 2018
interview, she spoke about her many plastic surgeries: ‘I wanted to
reinvent myself … one of the reasons for the boob job was that the
fetishists were into the idea of me being underage, because it’s rare
for a grown adult like me to have the body of a 14 year old. That was
why I sold so much porn.’2 Years on, Jordan is able to speak candidly
about how naiveté and grinding poverty led her into the sex industry.
As a younger woman, though, she took a very different view, insisting
point blank that she was a consenting adult who was free to do as she
wished. Having reached her eighteenth birthday, she was legally
entitled to give this response. The victim of the Rotherham gang, still
a child, was not.

For practical reasons, the age of consent has to serve as a legal bright
line, separating statutory rape from consensual sex. There is no other
way that the law could function. Although young people undoubtedly
mature at different rates, and the transition from childhood to
adulthood is, like night turning to day, a gradual process, we have to
establish an arbitrary marker. At 11pm, she is a child; at midnight,
she becomes an adult. That’s how it has to be.

But we all know that in the real world that doesn’t quite work. If we
recoil from Norfolk’s account of fifty men queuing up to sexually
violate a teenage girl who had been abandoned by the state services
tasked with protecting her, how can we then watch video of a young
woman only a few years older, looking just as much like a child,
being violated by even more men, without a similar response? The
sore, torn orifices are the same. The exhaustion and disorientation
are the same. The men aroused by using and discarding a young
woman presented to them as a ‘teen’ are also much the same.

This chapter is about the predatory nature of the porn industry and
its destructive effects on the people involved in it. It’s also about the
idea of sexual consent, because the only defence that the porn
industry has, when presented with its hideous list of crimes, is its
own version of the sexual liberation narrative: everyone is
consenting, everyone is an adult, the women like it, and who are you
to say otherwise?

Now, we might respond by pointing out that actually not everyone is

an adult, and not everyone is consenting, in the narrow legal sense of
the word, given the very many images of children and non-
consenting adults that can be found even on the most mainstream
porn platforms. But the industry and its defenders are quick to
dismiss such examples as outliers, swivelling back to the ‘happy
hookers’ who prop up its reputation. And as long as those women are
old enough, (moderately) sane enough, and don’t say ‘no’ at the
crucial moment, then they reach the legal consent threshold and the
industry can do with them what it likes.

But consent has more layers to it than that. There is the barest
definition of the term on which we have to rely in a court of law – did
she and could she say ‘no’? – but there is also a thicker meaning. And
here I’m afraid we’re going to have to let go of seductively simple
ideas about consent derived from liberal individualism. I’m going to
argue that, although ‘but she consented’ may do as a legal defence, it
is not a convincing moral defence.

The ‘Queen of Porn’

People – particularly young women – will sometimes claim the
ability to consent to some of the worst harms you can imagine. The
victims of child grooming gangs are no exception. Although some do
desperately seek out help, only to be turned away, it is far more
common for girls to reject anyone who tries to intervene to stop the
abuse. Sometimes they do this because they’ve been intimidated into
silence, but more often it’s a consequence of something far more
troubling: they think that the adult men abusing them are their
loving boyfriends.

This is what grooming does. It’s the same state described by more
old-fashioned terms such as ‘brainwashing’ and ‘Stockholm
syndrome’ – a total loss of psychological independence. Think of the
wife brutally beaten by her husband who then throws herself across
his body when the police try to arrest him, something that domestic
violence victims do all the time. Think of the dead-eyed followers of
Charles Manson, killing on command and then walking beaming into
the courtroom, marching in unison with the letter ‘X’ carved into
their foreheads to mark them out as ‘Manson’s girls’. Branding,
incidentally, is a detail that often recurs in accounts of this kind of
all-consuming abuse. One of the victims of the Oxford grooming
gang was branded with an ‘M’, the initial of her pimp. Similarly, in
1994, a man called Alan Wilson used a hot knife to burn an ‘A’ and a
‘W’ into his wife’s buttocks, an act for which he was tried and later
acquitted, thus producing R v. Wilson, a famous piece of English case
law. Wilson claimed his wife was turned on by being branded like a
cow. The wife refused to testify. The court believed the husband.

Some researchers believe that the grooming response is adaptive: a

perfectly rational response to the threat of violence. The
anthropologist Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, for instance, suggests that
the capture of women during warfare was such a common event in
human evolutionary history that it had important effects on our
psychology.3 The women who were able to integrate into their new
communities were best placed to survive, meaning that those who
were able to emotionally attach to their captors had a selection
advantage over those who resisted.

Of course, men can be groomed too. The original event for which
Stockholm syndrome is named – the taking of hostages at a Swedish
bank – involved the capture of several men, who also formed an
intense attachment to their captor. But it is a phenomenon we
observe far more often in women – perhaps, as Scalise Sugiyama
argues, because of our evolutionary history. Perhaps instead (or
additionally) because women are more likely than men to find
themselves in the sort of situation that most efficiently induces the
response: intimate proximity to a violent man.

Looked at from one angle, grooming is just a particularly intense and

blind form of love, an emotional attachment that is fundamentally
irrational but no less important and meaningful for that. Many
women who have been in an abusive relationship will describe the
feeling of being hopelessly trapped in the emotional forcefield of
their abuser – terrified, wretchedly unhappy, but also desperate to
stay.

For some women, there is no distinction between the experience of

domestic abuse and the experience of performing in porn. Linda
Lovelace (real name Linda Boreman), star of the 1972 hardcore film
Deep Throat, is perhaps the most famous example of a woman who
entered porn literally, as she later detailed in her autobiography
Ordeal, at gunpoint. Her first husband, Chuck Traynor, physically
and emotionally abused her and coerced her into prostitution and,
later, porn. Although it was widely known in the porn industry that
Traynor was beating Boreman behind closed doors, no one seemed
to mind (‘She seemed to have a sado-masochistic relationship with
Chuck’, shrugged the director of Deep Throat in a later interview).

When Deep Throat became an international success, grossing over

$600 million,4 Boreman toured the UK, attending Ascot in a
miniskirt, and during a visit to Stonehenge announced:

To be honest with you, it makes me so mad that sex films are

called obscene when other movies are so full of slaughter and
rated so that kids can see them. What kids should learn is that
sex is good, and then there wouldn’t be so many neurotics in the
world. I mean you’re only here once, so enjoy life!5

‘Linda Lovelace’ appeared to be a grateful beneficiary of sexual

liberation. Only later did she reveal the truth of what was done to her
and become a campaigner against the porn industry. She wrote in
Ordeal of her experiences of performing in porn:

They treated me like an inflatable plastic doll, picking me up and

moving me here and there. They spread my legs this way and
that, shoving their things at me and into me, they were playing
musical chairs with parts of my body. I have never been so
frightened and disgraced and humiliated in my life. I felt like
garbage. I engaged in sex acts in pornography against my will to
avoid being killed.6

This is a consistent pattern: women who have worked in porn will

conform to the liberation narrative while they’re still a part of the
industry and share the dark side of their experiences only once
they’ve left. And by then their images are out in the world, and
there’s no way of getting them back. Boreman wrote in 1980 that
‘everyone that watches Deep Throat is watching me being raped.’
Half a century on, people are still watching it.

And younger women are still experiencing the (now hugely

expanded) porn industry in much the same way that Boreman did.
Vanessa Belmond, for instance, spent seven years performing in
porn, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. She is explicit
about the cruelty of the industry: the racism she experienced as a
black woman,7 the financial exploitation, the prevalence of STDs,
and the total lack of respect for the boundaries and wellbeing of porn
performers, many of whom came away from scenes with injuries and
became dependent on drugs and alcohol to numb the physical and
emotional pain. Belmond is also open about her own youthful
experiences of an eating disorder8 alongside addictions to drugs9 and
porn use,10 all of which contributed to her entering the industry in
the hopes of becoming as glamorous, beautiful and desired as she
imagined porn performers to be. She describes the exploitative
nature of an industry that chews up and spits out young women
when they arrive as teenagers, dreaming of money and fame:

Here is the pattern I have seen over and over again in my 7 years
in this industry: Girl gets into porn, shoots regularly for about 6
months to a year doing relatively tame sex scenes. Work starts to
slow down, so girl decides to do more hardcore scenes (things
like anal, multiple men etc.). Work slows down again. Girl now
starts escorting and becomes ‘open’ to doing just about anything
on camera to get work. Eventually, there is no company willing
to shoot her and porn work is dried up. Girl usually has no work
history and often no schooling, and now is essentially stuck with
escorting, stripping, webcamming and any porn work she might
be able to scrape up.11

But, much like Linda Boreman, when Belmond was still involved in
the industry, she was the first to insist that she was simply expressing
her sexual agency:
 One by one, all of my boundaries were crossed. Did I ever tell my
fans that? Of course not! As far as they knew, I started doing
anal because I ‘wanted to try something new.’ If you had asked
these fans, I did the most hardcore sex scenes because I ‘got into
porn to act out all of my fantasies on camera!’

I was just a ‘sexual’ young girl trying out all of the things she
fantasized about! Right? I certainly wasn’t a broken-down young
woman doing what she had to do to make money in the sex
industry. I wasn’t a young woman whose self-worth had been
completely destroyed to the point where she felt like nothing
more than an object, a commodity. Noooo. I was a ‘liberated,’
‘sexually open,’ ‘party girl!’12

This transition into and out of the ‘liberated’ role also holds true for
those few women who do make it in porn. Jenna Jameson, for
instance, is still one of the most famous porn actresses in the world
and, for a time, one of its most visible supporters, christened the
‘Queen of Porn’ in the media. In 2001, the Oxford Union invited
Jameson to come to Oxford to argue against the proposition ‘The
house believes that porn is harmful’. Her side won the debate, 204 to
27.13 But Jameson is now a vehement critic of the sex industry. In her
autobiography How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary
Tale she writes of shooting scenes with performers she found
repulsive, the near constant physical pain and exhaustion resulting
from a gruelling schedule, and all this in an industry filled with
abusive men who take any opportunity to degrade the women they
work with. Jameson left the sex industry in 2008 and has since
become an outspoken conservative and anti-porn campaigner.14
The crimes of MindGeek
Jameson’s campaigning fury is directed in particular at Pornhub, the
tenth most visited website in the world, and she has lent her support
to the American campaign group TraffickingHub, who have been
developing a growing body of evidence that Pornhub knowingly hosts
videos of children and sex trafficking victims being raped, as well as
so-called revenge porn shared without the victim’s consent.

The Internet Watch Foundation has so far confirmed 118 cases of

children being sexually abused on Pornhub.15 One fifteen-year-old
girl who had been missing for a year was found after her mother was
tipped off that her daughter was being featured in videos on Pornhub
– fifty-eight such videos of her rape and abuse were discovered.
Another girl, fourteen-year-old Rose Kalemba, was gang raped at
knifepoint. Footage of the attack was posted on Pornhub and viewed
more than 400,000 times. Kalemba contacted the site repeatedly
over a period of six months, asking for the video to be removed, but
with no success. Meanwhile, Pornhub continued to profit from the
footage of her assault. You don’t need to go to the ‘dark web’ in order
to access this material – it’s available on the biggest, most
mainstream porn site in the world.

Globally, the porn industry is certainly worth many billions of US

dollars, with some placing the figure as high as $97 billion.
MindGeek, the giant of the porn world, operates nearly a hundred
websites, including Pornhub, that in total consume more bandwidth
than Twitter, Amazon or Facebook.16 MindGeek’s organisational
structure is complex, with an elaborate system of companies
scattered all over the world, including in tax havens such as Cyprus
and Luxembourg. In 2009, then owner Fabian Thylmann was
arrested on charges of tax evasion and consequently sold MindGeek
to Feras Antoon and David Marmorstein Tassillo. For the last
decade, these two men have managed to keep an astonishingly low
profile – Antoon has only a brief Wikipedia mention, and
Marmorstein Tassillo has none at all. Unlike figures such as Jack
Dorsey, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the senior executives of
MindGeek are not household names, and they have thus far been
able to keep out of the media spotlight, accumulating vast wealth
without the burden of public accountability.

In December 2020, an article in the New York Times delivered a

painful blow to MindGeek. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas
Kristof conducted an investigation into the failure of Pornhub to
remove sexual images of children and non-consenting adults from its
platform. The New York Times is not only one of the most
prestigious news outlets in the world, it is also a liberal publication
that rarely publishes articles critical of the sex industry. Thus
Kristof’s piece could not easily be dismissed by Pornhub’s defenders
as yet another example of conservative prudishness, and his damning
verdict was all the more persuasive: ‘[The Pornhub] site is infested
with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy
cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and
footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for
“girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than
100,000 videos.’17
The response was immediate. Mastercard and Visa both announced
that they would be ending the use of their cards on Pornhub and,
four days after the publication of Kristof’s piece, MindGeek
announced that it would create a new team of moderators to review
and remove ‘potentially illegal material’, ban downloads, and change
its upload policies so that only verified users would be permitted to
post videos.18 Pornhub later purged all existing videos from
unverified users, reducing the number of videos on its platform from
13 million to 4 million.19 This was by far the most significant
crackdown in the site’s history.

It was also not enough. An ongoing legal case gives a taste of the sort
of shady practices MindGeek has been involved with, and could yet
continue to be involved with, despite the introduction of its new
safeguarding measures. GirlsDoPorn was a porn production
company, founded in 2009, whose channel was at one point one of
the twenty most popular on Pornhub. These were not amateur videos
posted by unverified users – GirlsDoPorn was a slick, professional
company that relied on an elaborate scam. It placed fake modelling
adverts on Craigslist asking for young women aged eighteen to
twenty-two to contact them. Those who responded were put in touch
with other women paid to pretend they had had positive experiences
working for the company as models. Some of the women were told
part of the truth: that they would be obliged to have sex on camera.
But none were told the whole truth: that the videos would be
distributed online.

GirlsDoPorn producers lied to these women, telling them that the

videos would be sold on DVD to private buyers on the other side of
the world. They also lied about the filming process, telling them that
they would be expected to have sex for only 30 minutes. Instead,
filming lasted up to seven hours. The women were coerced into
producing porn that was then distributed without their knowledge.
Half of them were not even given the total sum of money promised
by the producers.

Monica Evans was one of the women who responded to a fake

modelling ad posted by GirlsDoPorn producers in 2013, just two
months after her eighteenth birthday. She was flown out to
California, where she was coerced into filming hours of rough
intercourse. As she later told Vice: ‘I was in so much pain. I didn’t
want to do it anymore and they said, “No, you signed a contract, it’s
only ten more minutes” … I was there for four or five hours. It was
torture. Then they took me to the airport. I cried the whole plane ride
home.’20 A month later, the video was everywhere. It was linked to
Monica’s social media accounts, her family were sent screenshots,
and her little sister was harassed. Monica emailed Pornhub asking
them to take down her video, but she never heard back. She was
admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Monica was one of the young women who later gave evidence in a
civil case brought by twenty-two victims of GirlsDoPorn. In January
2020, the plaintiffs were awarded $12.775 million in damages and,
during the course of the case, criminal charges were also brought,
including sex trafficking and producing sexual images of a child.
Some of the people associated with GirlsDoPorn have been charged
by American federal authorities. Two of those defendants – porn
actor Ruben Andre Garcia and cameraman Theodore Wilfred Gyi –
have pleaded guilty and await sentencing, while GirlsDoPorn co-
creator Michael James Pratt remains at large.21

Although this civil lawsuit was filed in June 2016, Pornhub did not
remove the GirlsDoPorn channel until October 2019,22 when
criminal charges were brought. In December 2020, forty women
involved with GirlsDoPorn filed a further lawsuit claiming that
MindGeek knew about the company’s sex trafficking as early as
2009, and definitely by 2016, but nevertheless continued to partner
with GirlsDoPorn.23 The lawsuit also alleges that, as recently as
December 2020, MindGeek failed to remove GirlsDoPorn videos
despite requests for removal by victims. At the time of writing, the
lawsuit remains outstanding.24

Despite this kind of barely concealed malpractice, MindGeek

continues to churn out profits for one simple reason: people keep
watching. Some of the abuses of the porn industry are deliberately
hidden from consumers, with porn performers paid to moan with
pleasure as they clench with agony. But sometimes the abuse is
obvious. Sometimes, in fact, the abuse is the point.

The format of the GirlsDoPorn videos dwelt on the coercion rather

than concealing it. Typically filmed in hotel rooms and with minimal
crew, the women were given money on camera and asked to read
parts of their (misleading) contracts out loud. There was no pretence
that these women were enthusiastic participants – their reluctance
was intended to be sexy. And, based on the success of GirlsDoPorn
over its eleven-year existence, porn consumers found the genre very
sexy indeed: these videos were viewed over a billion times on sites
owned by MindGeek.

The porn industry would not produce content depicting abuse unless
there were a demand for it. There is a darkness within human
sexuality – mostly, but not exclusively, within men – that might once
have been kept within a fantasist’s skull, but which porn now makes
visible for all the world to see. The industry takes this cruel, quiet
seed and makes it grow.

Limbic capitalism
In a 2020 survey of men across a range of Western European
countries, respondents reported watching an average of 70 minutes
of online porn a week, with 2 per cent watching more than 7 hours.25
The average man, it seems, spends more time watching porn than he
does showering.26

And yet not all men watch porn, even in younger cohorts: a 2019
survey commissioned by the BBC found that 23 per cent of UK men
aged eighteen to twenty-five reported having not watched porn in the
last month.27 Porn use is not evenly distributed through the
population but, rather, conforms to the Pareto distribution, with a
minority of people accounting for the vast majority of consumption.
It is these consumers who are chiefly responsible for allowing the
porn industry to flourish, and yet they are also exploited by the
industry in their own way.
A lot of porn consumers feel conflicted about their use. Dr Fiona
Vera Grey, a research fellow at Durham University, has conducted
research with both men and women about their experiences of using
porn. A common emotional response among users she’s heard from
is a feeling of overwhelming arousal, followed abruptly by feelings of
shame immediately after orgasm. Many users, Vera Grey reports,
‘have an ethical conflict going on in terms of seeing material that
they feel is pretty shit for women, but personally they’re aroused by
it…. So they’re masturbating to material and then afterwards they
think “oh my God”, and they push the computer away.’28

Sexual arousal suppresses our disgust response29 for a

straightforward biological reason: other people are potential sources
of disease, but we have to get close to other people in order to
reproduce. The natural disinclination towards intimacy with
strangers is therefore disabled when we find those strangers sexually
attractive. And the disgust response is very closely linked with moral
intuition.30 Put simply, we’re not as good at making fine-tuned moral
judgements when we’re horny.

And porn sites are set up to arouse users as quickly as possible. Not
only do thumbnails show the most explicit moments of a video –
always the act of penetration, never the performers just sitting on a
bed – the links to videos are also often animated and play
automatically when the user hovers a cursor over them, or else when
the site opens. As soon as a user arrives, their eyes (and sometimes
ears) are immediately bombarded with intense sexual stimuli. This
basic drive, as fundamental as hunger or thirst, can’t be resisted
through moral reasoning. It is an involuntary response that the porn
industry has become very adept at provoking.

This kind of website design is a particularly disturbing example of

what Professor David Courtwright has called ‘limbic capitalism’, that
is, a ‘technologically advanced but socially regressive business system
in which global industries, often with the help of complicit
governments and criminal organizations, encourage excessive
consumption and addiction. They do so by targeting the limbic
system, the part of the brain responsible for feeling.’31 Limbic
capitalism is the reason why the most successful apps are brightly
coloured like fresh fruit and glint like fresh water. Our primitive
brains helplessly seek out the stimuli that we have evolved to be
attracted to because responding to those stimuli gave our ancestors a
survival advantage. Purveyors of limbic capitalism have become wise
to these instincts and have learned over time how best to capture
them.

Porn is to sex as McDonald’s is to food. These two capitalist

enterprises take our natural appetites, pluck out the most compulsive
and addictive elements, strip away anything truly nutritious, and
then encourage us to consume more and more. Both products are
examples of superstimuli: exaggerated versions of naturally
occurring stimuli that tap into an evolved longing for nourishment,
excitement and pleasure but do so in a maladaptive way, fooling the
consumer into gorging on a product that initially feels good but in
the long term does them harm.
When faced with such temptations, we human beings are not all that
much more sophisticated than the Australian jewel beetle
(Julodimorpha bakewelli), a glossy, golden-coloured beetle around 4
cm long. In 1981, a pair of insect specialists observed a male jewel
beetle attempting to mate with a discarded beer bottle (known in
Australian slang as a ‘stubbie’). Upon further investigation, they
found that male jewel beetles were not only frequently mistaking
stubbies for females of their species, they actually preferred the
stubbies, ignoring potential mates in order to hump the glass bottles
because these bits of litter were more glossy and more golden than
the female jewel beetles, and thus more sexually exciting to the
males.32

Porn provides much the same attraction, offering bigger breasts and
bigger dicks than those encountered ‘in the wild’, and thus also
offering more excitement. The impending arrival of realistic sex
robots on the market is likely to intensify this superstimuli effect still
further. The evolutionary biologist Diana Fleischman writes of the
malign impact of these new pieces of technology on their purchasers:

The cues a sex robot would provide to the evolved psychology of

a previously disgruntled teenager would be ‘you’re achieving
incredible mating success and status by staying at home and
playing video games, keep at it!’ … Video games and social
media already undermine the native psychological mechanisms
that make us work towards status – they supply more immediate
rewards and take far less effort than anything we work towards
out in the real world. Sex robots are only going to make that
worse, especially for young men.33
Why bother getting a job, going to the gym, or maintaining your
personal hygiene if your sex robot doesn’t care either way? If a sterile
piece of plastic can keep a young man sexually sated, he doesn’t need
to go out and meet real women. Of course, he will never acquire a
spouse or children and will be left in the end with only his sex robot
for companionship. But he will arrive at that lonely state having been
emotionally cushioned by the reliable dopamine hit won from
playing the sexual equivalent of a slot machine game over and over
again.

Even without access to sex robots, some men are already prioritising
watching porn over pursuing relationships with real partners. As
we’ll see in chapter 7, one perverse feature of the twenty-first-century
dating market is that the average young person is now having sex less
often than their parents and grandparents once did, and there is an
increasingly large and frustrated population of men who remain
virgins into their twenties and beyond. This subset of men is
particularly vulnerable to the purveyors of limbic capitalism.

The 2 per cent of Western European men who report watching more
than 7 hours of porn a week are not a healthy and happy group, and
nor are the men whose porn use may be less time-consuming but is
nevertheless personally destructive. The continuing influence of the
NoFap movement is a testament to the sexual dissatisfaction that
often comes with porn use. Founded in 2011 by the American web
developer Alexander Rhodes, NoFap encourages followers to give up
both porn and masturbation (‘fap’ being slang derived from the
sound of a man pleasuring himself). Followers – overwhelmingly
male – are offered freedom from the addictive power of porn and the
consequent sexual impairment that has skyrocketed within the last
twenty years, with erectile dysfunction now affecting between 14 and
35 per cent of young men, in contrast to perhaps 2 or 3 per cent at
the beginning of this century.34

Members of the NoFap subreddit sometimes write of masturbating

so often that they give themselves painful abrasions, and many
report suffering from ‘death grip syndrome’, a quasi-medical term
used to describe the loss of sensation that can sometimes result from
masturbating too aggressively. Sufferers report finding it difficult or
impossible to reach orgasm during sex with another person, partly
because of physical desensitisation and partly because of the
psychological effect of porn use. Even if they are motivated to seek
out sex with a real person, psychological death grip may mean that
they cannot become aroused by someone whose body isn’t exactly
like that of a porn star. Compulsive porn users expose themselves to
so much sexual stimulation that they literally become impotent.

The American actor and athlete Terry Crews is now an advocate of

the NoFap movement, having publicly spoken about his own struggle
with porn addiction: ‘Some people say, “Hey, man … you can’t really
be addicted to pornography.” But I’m gonna tell you something … It
changes the way you think about people. People become objects.
People become body parts; they become things to be used rather
than people to be loved.’35 Crews is handsome, rich and successful.
He is also a husband and father of five. Nevertheless, he found
himself neglecting his wife and watching porn instead, like an
Australian jewel beetle choosing an inert object over a real, living
mate. Such is the power that porn has over some users.
The feminists who criticised porn in the 1970s and 1980s got a lot
right, correctly predicting the industry’s direction of travel. The
infamous June 1978 cover of Hustler magazine, depicting a woman’s
body being pulped in a meat grinder, now looks almost tame
compared to the images of grotesque sexual violence that are
available, not only on mainstream porn sites but also on social media
platforms marketed as suitable for children.

But something that this generation of feminists didn’t predict was

the paradoxical effect that pornification would have on sexual
behaviour at the population level. On the one hand, we have a sexual
script that has become increasingly aggressive and loveless. But, on
the other, we have a group of men who are so stupefied by porn that
they are (sometimes permanently) impaired in their ability to have
sexual relationships with real people. Put simply, the porn
generation are having less sex, and the sex they are having is also
worse: less intimate, less satisfying and less meaningful.

Logging off
We are rapidly entering a world in which tech dominates the most
intimate parts of our lives, and this tech is designed by corporations
whose sole interest is profit making. The writer Venkatesh Rao
describes this as a world in which ‘you either tell robots what to do,
or are told by robots what to do’ – you live either above the
algorithm, or below it.36 The porn industry is a particularly
unpleasant example of this creeping domination, since all but a tiny
number of us are to be found below the algorithm.
There are a few people in the porn industry who are unambiguously
villainous – the executives of MindGeek, who are found
determinedly above the algorithm, do not provoke any sympathy in
me – but there are many more people below the algorithm whose
moral status is harder to define. In particular, porn users, who are
both the drivers of the industry and also its victims: not as victimised
as the performers, of course, but victimised nonetheless. They are
caught up in a form of limbic capitalism that takes our most basic
instincts and corrupts them in the pursuit of profit. You cannot
criticise capitalism without also criticising its most debased
offspring, the porn industry, which destroys its workers and its
consumers alike.

And yet most anti-capitalists prefer to look away. In fact, the most
committed defences of porn come nowadays from self-described
‘sex-positive’ leftists who claim that any criticism of the industry
must necessarily be a criticism of its workers (funnily enough, they
do not make the same defence of industries that rely on sweatshop
labour). These apologists are aided, in part, by the efforts of the
industry to sanitise its practices. Pornhub, for instance, runs a smoke
and mirrors exercise it calls ‘Pornhub Cares’, with campaigns against
plastic pollution and the destruction of bee and giant panda habitats
(‘Pornhub is calling on our community to help get pandas in the
mood. We’re making panda style porn!’)

But a far more effective counter to any criticism of the industry is the
sexual liberation narrative, always available to comfort any porn user
who feels a squirm of discomfort at what they’re funding. Kacey
Jordan, Jenna Jameson, Vanessa Belmond and Linda Lovelace all
gave some version of this narrative at the height of their fame,
responding to anyone who asked with a dismissive ‘of course I’m
consenting.’ All of these women later changed their minds, after the
porn industry had had its fill of them, and after the damage to their
bodies and psyches had already been done.

Taking a woman at her word when she says ‘of course I’m
consenting’ is appealing because it’s easy. It doesn’t require us to
look too closely at the reality of the porn industry or to think too
deeply about the extent to which we are all – whether as a
consequence of youth, or trauma, or credulousness, or some murky
combination of all three – capable of hurting or even destroying
ourselves. You can do terrible and lasting harm to a ‘consenting
adult’ who is begging you for more.

Some feminists place their faith in so-called ethical porn, but this
hypothetical product serves only to distract from the reality of how
the porn industry really operates. For one thing, porn marketed as
‘ethical’ makes up such a tiny and unpopular proportion of the
market that focusing on it is like, as feminist writer Sarah Ditum has
put it, ‘putting a chicken in your back garden and claiming you’ve
fixed factory farming.’37 For another, whatever ‘ethical’ label may be
stuck on a video, you cannot look at it and know for sure that the
people in it were truly happy to be there. Just as importantly, you
cannot look at a video and know if the people in it are still happy that
their images are out in the world. Linda Lovelace was an enthusiastic
defender of the porn industry during her promotion of Deep Throat:
it was only years later that she said that viewers were ‘watching me
being raped’.
And even aside from the conditions of its production, the product
itself will always have a damaging effect on the consumer’s sexuality.
The feminist critic Laura Mulvey has used the phrase ‘the invisible
guest’ to describe the role of the viewer who looks on at the events of
a film, forgotten in the corner of the room.38 The role of the porn
viewer should be understood as that of an invisible voyeur. Porn
trains the mind to regard sex as a spectator sport, to be enjoyed alone
and in front of a screen. It removes love and mutuality from sex,
turning human beings – as Terry Crews has put it – ‘into body parts’.

This is one of those rare problems that has such a blindingly simple
solution: opt out. Regardless of whether the state regulates the porn
industry – as I believe it ought to – the individual maintains absolute
control over whether or not he or she directly contributes to it. There
is no good reason to use porn. Giving it up costs the consumer
nothing. It is easier by far than giving up factory-farmed meat or
products made by sweatshop labour because, although we all need to
eat and clothe ourselves, not a single one of us needs to watch porn
ever again. The sexual liberation narrative tells you to keep going;
I’m telling you that you have an obligation to stop.

Notes
1. ‘An uncomfortable truth’, www.youtube.com/watch?
v=qrUiHB5qJJ0.

2. Generation Wealth, director Lauren Greenfield, Evergreen

Pictures, 2018.
3. Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, ‘Fitness costs of warfare for women’,
Human Nature 25 (2014): 476–95.

4. ‘Linda Boreman, 53, star of “Deep Throat” became advocate

against porn’, 23 April 2002, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-
2002-apr-23-me-linda23-story.html.

5. Simon Garfield, ‘Blow for freedom’, 28 April 2002,

www.theguardian.com/film/2002/apr/28/features.review.

6. Linda Lovelace and Mike McGrady, Ordeal: An Autobiography.

New York: Citadel Press, 1980.

7. See www.antipornography.org/racism-in-porn-industry-harsh-
reality-exposed.html.

8. See www.antipornography.org/my-bulimia-eating-disorder-story-
how-it-harmed-me.html.

9. See www.antipornography.org/my-story-of-becoming-a-
methamphetamine-addict.html.

10. See www.antipornography.org/female-porn-addiction-my-story-

how-i-became-addict.html.

11. See www.antipornography.org/working-in-porn-is-a-dead-end-

trip-to-nowhere.html.

12. See www.antipornography.org/is-doing-porn-empowering-for-

women.html.

13. See www.stylist.co.uk/people/10-unlikely-oxford-union-

speakers/13301.
14. Ashley Maaike, ‘Jenna Jameson is speaking out against
trafficking in porn’, 5 August 2020,
https://filmdaily.co/news/jenna-jameson-porn-trafficking/.

15. See https://filia.org.uk/resources/2020/5/16/international-call-

for-credit-card-freeze-on-porn-sites.

16. David Auerbach, ‘Vampire porn’, 23 October 2014,

https://web.archive.org/web/20141219160919/http://www.slate.
com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/mindgeek_porn_
monopoly_its_dominance_is_a_cautionary_tale_for_other_ind
ustries.html.

17. Nicholas Kristof, ‘The children of Pornhub’, 4 December 2020,

www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-
trafficking.html.

18. Nicholas Kristof, ‘An uplifting update on the terrible world of

Pornhub’, 9 December 2020,
www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/pornhub-news-child-
abuse.html.

19. Kari Paul, 14 December 2020,

www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/14/pornhub-purge-
removes-unverified-videos-investigation-child-abuse.

20. Meg O’Connor, 18 October 2019,

www.vice.com/en_uk/article/evjkdw/she-helped-expose-girls-
do-porn-but-she-can-never-outrun-what-it-did-to-her.
21. Debbie L. Sklar, 12 April 2021,
https://timesofsandiego.com/crime/2021/04/02/10-more-
women-join-lawsuit-against-pornhub-plaintiffs-now-total-50/.

22. Ana Valens, ‘Pornhub pulls Girls Do Porn videos amid sex
trafficking charges’, 15 October 2019,
www.dailydot.com/irl/pornhub-girls-do-porn-federal-charges/.

23. See www.10news.com/news/local-news/women-sue-pornhubs-

parent-company-for-hosting-girlsdoporn-com-videos.

24. Sklar, 12 April 2021.

25. T. Jacobs, K. Fog-Poulsen, A. Vermandel et al., ‘The effect of porn

watching on erectile function’, European Urology Open Science
19, Supplement e1121–e1122, July 2020.

26. See www.mirashowers.co.uk/blog/trends/revealed-what-brits-

are-really-getting-up-to-in-the-bathroom-1/.

27. Moya Lothian-McLean, ‘How do your porn habits compare with

young people across Britain’, 14 March 2019,
www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/bb79a2ce-0de4-4965-98f0-
9ebbcfcc2a60.

28. Interview with Fiona Vera Grey, 2 June 2020.

29. Charmaine Borg and Peter J. de Jong, ‘Feelings of disgust and

disgust-induced avoidance weaken following induced sexual
arousal in women’, PLoS ONE 7 (2012): e44111.
30. C.-E. Ivan, ‘On disgust and moral judgments: a review’, Journal
of European Psychology Students 6 (2015): 25–36.

31. David Courtwright, 31 May 2019,

https://quillette.com/2019/05/31/how-limbic-capitalism-preys-
on-our-addicted-brains/.

32. Darryl T. Gwynne and David C. F. Rentz, ‘Beetles on the bottle:

male buprestids mistake stubbies for females (Coleoptera)’,
Australian Journal of Entomology 22 (1983): 79–80.

33. Diana Fleischman, 24 April 2018,

https://jacobitemag.com/2018/04/24/uncanny-vulvas/.

34. Amy Fleming, ‘Is porn making young men impotent?’, 11 March
2019, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/mar/11/young-
men-porn-induced-erectile-dysfunction.

35. Brandon Griggs, ‘Terry Crews: porn addiction “messed up my

life”’, 24 February 2016,
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/24/entertainment/terry-crews-
porn-addiction-feat/index.html.

36. Venkatesh Rao, 17 August 2017,

www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-
of-maya-millennial/.

37. Sarah Ditum, 26 June 2020, https://unherd.com/2020/06/why-

doesnt-porn-ever-get-cancelled/.

38. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen

16/3 (1975): 6–18.
6
Violence Is Not Love
One of the pleasurable things about BDSM, from a business
perspective, is that it so often demands kit. The British high-street
retailer Ann Summers currently offers a six-piece ‘bondage set’ for
£60, a starter pack which includes a flogger, blindfold, ball gag, ankle
cuffs, handcuffs and rope. To this could be added dozens of other
items from the Ann Summers BDSM range, from multi-chain nipple
clamps (£15) to basic hog ties (£10).

Many of these products feature Fifty Shades of Grey branding, the

novel and film franchise having provided a golden opportunity for
Ann Summers to diversify its range. In 2017, the flagship store at
London’s Marble Arch invited customers to visit a basement room –
‘The Red Room’ – devoted to all things Fifty Shades. There could be
found a bondage dog crate, butt plugs with fluffy tails, a penis cage,
and a £10,000 vibrator that came complete with matching cufflinks.1
Who knew that sexual liberation could be so profitable?

This marketing wheeze was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the
Fifty Shades franchise, which eroticises wealth just as much as it
eroticises sexual dominance. Christian Grey, the troubled romantic
hero, is charming, handsome, and knows his way around a fluffy butt
plug. He is also a billionaire, and the victim of his affections,
Anastasia, is wooed just as much by his Airbus EC130 helicopter as
she is by the sex dungeon that he calls his ‘Red Room’. Of course,
take away all of these distractions, and what Christian Grey really
undertakes is just common-or-garden domestic abuse. He becomes
obsessed with a much younger, virginal woman. He wins her over by
bombarding her with attention. He controls her every move, from
what she wears to who she spends time with. He even dictates what
she’s allowed to eat.

And here’s the troubling thing: a lot of women loved it. Not all
women – personally, I’m unmoved by Christian Grey’s charms, as
are most of the friends I’ve spoken to – but, for a sizeable minority,
the combination of domestic abuse and ostentatious wealth proved
highly arousing and therefore highly lucrative – for the author E. L.
James herself, for publishers, for filmmakers and for retailers of
BDSM gear, including Ann Summers.

Radical feminists have historically explained this disturbing form of

arousal as the product solely of socialisation, imbibed from a culture
that celebrates female submission and male domination. Although
there is some truth to this idea, the radical feminist analysis doesn’t
fully explain the popularity of BDSM among the women who bought
Fifty Shades. The sad truth is that a minority of women do find
BDSM very sexy, and you do not have to go far to find such women
publicly defending the practice as an expression of their sexual
agency. To my mind, a more plausible (and more distressing)
explanation for this behaviour has to include a recognition that some
women may be primed to find Christian Grey’s abusive behaviour
arousing – and that priming is a consequence not only of culture but
also of biology.
The idea of possessiveness
In chapter 2, we confronted the fact that there are important average
differences between men and women when it comes to sexuality. One
striking feature of typical female sexuality is a preoccupation with
partners’ displays of emotional loyalty. This is a logical consequence
of the fact that a pregnant and nursing woman is astonishingly
vulnerable, and she and her baby are more likely to survive if she has
a committed and well-resourced mate. A man may demonstrate his
suitability for the role in various ways, for instance by buying gifts,
lavishing his mate with attention, and showing kindness towards
children.

He can also show his commitment in more unpleasant ways.

Christian Grey is a violent, controlling brute, but his obsessive
behaviour towards Anastasia does at least demonstrate his
unwavering commitment to her. Fifty Shades adds a whips-and-
chains aesthetic, but many older romance novels are centred on
much the same dynamic: the strong handsome man who falls head
over heels in love with the heroine and will do anything to have her,
up to and including being violent.

Next time you’re in your local library, have a look at the covers and
blurbs of some Mills & Boon novels, written for an older and more
traditionalist audience than Fifty Shades. Invariably the heroes are
portrayed as big and muscly and are either high-status professionals
(surgeons, say) or adventurous vagabonds (pirates or highwaymen).
There is variation within the romance genre, and heroes may be
more or less aggressive depending on the particular book, but one
theme remains consistent: the consumers of women’s erotic fiction
have never been turned on by a man who plays hard to get, wavers in
his interest, or is distracted by the attentions of other women. Long
before Fifty Shades came along, what these readers were aroused by
is the fantasy of a man who is really into them, often obsessively so.

Sometimes that desire for undivided attention favours the gentle

giant who is loving and tender towards women, children and kittens.
But a woman’s perfectly rational desire for a loyal mate can also
sometimes be hijacked by the likes of Christian Grey, who is
undoubtedly committed to Anastasia but is also controlling and
dangerous.

The tragedy is that, while the fictional Christian Grey may be faithful
to Anastasia, his real life counterpart often isn’t. It’s easy enough for
an inexperienced or overly trusting woman to confuse jealousy for
fidelity and so be drawn to the aggressive heroes of erotic fiction.
But, in reality, the two character traits do not necessarily go hand in
hand.

The conservative writer and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple has

never been one for repeating feminist pieties, which in this instance
makes his analysis of the jealousy dynamic more candid. When
working at a hospital in a deprived area of Birmingham, England,
Dalrymple often encountered both the victims and the perpetrators
of domestic abuse, and he writes about his patients’ experiences with
no effort to mince his words:
 The great majority of the jealous men I meet are flagrantly
unfaithful to the object of their supposed affections, and some
keep other women in the same jealous subjection elsewhere in
the city and even 100 miles away. They have no compunction
about cuckolding other men and actually delight in doing so as a
means of boosting their own fragile egos. As a result, they
imagine that all other men are their rivals: for rivalry is a
reciprocal relationship. Thus a mere glance in a pub directed at a
man’s girlfriend is sufficient to start a fight not only between the
girl and her lover but, even before that, between the two men.2

As for the women who become involved with such men, Dalrymple
writes of a self-harming instinct which is not often acknowledged
among feminists but is likely to be familiar to anyone who has ever
worked with victims of domestic abuse:

But why does the woman not leave the man as soon as he
manifests his violence? It is because, perversely, violence is the
only token she has of his commitment to her. Just as he wants
the exclusive sexual possession of her, she wants a permanent
relationship with him. She imagines – falsely – that a punch in
the face or a hand round the throat is at least a sign of his
continued interest in her, the only sign other than sexual
intercourse she is ever likely to receive in that regard. In the
absence of a marriage ceremony, a black eye is his promissory
note to love, honour, cherish, and protect.3

In this chapter, I’m going to argue that BDSM is simply a ritualised

and newly legitimised version of a toxic dynamic that is all too
common between men and women. Although the sexual domination
of ‘subs’ by ‘doms’ may have been given a counter-cultural gloss in
recent decades, it is in fact as old as the hills. As we will see, BDSM
enthusiasts have worked hard to present their sexual interest as a
means of subverting the status quo, but in fact it is nothing of the
sort. The mainstreaming of BDSM has, firstly, served to protect the
interests of men who want to beat up women and avoid being
punished for it, and, secondly, it has made a lot of money for the
porn industry and for manufacturers of tacky leatherette clothing. In
other words, BDSM is good for abusive men and good for capital. It
subverts nothing.

The popular representation of BDSM often focuses on a very

particular and unusual relationship in which a wealthy businessman
pays a female dominatrix for regular whippings. These relationships
do exist, and their amusingly counter-intuitive dynamics make them
attractive to screenwriters and journalists. But they are not typical.

Most submissives (‘subs’) are female and most dominants (‘doms’)

are male. One 2013 study4 of participants in a BDSM online forum
found that only 34 per cent of men consistently preferred the sub
position, while an even smaller proportion of women – 8 per cent –
identified as doms. The same study found that doms tended to be low
in the agreeableness personality trait, meaning that they were
assertive and demanding. Subs, in contrast, tended to be more
agreeable than average, meaning that they were eager to please.
These findings call into question the idea that people are drawn to
BDSM roles that go against their normal dispositions – in fact, the
opposite seems to be true. Most of the time, doms remain doms
outside of the bedroom (or sex dungeon), and subs remain subs. In
the real world, BDSM does not defy the sexual domination of women
by men – rather, it reinforces it.

The Sutcliffean woman

But this is not, I regret to say, the dominant feminist view in the
twenty-first century. It was not even the unanimous view in the
1970s, when radical feminism was riding high. In the influential text
The Sadeian Woman, for instance, published in 1978, Angela Carter
attempted a literary deconstruction of the writings of the grandfather
of BDSM: the Marquis de Sade, the French aristocrat for whom
‘sadism’ is named. Immersed in the psychoanalytic style that was
fashionable at the time, Carter identified in Sade’s work a kind of
protofeminism, referring to ‘the pornographer’ – of which Sade is the
pre-eminent example – as an ‘unconscious ally’ to women, ‘because
he begins to approach some kind of emblematic truth.’5 The Sadeian
Woman is part of a long, sorry history of feminists prioritising their
own intellectual masturbation over their obligation to defend the
interests of women and girls.

Carter is not alone in venerating Sade, and in the years since the
publication of The Sadeian Woman she has been joined by many
other sex-positive feminists keen to reclaim BDSM for women. There
are also plenty of men who have historically enjoyed Sade’s work.
Flaubert and Baudelaire, for instance, rediscovered his writings in
the nineteenth century and, in the 1920s, Surrealists including Man
Ray, André Breton, and Dali were attracted to Sade’s demand for
absolute sexual freedom.6

These renegades fell well outside of the mainstream in their own

time and, in fact, struggled to get hold of copies of Sade’s books,
since they were banned in France until 1957.7 But in the 1960s Sade’s
work became widely available and acquired a new glamour.
Gonzague Saint Bris, the author of a recent biography of Sade, sees
his influence in the sexual revolution of the 1960s.8 As a twenty-year-
old during the May 1968 student riots in Paris, Saint Bris recalls, ‘I
looked at all the placards, reading “It is Forbidden to Forbid,” and
“Do Whatever You Desire.” I suddenly understood that our
revolutionary phrases were actually from Sade. I began to see a
phantom wearing his powdered wig standing on the barricades
beside me!’9

Sade maintains a chic reputation in some quarters today, so much so

that one of the marquis’s living descendants, the Count de Sade, has
been able to capitalise on the family name to produce a line of
Maison de Sade luxury goods, including wine, scented candles, and –
in honour of the bicentennial of his death – a bust of the marquis
that retailed for US$5,700.10 In that year, several prestigious
Parisian museums put on exhibitions to commemorate Sade’s life
and work.11 As far as I can tell, all of these eminent defenders of Sade
know full well what he got up to in real life – the fact that he
imprisoned, raped and tortured many prostituted women and
servants, including several children, and that these victims most
certainly did not consent to what was done to them and told the
authorities as much after they had escaped.

From the age of thirty-seven, Sade spent much of his life in prison
and was then able to perpetrate his violent fantasies only in print. In
his magnum opus, 120 Days of Sodom, Sade fantasises about horror
upon misogynist horror. If he had been free to, it seems likely that
his violent sexual adventures and murderous fantasies would
ultimately have escalated to actual murder, and his victims would
probably have been found among the same poor women and children
he persecuted in the years before his imprisonment. Sade’s
eighteenth-century setting may give him an air of otherness, but he
was really no different from any modern sex offender with a taste for
torture and mutilation. Angela Carter might as well have penned a
hymn to the Yorkshire Ripper and called it The Sutcliffean Woman.

Feminists such as Carter may have been fooled by Sade’s dark

mystique, but Andrea Dworkin was not. Writing in 1979, Dworkin
saw Sade for what he was – an aristocratic psychopath who used his
sex, wealth and power to gain access to the bodies of the poor:

Those leftists who champion Sade might do well to remember

that prerevolutionary France was filled with starving people. The
feudal system was both cruel and crude. The rights of the
aristocracy to the labor and bodies of the poor were
unchallenged and not challengeable. The tyranny of class was
absolute. The poor sold what they could, including themselves,
to survive. Sade learned and upheld the ethic of his class.12
On Easter Sunday in 1768, Sade came upon one of his victims, a
widow called Rose Keller, when she was begging on the streets of
Paris, having been made destitute after her husband’s death. He
offered her work as a housekeeper and she went with Sade to his
house, where he whipped and badly injured her. Keller later said that
she believed Sade would kill her, and when she managed to escape
from his house she ran half naked and in terror until she found
refuge with some local women, who alerted the police.13

It is no coincidence that Keller was poor. It is no coincidence that

Sade was able to avoid imprisonment by paying her off. It is no
coincidence that he abducted her on Easter Sunday, since Sade was
aroused almost as much by blasphemy as he was by misogyny, and
this anti-clerical instinct has done much to increase his reputation
among atheist intellectuals of the modern era. To such intellectuals,
Sade’s victims are made invisible – dismissed as mere servants and
whores, now long dead – and his rebellion against the conservative
mores of his time is valorised. Dworkin had it right when she wrote
of the ‘freedom’ that Sade represents to his fans: ‘Sade suffered
because he did what you want to do; he was imprisoned as you might
be imprisoned. The “you” is masculine. The freedom Sade is credited
with demanding is freedom as men conceive it.’14

Choking
If only Dworkin’s analysis had won out. Unfortunately, among most
twenty-first-century feminists, Carter is triumphant. The masculine
freedom represented by Sade – the freedom to hurt, degrade and
humiliate – is available to sample by both men and women in our
newly liberated sexual culture, but with just one change: unlike Sade,
today’s sadists are obliged to seek consent. And that, we’re told,
makes all the difference.

Roxane Gay, for instance, in her bestselling book Bad Feminist,

offers a directive that sounds simple enough:

For people who enjoy BDSM, there’s this thing called consent,
which should always exist in human interactions, but which is
exceedingly important when you entrust your body and mind to
someone else in such ways. You can say, ‘I want you to hurt me,’
or ‘I want you to humiliate me,’ or ‘I want you to dominate me,’
and someone else will do so. But, and this is important, when
you say, in some form or fashion, stop, the pain or humiliation
or domination stops, no questions asked.15

Gay is personally a fan of BDSM and, in a recent anthology of short

stories on the theme, she writes about a man who takes pleasure in
slapping his wife, strangling her with a belt, and scarring her back
with a razor blade.16 By the end of the story we discover that the man
is in fact transgender, which supposedly transforms the nature of the
couple’s abusive sex.

Of all of the sex acts associated with BDSM, strangulation is

currently the most fashionable and also the most gendered. In porn,
men strangle men, men strangle women, but women are very rarely
the ones doing the strangling. Strangulation outside of sex is also
gendered, with the vast majority of victims being female and the vast
majority of perpetrators being male. One study in San Diego found
that, of 300 forensic records reporting strangulation, 298 involved a
man strangling a woman. And it is a crime that is very often suffered
by victims of domestic violence, most of whom are women.

The UK domestic abuse charity Refuge reports that 48 per cent of

women using their services report having been strangled, choked or
suffocated, and women who have previously been strangled by their
partners are eight times more likely to be killed by them, often by
strangulation, since this is the second most common method of
murder used by men against women in the UK.17 Scrolling through
‘choking’ porn and seeing image after image of men with their hands
around women’s throats, anyone not trained in the ideology of liberal
feminism would be forgiven for seeing nothing more than bog-
standard male violence against women – the kind of violence that
feminists are supposed to be united against.

The trend for sexual strangulation has not confined itself to porn.
Research conducted by ComRes in 2019 found that over half of
eighteen- to 24-year-old UK women reported having been strangled
by their partners during sex, compared with 23 per cent of women in
the oldest age group surveyed, aged thirty-five to thirty-nine.18 Many
of these respondents reported that this experience had been
unwanted and frightening, but others reported that they had
consented to it, or even invited it.

And here lies the complication, because you don’t have to look hard
to find women who say they love being strangled, and these willing
women – girls, really, many of them – are held up as mascots by
those who defend the fashion for sexual strangulation. The argument
from liberal feminists such as Roxane Gay is that, since there are
some women who enjoy being strangled, it is wrong to condemn
strangulation per se – it is only non-consensual strangulation that
deserves our condemnation. It is exactly the same argument that we
have come across earlier in this book: with consent, anything goes.

In July 2020, for instance, Men’s Health magazine ran a feature

titled ‘Breath play is a popular form of BDSM. Here’s how to do it
safely’,19 and when Member of Parliament Laura Farris criticised the
article for being anti-feminist, she was met with a huge backlash on
Twitter, largely from young women who insisted that consensual
strangulation can be a harmless form of kink. Gigi Engle, a sex writer
for Men’s Health, joined Farris’s critics in tweeting ‘Nope. Laura,
sweetie, choking can be a very fun Sex act when done safely and
consenually [sic].’20

But Engle is wrong on this. An alarming study from 2020 reveals the
range of injuries that can be caused by non-fatal strangulation,
including cardiac arrest, stroke, miscarriage, incontinence, speech
disorders, seizures, paralysis, and other forms of long-term brain
injury.21 Although it takes several minutes to actually kill someone by
strangulation, unconsciousness or ‘choking out’ can occur within
seconds and always indicates at least a mild brain injury. Dr Helen
Bichard, the lead author of the study, reports that the injuries caused
by strangulation may not be visible to the naked eye, or may only
become evident hours or days after the attack, meaning that they are
far less obvious than injuries such as wounds or broken bones, and
so may be missed during a police investigation.
Bichard rejects on medical grounds the idea that strangulation can
ever be done safely, describing this as an urban myth: ‘I cannot see a
way of safely holding a neck so that you wouldn’t be pressing on any
fragile structures.’22 And, given the possible consequences of
strangulation, until recently only partially understood, Bichard
argues that the vast majority of laypeople are not capable of giving
truly informed consent to it.

The Men’s Health piece got something else wrong, too, by suggesting
that strangulation is arousing primarily because ‘cutting off the
brain’s oxygen supply can cause feelings of lightheadedness.’ This
bio-medical attempt to explain the fashion for sexual strangulation is
quite common and is appealing in its simplicity, but it leaves out a
crucial factor. It is certainly true that a fetish for auto-erotic
asphyxiation is attractive to some men, and, every now and again,
men with a sexual interest in strangulation will be found dead,
having accidentally killed themselves during a misjudged
masturbation session.23

But a fetish for strangling oneself is vanishingly rare among women,

so much so that I have not been able to find a single case in the UK of
a woman accidentally killing herself during an auto-erotic
asphyxiation attempt gone wrong, with the notable exception of 21-
year-old Hope Barden, who died in 2019, having been paid to hang
herself on webcam by Jerome Danger, a sexual sadist obsessed with
extreme porn.24

If it is really true that women are drawn to strangulation because of

the high induced by oxygen deprivation, then why is it that women
are not strangling themselves alone, but instead are asking their
male partners to do it to them? The answer is straightforward
enough: because these women are not getting off on the lack of
oxygen, but instead on the power play.

Sadly, images of strangulation shared or liked by women on social

media, discussions between women on platforms such as Reddit and
Twitter, and testimony that I’ve heard directly from many young
women all suggest that many of the women who seek out
strangulation have a very particular – and very misguided –
understanding of what strangulation means when men do it to them
during sex.

To put it bluntly, many of these women are as deluded as the victim

of domestic violence, described by Theodore Dalrymple earlier in this
chapter, who ‘imagines – falsely – that a punch in the face or a hand
round the throat is at least a sign of his continued interest in her.’
They think strangulation indicates a man’s love, passion and desire
for them. More often than not, it indicates none of these things, but,
in a culture in which the differences between male and female
sexuality are routinely denied, particularly by liberal feminists, it
shouldn’t surprise us that many of these young women take the lead
from erotic fiction such as Fifty Shades and misinterpret aggression
from their male partners as a sign of passion, not realising that real-
life Christian Greys usually have no interest whatsoever in the
wellbeing of the women they (to use a nasty piece of porn
terminology) ‘hatefuck’.
Dr Scott Hampton is a clinical psychologist and director of Ending
the Violence, an American organisation committed to addressing
gender-based violence. Hampton has spent more than thirty years
running offender treatment programmes inside American prisons
and has collected a long and dispiriting series of accounts from
domestic violence perpetrators, some of whom discuss their reasons
for strangling their partners during sex.25 These accounts provide a
far more candid insight into the motivations of men who strangle
women than any erotic fiction ever could.

Hampton’s patients do not strangle out of love or out of any desire to

heighten their partner’s pleasure. They do it to show how powerful
they are: ‘No better way to get her full attention, especially when she
realizes I could end her life in a snap, literally’, says one man. ‘The
look of terror in her face is such a rush. She can’t help but look at
you. You’re right there’, says another. For a man with a fragile ego,
strangulation can be appealing as a way of displaying absolute
strength and dominance over a woman who is then forced to look
right into his eyes.

We Can’t Consent to This

Even if you accept the liberal feminist claim that it is possible for
someone to truly and meaningfully consent to being strangled by
their sexual partner, you are still faced with the problem of how the
law is supposed to differentiate between consensual and non-
consensual instances of sexual violence. Emmett, a piece of English
case law from 1999, highlights the difficulty. The case involved a man
who poured lighter fluid over his partner’s breasts and then set her
alight, causing third-degree burns. The woman visited her GP for
treatment of the injury, and the GP – suspecting domestic violence –
took the unusual step of violating patient–doctor confidentiality by
making a report to the police. The woman refused to give evidence
when the case came to court, and her partner insisted that she had
consented to everything that he did.

What is the court to do, in such a case? As Jonathan Herring,

professor of law at the University of Oxford, explains:

In cases where a domestic abuser is charged with assaulting

their partner where there are proven injuries, explaining the
injuries as the results of consensual sadomasochism is one of the
few defences available to them and if the victim is too scared to
give evidence, then it will be a hard defence for the prosecution
to rebut.26

Even if the victim in Emmett had been willing to give evidence and
had supported her partner’s account, the court might still have been
unsure as to whether her consent was truly free, since, as Herring
points out, ‘there are uncomfortable links between the cases where
an abuser has sought to control his victim and every aspect of her
life, and cases where a BDSM master has sought control of his
slave.’27 From the outside, a consensual BDSM relationship and an
abusive relationship look exactly the same, and so if a sub is injured
or killed during a sexual encounter, and her dom claims it was an
accident, how exactly are the courts supposed to tell the difference?
This is not a theoretical problem. The We Can’t Consent to This
campaign, which I’ve worked on, has documented sixty-seven cases
in the UK in which people have been killed and their killers have
claimed that their deaths were the result of a sex game ‘gone wrong’.
All suspects in these killings have so far been male, and sixty of those
killed have been female. Most of the victims died from strangulation,
although a significant minority suffered serious genital trauma. Most
of the victims were the wives or girlfriends of perpetrators, and often
there was evidence of domestic abuse. Other women had only met
the perpetrators that day, and a large number of victims were
involved in the sex trade.

There are two striking trends in the data we’ve collected. Firstly, the
number of rough sex cases has increased significantly since the turn
of this century; secondly, defendants who rely on this defence have
increasingly been meeting with success, with roughly half of these
homicide cases now ending without a conviction for murder. Put
differently, within the last two decades, courts have become much
more willing to believe defendants when they claim that their victims
died because they literally ‘asked for it’.

Some of the sentences handed down in these cases have been

shockingly light. For instance, three cases in 2018 resulted in a
manslaughter conviction after defendants relied on a ‘rough sex
defence’ when charged with murder. John Broadhurst was sentenced
to 3 years 8 months when his girlfriend Natalie Connolly died in his
home from a combination of intoxication and vaginal haemorrhage,
having been violently penetrated by Broadhurst with a bottle of
carpet cleaner.28 Jason Gaskell was sentenced to 6 years when he slit
the throat of Laura Huteson during sex, using a knife he kept under
his pillow.29 And Mark Bruce was also sentenced to six years after he
picked up a seriously drunk Chloe Miazek from a bus stop, took her
back to his home, and strangled her to death (Bruce’s barrister said
in court that ‘it would seem to be a complete coincidence that Mr
Bruce met another person who shared his interest in that particular
activity’).30

Feminists in other parts of the world have also documented a rise in

the use of the rough sex defence, with similar cases found in
Canada,31 Italy,32 Russia,33 Mexico,34 Germany35 and the United
States.36 The increasing popularity and success of the ‘rough sex
defence’ internationally seems to be a result of the fact that courts
are increasingly willing to believe that women not only consent to,
but actually seek out, the kind of violence that can prove lethal. The
phenomenon thus provides compelling evidence of the large-scale
consequences of the normalisation of BDSM.

This normalisation is glaringly obvious online, where BDSM content,

particularly content featuring strangulation, has migrated from niche
porn sites to mainstream porn sites, and now to social media,
including platforms that advertise themselves as suitable for children
aged thirteen and over. On Instagram, there are tens of thousands of
sexualised choking images available with hashtags such as
#chokeme, #chokeher, #neckfetish, #breathplay and #chokeherout.
On Pinterest there are images of children being gripped by the
throat. One picture on Tumblr showed a bed with rose petals spelling
out the words ‘bruise my oesophagus’.37 On these platforms,
strangulation of women is presented as loving, sexy, stylish, desirable
and sometimes amusing, and images are almost always taken from
the perspective of the person doing the strangling.

You do not have to go searching for these images. If you are exposed
to mainstream porn, or even just to mainstream social media, you
are very likely to come across them without meaning to. A Sunday
Times article from January 2020 – illustrated, of course, with an
image from Fifty Shades – quotes a young student who reports that
she started seeing strangulation material on Tumblr from the age of
fourteen:

I’d inadvertently see a lot of pornographic material because

accounts would use the hashtags of other popular TV shows or
media to bring followers to their porn sites … After my
experiences with Tumblr, I felt that choking was normalised as a
sexual behaviour. It’s shown as an expression of passion and it’s
something that girls are kind of groomed into doing, but it’s only
recently that I see that being critiqued as something criminal.38

Porn platforms profit from a process of escalation, introducing users

to milder content, and then – for those who are susceptible –
suggesting more and more extreme and addictive content as the
viewer is gradually desensitised. For many users, that desensitisation
leads inexorably towards BDSM, and, once a taste for creative forms
of violence and degradation has developed, it may not stay confined
to solitary fantasy.

One convicted domestic abuser interviewed by Dr Scott Hampton

gives the game away when he confesses that ‘I never would have
thought of [strangulation] until I saw it in a porno,’ and the huge age
skew in the survey data on sexual strangulation lends weight to his
claim. Is it really plausible that all of these young people
spontaneously decided that strangulation was, as Gigi Engle
describes it, ‘a very fun Sex act’? Or could the fact that this
generation is the first to have been raised on online porn also be
playing a role?

This is hard to prove for certain either way. There is no randomised

double blind trial proving the link between porn use and sexual
behaviour, and there never will be, says Clare McGlynn, professor of
law at Durham University. But McGlynn draws a comparison with
advertising: ‘It’s not that I watch adverts and then go out and buy a
particular washing powder. But on some level it is having some
influence on me, and companies spend billions on advertising.’39 The
comparison is a good one, but it also returns us to the troubling issue
that I raised in the last chapter, because companies selling washing
powder are responding to demand, and so, I’m sorry to say, are porn
producers. Strangulation is a fashion spread by porn, but it is an
elaboration on a theme that the porn industry did not create. That
theme centres around violent men who are aroused by domination
and insecure women who seek it out. It is the same theme we see in
Fifty Shades, and sometimes in Mills & Boon novels. It isn’t new, but
it has been horribly exaggerated in the modern world.

And the liberal feminist appeal to consent isn’t good enough. It

cannot account for the ways in which the sexuality of impressionable
young people can be warped by porn or other forms of cultural
influence. It cannot convincingly explain why a woman who hurts
herself should be understood as mentally ill, but a woman who asks
her partner to hurt her is apparently exercising her sexual agency.
Above all, the liberal feminist faith in consent relies on a
fundamentally false premise: that who we are in the bedroom is
different from who we are outside of it.

In a recent piece, the Sunday Times advice columnist Dolly Alderton

repeated this foolish idea in her response to a letter by a 29-year-old
woman concerned that she was repeatedly ‘drawn to’ misogynist
men:

I think everyone should be free to separate their sexuality from

their politics, as long as every party has consented and is having
fun. What’s important is that you don’t confuse your craving for
sexual objectification or domination with a need for a
misogynistic or dominating boyfriend … Put simply: you need a
kind, chill, respectful boyfriend in the streets and a filthy pervert
in the sheets. They do exist. I hope you have fun finding one.40

Alderton’s recommendation was that her respondent seek out casual

sex on dating apps with men who are willing to act like dominating
misogynists in the bedroom but who are also ‘nice’. It’s hard to think
of a worse piece of advice. Liberal feminists such as Alderton are not
only telling young women to meet up with strange men from the
internet for sex, they are also telling them to pre-select those men on
the basis of their desire for violence.

Any man who can maintain an erection while beating up his partner
is a man to steer well clear of, but those with an interest in
masochism don’t want to hear that kind of grim truth, and those with
an interest in sadism don’t want to be forced to repress their desires.
So the palatable option for liberal feminism is to draw a bright line
between a person’s sexuality and their politics and then appeal
desperately to ‘consent’ in an attempt to ride the tiger of male
sexuality. The problem is that, while masochistic women may want to
play at being raped, they do not want to actually be raped. And yet
seeking out a man who is turned on by violence may well result in
exactly this outcome.

When the musician Andy Anokye (also known as Solo 45) was
accused of assaulting a number of women – committing acts that
included strangling them, waterboarding them, and holding a gun to
one woman’s head and a cloth soaked in bleach to the face of another
– he offered a simple explanation for his behaviour: it turned him on.
This twenty-first-century Marquis de Sade told Bristol Crown Court
in 2020 that he was aroused by dacryphilia, a fetish for terrified
sobbing, which had motivated him to seek out victims to terrorise
sexually. One victim told the court that Anokye’s abuse had been so
bad that at one point she had ‘wanted to die’.41

Anokye’s defence team claimed that the five women who gave
evidence against him had all consented to the acts of violence he
inflicted, but – thankfully – the jury were not convinced by this
narrative. In March 2020, he was unanimously convicted of twenty-
one rapes, five counts of false imprisonment, two counts of assault by
penetration, and two of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. He
will serve at least twenty-four years in prison.42
During their investigation, detectives used video recovered from
Anokye’s phone to track down other women who had been subjected
to his violence. Several of these women gave evidence for the
prosecution, but one did not. Detectives described the videos
featuring this woman as ‘violent’ and ‘brutal’, but she rejected that
characterisation, telling the court, as a witness for the defence, ‘it
wasn’t a rape – I consented to this behaviour and the activity.’43

Let’s pretend for a moment that every one of Anokye’s victims had
responded to his violence just as this woman responded to it. She
experienced exactly the same kind of abuse as the other women, but,
for whatever reason, she didn’t object to it. Liberal feminists would
have us believe that if, by chance, all of his victims had felt this way,
then Anokye would have done nothing wrong. His actions would no
longer be shocking, misogynist and criminal. They might even be
considered revolutionary, just like Sade’s (‘Do Whatever You Desire’
read the placard at the 1968 student protest that Sade’s biographer,
Gonzague Saint Bris, so admired – a piece of advice that Anokye
followed to the letter).

This cannot hold. Either Anokye is a villain, or he isn’t – his villainy

can’t be dependent on whether or not he was lucky in his choice of
victim and happened to choose a woman who wouldn’t complain
when strangled, waterboarded and suffocated with bleach. The
liberal feminist analysis of sexual violence is not only wrong but
dangerous. It tells people – mostly men – that, if they discover in
themselves a desire to hurt other people, they shouldn’t resist it but
should instead cultivate it, locking themselves into a cycle of positive
reinforcement in which arousal in response to violence is rewarded
by orgasm.

And it tells people – mostly women – with masochistic impulses that

these desires, too, should be encouraged. That instead of running in
terror from men with a taste for violence – as Rose Keller ran from
Sade through the streets of Paris – women should instead stay and
feed this taste, giving the sadist exactly what he wants, until one day
his desires are no longer confined to the bedroom, and he no longer
stops at ‘no’.

Notes
1. Gemma Askham, ‘Ann Summers now has a real life Red Room’, 11
April 2017, www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/fifty-shades-red-
room-ann-summers.

2. Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that

Makes the Underclass. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001, pp. 75–6.

3. Ibid., p. 78.

4. Andreas Wismeijer and Marcel van Assen, ‘Psychological

characteristics of BDSM practitioners’, Journal of Sexual
Medicine 10 (2013): 1943–52.

5. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural

History. London: Virago, 1979 [Kindle edn, location 360].
6. Tony Perrottet, February 2015,
www.smithsonianmag.com/history/who-was-marquis-de-sade-
180953980/?all.

7. Ibid.

8. Gonzague Saint Bris, Marquis de Sade: l’ange de l’ombre. Paris:

Editions Télémaque, 2013.

9. Perrottet, 2015.

10. Ibid.

11. Leland de la Durantaye, ‘Who whips whom’, London Review of

Books, 19 February 2015.

12. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New

York: E. P. Dutton, [1979] 1989, p. 79.

13. Ibid., pp. 73–4.

14. Ibid., p. 89.

15. Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist. New York: HarperCollins, 2014, p.

184.

16. In Garth Greenwell and R. O. Kwon, eds, Kink: Stories. New

York: Simon & Schuster, 2021.

17. Yvonne Roberts, 22 November 2020,

www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/22/if-im-not-in-on-
friday-i-might-be-dead-chilling-facts-about-uk-femicide.
18. Alys Harte, ‘A man tried to choke me during sex without
warning’, 28 November 2019, www.bbc.com/news/uk-50546184.

19. Suzannah Weiss, 21 July 2020,

https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/a33382089/breath-
play-erotic-asphyxiation-bdsm/.

20. See
https://twitter.com/GigiEngle/status/1286391789352620044.

21. Helen Bichard, Christopher Byrne, Christopher W. N. Saville and

Rudi Coetzer, ‘The neuropsychological outcomes of non-fatal
strangulation in domestic and sexual violence: a systematic
review’, Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 12 January 2021.

22. Interview with Helen Bichard, 30 July 2020.

23. A. Coluccia, M. Gabbrielli, G. Gualtieri et al., ‘Sexual masochism

disorder with asphyxiophilia: a deadly yet underrecognized
disease’, Case Reports in Psychiatry (2016) article 5474862;
www.hindawi.com/journals/crips/2016/5474862/.

24. Martine Berg Olsen, 26 June 2019,

https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/26/webcam-girl-21-died-pervert-
paid-strangle-watched-online-10077321/?ito=cbshare.

25. See www.endingtheviolence.us/articles.html.

26. Jonathan Herring, ‘R v. Brown (1993)’, in Philip Handler, Henry

Mares and Ian Williams (eds), Landmark Cases in Criminal Law.
Oxford: Hart, 2017, pp. 348–9.
27. Ibid., p. 350.

28. Kate Dennett, 23 July 2020, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-

8552589/Businessman-killed-lover-used-rough-sex-defence-
FREED-two-years.html.

29. Lucy Leeson and Danya Bazaraa, 20 August 2018,

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/laura-huteson-death-killers-
brutal-13109002.

30. See
www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/aberdeen/1448323/sex-
strangler-jailed-for-killing-20-year-old-chloe-miazek/.

31. Dennett, 23 July 2020.

32. Barbie Latza Nadeau, 5 February 2014,

www.thedailybeast.com/iranian-found-in-venice-lagoon-alleged-
victim-of-botched-sex-game?
account=thedailybeast&medium=twitter&source=socialflow.

33. Will Stewart, ‘Twisted torture’, 27 August 2018,

www.thesun.co.uk/news/7108595/suspect-paedo-dumps-teens-
body-pavement-bdsm/.

34. Richard Hartley-Parkinson, 18 May 2016,

https://metro.co.uk/2016/05/18/psychologist-dies-after-asking-
flatmate-to-strangle-her-during-sex-5889007/.

35. See www.pnn.de/kultur/ueberregional/trauerspiel-alexander-

und-natalia-ein/21848546.html [in German].
36. Serina Sandhu, 24 September 2015,
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-man-
disembowels-woman-uttering-wrong-name-during-sex-
10512965.html.

37. Fiona MacKenzie, ‘We Can’t Consent To This’ briefing document,

2020; see https://wecantconsenttothis.uk/press.

38. Rosamund Urwin and Esmé O’Keeffe, 26 January 2020,

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/social-media-make-girls-think-
choking-during-sex-is-normal-0jlrgf2b0.

39. Interview with Clare McGlynn, 29 May 2020.

40. Dolly Alderton, 18 April 2021, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dear-

dolly-im-a-feminist-so-why-am-i-only-attracted-to-misogynists-
20cgws8z8.

41. ‘Grime artist Solo 45 “choked woman with collar”’, 16 December

2019, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-50816008;
‘Grime artist Solo 45 “waterboarded victim”’, 28 November 2019,
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-50591539; ‘Grime artist
Solo 45 “held gun to head of rape victim”’, 6 December 2019,
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-50690488; ‘Solo 45
trial: grime artist a “narcissist and bully”’, 12 February 2020,
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-51478517; Geoffrey
Bennett, 30 July 2020, www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-
news/solo-45-rape-court-case-4378719.
42. Claire Hayhurst and Emma Flanagan, 24 February 2020,
www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/solo-45s-defence-
claims-four-3881370; ‘Solo 45 trial: grime artist jailed for raping
four women’, 30 July 2020, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-
bristol-53593983.

43. See www.enfieldindependent.co.uk/news/18229785.police-

pushed-woman-allege-raped-grime-artist-solo-45-court-told/.
7
People Are Not Products
Wherever armies are to be found, brothels are to be found also, and
often with more or less explicit sanction from military authorities.
For British Army officials in the 1880s, for instance, the necessary
link between prostitution and the colonial project was simply
common sense. The vast numbers of British men stationed in India
needed to be provided with prostitutes, and the authorities would
rather not have an epidemic of venereal disease on their hands. Thus
there was a procurement system put in place. A circular
memorandum from the quartermaster general, dated 1886, decreed
that ‘it is necessary to have a sufficient number of women [and] to
take care that they are sufficiently attractive.’1

To acquire these women – described in this same memorandum as

‘convenient arrangements’ – British officials would typically show up
in Indian villages and flourish a government order for prostitutes.
‘The poor people are afraid to refuse or resist; their daughters are
delivered up,’2 reported one medical officer. These young women –
many of them below the age of consent in Britain at the time – were
bought for 3 rupees apiece and then kept effectively imprisoned in
the army brothels.

The madams took their clothes away on arrival, leaving them with
only a translucent gown that would be conspicuously scanty if they
ever ventured out on the streets, making escape difficult. The girls
were also controlled through economic coercion, since they were
required to pay a daily fee for their lodging, and this fee was made
deliberately higher than the tiny sums they were paid by punters,
meaning that a prostitute accumulated debt the longer she ‘worked’,
tying her to the brothel forever.3

We know these details about the misery of these long-dead women

only because of the efforts of Josephine Butler, an English
campaigner whom we might now describe as a ‘feminist’, although
the word was not in use at the time. Butler did not accept the male
need for ‘convenient arrangements’. To her mind, these Indian
prostitutes were ‘the women of a conquered race oppressed by their
conquerors’,4 and she worked alongside other campaigners to
successfully end the British Army’s practice of institutionalised
sexual slavery.

Butler is not remembered kindly by most twenty-first-century liberal

feminists. Alison Phipps, professor of gender studies at the
University of Sussex, describes Butler’s movement in a paragraph
dense with scare quotes:
 Today’s reactionary feminists are descendants of nineteenth-
century ‘vice-fighters’, Christian moralists and anti-
miscegenationists, the bourgeois women enlisted by Fordism to
‘improve’ the working class, and those who ran the
reformatories for ‘wayward’ Black girls and who abused them
‘for their own good’. And the lineage is not just ideological. The
Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, built in the eighteenth century
to house ‘fallen women’, have more recently become Ruhama, an
outreach organisation for women in prostitution. Anti-
trafficking campaigns were prefigured by the ‘white slavery’
panics associated with nineteenth-century temperance.5

To ‘wayward’, ‘improve’, ‘vice-fighters’, ‘fallen women’ and ‘white

slavery’ we might also add terms such as ‘rescue’, ‘virtuous’ and ‘a life
of sin’ – all vocabulary used by nineteenth-century campaigners, and
all now rejected by a new generation of feminists who regard
prostitution very differently, and who are not only appalled by the
abuses committed by some Victorians but are also allergic to their
entire worldview.

In particular, the religious inflection of Victorian moralising is

anathema to a determinedly secular contemporary feminist
movement. Josephine Butler was a Christian, and her faith was the
key driving force in her work. And although she was both a slavery
abolitionist and an early supporter of women’s suffrage – two issues
that place her on ‘the right side of history’ from the vantage point of
today – she is also condemned on other counts. One historian, for
instance, describes Butler’s campaign against the army brothels as
dependent on an ‘image of a helpless Indian womanhood’ and
describes Butler as a collaborator ‘in the ideological work of empire’.6
You’d never guess, reading her modern critics, that Butler’s goal was
to stop British men raping Indian girls.

I refuse to condemn Butler or to put sneering scare quotes around

the terminology that she and her allies used to describe their work.
Yes, she used the Bible in her attempts to help women out of
prostitution, quoting from the gospels as she sat on the floor and
picked oakum with people confined to English workhouses. And, no,
she didn’t manage to tear down the British Empire, or even to stray
far outside of the imperialist paradigm. But then she also took
destitute women and girls into her home and nursed them as they
died from venereal disease contracted through prostitution, and how
many twenty-first-century feminists can boast of similar deeds?

If we are to understand the workings of the sex trade within their

historical context, we should look to Josephine Butler before we look
to her modern critics, because to succumb to chronological snobbery
in this case is to commit a fatal error. 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.

An ancient solution
Earlier in this book, I laid out the ways in which average male and
female sexuality differ, and I made the case for this difference being a
product of evolution rather than merely culture. One of the most
important differences between the sexes is that men are higher in the
quality that psychologists call ‘sociosexuality’ – the desire for sexual
variety. This means that, on average, men are much more likely than
women to desire casual sex.

This sexuality gap produces a mismatch between male and female

desire at the population level. There are a lot more straight men than
there are straight women looking for casual sex, meaning that many
of these men are left frustrated by the lack of willing casual partners.
As we have seen, in the post-sexual revolution era, the solution to
this mismatch has often been to encourage women (ideally young,
attractive ones) to overcome their reticence and have sex ‘like a man’,
imitating male sexuality en masse. The thesis of this book 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. But one of the points I have been keen to stress
throughout is that, although our current sexual culture has
significant problems, this does not mean that the sexual cultures of
the past were idyllic. All societies must find some kind of solution to
the sexuality gap, and those solutions can be anti-woman in many
diverse ways.

Our modern solution is to encourage all women, from every class, to

meet the male demand for casual sex. In contrast, the solution
adopted by most societies in the period before the invention of
reliable contraception was for the majority of women to have sex
only within marriage (whether that be monogamous or polygynous),
while a minority of poor women were tasked with absorbing all that
excess male sexual desire. Aside from a handful of high-class
courtesans and call girls who might attain some degree of social
status – usually having come from poor backgrounds originally – the
prostituted class has historically been composed of women with no
other options: the destitute, those abandoned by their partners,
those addicted to drugs or alcohol, and those captured in warfare or
tricked by traffickers. Prostitution is an ancient solution to the
sexuality gap, and it is not a pleasant one.

It’s very difficult to explain the wretchedness of the prostituted class

if you believe the modern liberal feminist claims about the sex
industry. Why would women be so profoundly averse to selling sex if
it were not really any different from selling some other product or
service? And why would Indian families want either to ‘refuse or
resist’ when British Army officials came for their daughters?

Liberal feminists attempt to explain this phenomenon as a result of

stigma. They point out that prostitution is stigmatised, which is true,
and they argue that stigmatisation makes life difficult and dangerous
for prostitutes, which is also true, but they don’t explain why the
stigma would arise in the first place, except to suggest, as does the
sex-positive historian Kate Lister, that ‘cultures that repressed
sexuality’ are to blame, because, ‘as patriarchal, puritanical attitudes
towards sex developed in the West, women’s sexuality came in for
particular censure.’7

Some liberal feminists go even further. One 2014 academic paper, for
instance, titled ‘Sex work undresses patriarchy with every trick!’
argues that: ‘It is precisely because sex work constantly challenges
patriarchy, stereotypes and the normative understanding of feminine
sexuality that it evokes a sense of unease and agitation amongst
those seeking to bear the torch of patriarchy.’8 But ‘patriarchy’ (if by
this we mean a social system that prioritises male interests over
female ones) does not necessarily demand the censure of female
sexuality at all, at least not consistently. Men might not want their
wives or daughters to have illicit sex, but they are often quite happy
for the wives and daughters of other men to do so. Which means that
reserving a prostituted class for the purposes of male enjoyment suits
male interests very nicely. Why, then, would ‘patriarchal, puritanical’
ideology explain the intense and cross-cultural reluctance that
women almost always feel when faced with the prospect of becoming
a member of this class?

There is a much more convincing explanation for the deeply visceral

aversion that women typically feel in relation to prostitution. As I
laid out in chapter 2, our evolutionary history has led to men and
women pursuing different reproductive strategies as a consequence
of their different reproductive roles. As the evolutionary biologist
David Buss writes:

From the moment of conception, when the one tiny sperm joins
the nutrient-rich egg, women are already contributing much
more than the man. The asymmetry in investment does not end
there. It is the woman who incubates the fertilised egg within
her body. It is the woman who transfers calories from her body
through the placenta to the developing embryo … It is the
woman who bears the burden of nine full months of pregnancy,
an astonishingly long investment compared to most mammals.9
Given all this, is it any surprise that women are picky about who they
have sex with? In a world without reliable contraception, the decision
to have sex is far more consequential for a woman than it is for a
man, since the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy leaves her with
some very stark options: raising a baby without support from a mate,
an attempted abortion, or infanticide. In our species’ history, women
have never had the option to rip and run.

The Pill has existed for seventy years, while Homo sapiens has
existed for approximately 200,000 years. We evolved in an
environment in which sex led to pregnancy, and these psychological
adaptations remain with us. Of course nature can be overcome, to an
extent – we all live modern lives that are very different from those of
our ancient ancestors – but it is very hard to remove deeply
embedded adaptations from the human mind.

Emotionally, if not legally, it is difficult to distinguish prostitution

from rape. The feminist campaigner Rachel Moran, who was in
prostitution from the age of fifteen through to twenty-two, describes
her own emotional response as identical to that experienced during
sexual abuse:
 I felt the same sickening nausea and rising panic that is inherent
to conventional sexual abuse in each prostitution experience I
ever had, and I felt that regardless of whether or not a man
stayed within the agreed sexual boundaries…. When we
understand that the sex paid for in prostitution shares so many
of its characteristics with the sex stolen in rape, it makes sense
that so many prostituted women make clear parallels between
the two experiences.10

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. She must suppress her most
self-protective instincts in the service of another person’s sexual
pleasure. This is why the sex industry typically attracts only the
poorest and the most desperate women – these are the people who
don’t have the means to resist it.

Prostitution denies women what they are evolved to want: the

opportunity to choose their mates. Instead, prostitutes are forced to
have unwanted sex with men that they do not find even remotely
attractive. And, in the era before reliable contraception, unwanted
pregnancy was often the result, as is evident from archeological
evidence such as that found in an excavation in Buckinghamshire,
England, which uncovered ninety-seven infant skeletons buried
under a Roman brothel.11 Even in the modern world, in low- and
middle-income countries, where access to contraception can be
unreliable, female prostitutes have about a one in four chance of
being impregnated by a client in any given year.12 Sex may be
meaningless fun for the clients, but it is neither fun nor meaningless
for the women, or for the children they bear.

$20 and $200

There is a strange thing that happens in the political discourse on the
sex industry. Usually, people who identify with the liberal left are
concerned with championing the interests of the most economically
marginalised people – the poor over the rich, the worker over the
boss, and so on. But when it comes to prostitution, that position is
slyly reversed. Rather than talking about the women at the bottom of
the industry – the very poor, drug addicted or trafficked – it is more
common to see liberal feminists drawing attention to those in the
most elite slice of the industry. It is the highest earning, rather than
the lowest earning, who find themselves with the most vigorous allies
on the left.

I don’t dispute that there are some self-described sex workers who
are not in poverty and who, moreover, not only support the
decriminalisation of prostitution on empirical grounds but also insist
that sex work is just like any other kind of work. These women are
particularly prominent in the media and on platforms such as
Twitter. Compared with other women in prostitution, they are
disproportionately likely to be white, Western and university
educated. Furthermore, by definition, those speaking freely and
publicly about their experiences in the industry are not being tightly
pimped, are fluent in English, and have access to the internet. They
are representative only of the most comparatively fortunate end of
the sex-work spectrum.

In contrast, the women who campaign for the so-called Nordic

model, which criminalises buyers and pimps but decriminalises
sellers, tend to have different biographies. They are much more likely
to have left the sex industry before beginning campaigning work and
to have been in brothel- and street-based prostitution rather than
escorting or camming. They are also much more likely to have been
born in poverty.

This is an observation that many advocates of decriminalisation find

annoying. Juno Mac and Molly Smith, for instance, the authors of
Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights, describe
the bind in which they find themselves, with their views as sex
workers instantly discredited because of their class backgrounds:
‘Many sex worker activists find that their testimonies are dismissed
in feminist spaces on the grounds that, by virtue of being activists,
they are not representative; that they speak from an exceptional,
privileged and anomalous perspective.’13

Mac and Smith both have PhDs, but, even without knowing this
information about their biographies, their middle-class accents
would give them away. As would mine, of course – as a columnist
and author, I am speaking from a platform to which the vast majority
of people simply do not have access. By definition, this is a public
discussion to which only the relatively privileged can contribute.

But it is important to pay attention to the class backgrounds of

activist sex workers, not as a ‘gotcha’ to shut down discussion, but
because one’s economic interests have a profound effect on one’s
personal preferences. Once you start paying attention, you notice
how many of these activists have had an unusual experience of the
sex industry. Julie Bindel, the investigative journalist and
campaigner against sexual violence, writes of some of the most
prominent voices in media discussions of the sex industry:

Many of those high-profile pro-prostitution lobbyists who speak

as ‘sex workers’ are what I would call ‘tourists’. Melissa Gira-
Grant for example, who is highly educated and earning her living
as a journalist; Brooke Magnanti, who holds a PhD, has written
several books, and works as a scientist; and Douglas Fox, whose
partner owns one of the largest escort agencies in Britain, are
not representative of the sex trade.14

This sleight of hand is partly enabled by the fact that the term ‘sex
worker’ has such a loose meaning. Sometimes it might refer – as in
Magnanti’s case – to what is sometimes called ‘full contact’ sex work.
Others – such as Gira-Grant – may have only ever done cam work.
Most egregiously, a man such as Douglas Fox is also able to describe
himself as an ‘independent male sex worker’ and can even retain a
prominent position in the International Union of Sex Workers,
despite the fact that he is actually a pimp.15

Within the academy, it is particularly common to see researchers

describe themselves as ‘sex workers’ while being deliberately vague
about the exact nature of their involvement in the industry. When
the phrases ‘listen to sex workers’ and ‘speaking as a sex worker’
carry such a premium, it’s unsurprising to see such claims bandied
around by people who might be better described as (to use Bindel’s
phrase) ‘tourists’.

This is a longstanding issue in the sex workers’ rights movement.

One of the first and most influential organisations advocating for the
full decriminalisation of prostitution was COYOTE (Call Off Your Old
Tired Ethics), founded in San Francisco in 1973 and often described
in the media as ‘the first prostitutes’ union’.16 But when the
sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein conducted eighteen months of
fieldwork among prostitutes in San Francisco, she found the
COYOTE membership to be highly unrepresentative:

The vast majority of COYOTE’s members are white, middle-class

and well-educated, just as their political opponents claim. They
are predominantly call-girls, escorts, exotic dancers and
masseuses; a few are fetish specialists, such as dominatrixes or
‘switches’ (who alternate between domination and submission).
Many work out of expensively-furnished homes or rented ‘work
spaces’ by placing advertisements in newspapers, earning
enough money not only to cover expenses, but also to help
finance alternative artistic and intellectual careers … The
average hourly fee, whether or not one is ‘in business for herself,’
is $200.

Bernstein described COYOTE’s monthly meetings, in which:

 New members often introduce themselves by telling their
‘coming out’ stories (‘I graduated from Smith College with a BA
in philosophy, then I moved here to become a sex-worker’) and
are met with hearty applause. Being a sex-worker is about taking
pleasure in sex, unleashing repressed energies, or exploring the
socially-deemed dangerous border zones of eroticism.

This is in contrast to the prostitutes Bernstein described as being at

‘the other end of the continuum’: homeless women, addicted to crack
or heroin, who would sell sex for $20 and then immediately spend
the proceeds on drugs. Most of these women were tightly controlled
by pimps and were visibly sickly and distressed.17

Elizabeth Bernstein is a long way from being a sex trade abolitionist,

and I imagine she would strongly disagree with much of what I have
to say in this book.18 Nevertheless, she draws attention to a problem
with the discourse on the sex industry that typically goes
unacknowledged. The directive ‘listen to sex workers’ is commonly
used by the decriminalisation lobby, but which ones?

Luxury beliefs
The psychologist Rob Henderson has coined the term ‘luxury beliefs’
to describe the kind of ideas and opinions that confer status on the
rich at very little cost while taking a toll on the poor.19 These are, he
theorises, a form of Veblen good, named for the sociologist Thorstein
Veblen – that is, products that do not obey the usual rules of supply
and demand but instead are desired by consumers because they are
expensive, rather than in spite of this fact. But as luxury consumables
have become easier to manufacture and thus more affordable, the
rich have had to cast around for new Veblen goods. Therefore, writes
Henderson:

The affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-
attached it to beliefs … The logic is akin to conspicuous
consumption – if you’re a student who has a large subsidy from
your parents and I do not, you can afford to waste $900 and I
can’t, so wearing a Canada Goose jacket is a good way of
advertising your superior wealth and status. Proposing policies
that will cost you as a member of the upper class less than they
would cost me serve the same function.

In the elite circles of the media, NGOs and top universities, repeating
a phrase such as ‘sex work is work’ confers status on the speaker. It
suggests an admirable open-mindedness, a rebellious attitude
towards bourgeois sexual norms, and an empathetic relationship
with the imagined figure of ‘the sex worker’ – that is, an independent
entrepreneur who doesn’t mind the sex itself but does mind the
intrusion of the state into her business. Proponents of this luxury
belief may share hashtags on Twitter such as #supportsexworkers
and #decrimnow, and they will tell anyone who disagrees with them
to ‘listen to sex workers’, but they will typically never have met or
spoken with anyone who has experienced $20 prostitution, or
perhaps even $200 prostitution. But since the term ‘sex worker’
collapses the two categories together, the class distinctions can be
easily obscured.
But that doesn’t mean that the class distinctions go away. Support for
the decriminalisation and normalisation of prostitution may not
obviously look like a luxury belief, since proponents will typically use
the vocabulary of oppression and marginalisation. But in effect it is a
luxury belief, since the costs are not borne by the upper classes who
gain status by expressing support for such a policy but instead by the
lower class people – overwhelmingly women – who are most likely to
actually end up in the sex industry.

Decriminalisation or legalisation of the sex industry increases the

demand for commercial sex. In countries that have adopted these
legal models, the proportion of the male population who have ever
bought sex is higher, and the sex tourism industry is larger. Given
that the number of women who will willingly enter the sex trade is
very small, when demand grows, unwilling women must be sought
out in order to meet it.

In the global sex industry, it is poor countries that provide the

‘product’ and rich countries that provide the demand. The brothels of
the UK, Netherlands and Germany are filled with women from poor
parts of the European Union, in particular Romania, as well as
women from West Africa and Southeast Asia,20 some of whom have
been forcibly trafficked, while the rest are there as a result of varying
degrees of poverty. Meanwhile, the brothels of Bangkok that cater for
tourists are filled with sex buyers from Europe, Australia and North
America. The buyers tend to have lighter coloured skins than the
sellers because sex is sold in only one direction along the economic
gradient.
Walk through Patpong, one of Bangkok’s most popular red-light
districts, and you will see a lot of white men. The same was true
during the Vietnam War, when Bangkok was one of the preferred
destinations for American soldiers’ week of ‘R&R’: officially, ‘Rest &
Recuperation’, unofficially, ‘Rape & Run.’21 The historian Meredith
Lair describes the American military’s implicit sanction of
prostitution during the war:

At euphemistic massage parlors and steam baths all over South

Vietnam, soldiers could get fellatio or intercourse for as little as
$2. Military authorities dismissed brothels on American bases
with a nod and a wink, providing medical care to prostitutes and
Johns alike, which sent a strong signal to American soldiers that
their exploitation of Vietnamese women was not only excused
but also sanctioned as a bonus for a year’s worth of service.22

Sex tourism destinations still cluster around US military bases. In

Korea, thousands of women – including 5,000 Filipinas and even
more Russians – are located around the bases, and there is pressure
to ‘import’ younger and younger women from more ‘exotic’
backgrounds to meet the demand for variety.23 The British Army
officials in the 1880s who procured young Indian women for their
soldiers were conforming to an historical norm.

Many sex buyers are deeply and profoundly racist and make no effort
to conceal this fact, speaking openly and in crude terms about their
contempt for the women from whom they buy sex. Both in online
reviews and in interviews with researchers, race is featured
prominently in buyers’ assessments of the ‘product’, and it is not
uncommon to come across nasty pieces of racist slang – LBFM (‘little
brown fucking machines’) is, for instance, used to refer to Southeast
Asian women. ‘I made a list in my mind,’ reports one London sex
buyer. ‘I told myself that I’ll be with different races, e.g. Japanese,
Indian, Chinese … Once I have been with them I tick them off the list.
It’s like a shopping list.’24

Some advocates of decriminalisation or legalisation are sanguine

about this racialised dynamic, pointing out that there are plenty of
other industries in which migrant workers predominate. And
although they do recognise that selling sex is risky – with a homicide
rate many times higher for prostituted women than for non-
prostituted,25 as well as a shockingly high all-cause mortality rate
due to drug and alcohol related deaths26 – they point out that it is
not the only line of work that comes with danger. Brooke Magnanti,
for instance, a former escort who writes under the pen name Belle de
Jour, compares a career selling sex to a career as a deep-sea
fisherman – both dangerous options, yes, but both legitimate forms
of work.27

When this idea is taken to its logical conclusion, we end up with the
sterile language of business introduced to the brothel or the alleyway.
In academic writing that attempts to impose this framework, pimps
and madams engage in ‘sex work management’,28 rape becomes a
‘contract breach’,29 and violence, pregnancy and disease become
‘occupational health risks’.30 The horror of what is actually
happening is deliberately obscured, because we’re not supposed to
feel horror. The cerebral, liberal thing to do is to resist such
emotional impulses and regard prostitution as much the same as
deep-sea fishing, only with an added layer of pointless stigma – a
relic from less enlightened times.

The redistribution of sex

Throughout this book, I’ve used the term ‘sexual disenchantment’ to
describe both an historical process and a political claim. I’ve
borrowed the term from Aaron Sibarium, who writes:

Where past sexual regimes constrained who could have sex with
whom, and for what ends, today’s attacks such constraints as
benighted and domineering – promising, like classical
liberalism, to let individuals do as they please. A marriage, a
one-night stand, a ‘throuple,’ a hook-up, a brothel: these are all
equally valid means of getting sex, which has no inherent value
beyond what consenting adults assign to it. If the scientific
revolution disenchanted the world, a la Weber, the sexual
revolution disenchanted sex in the process of deregulating it.31

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.

Sexual disenchantment is often appealed to by those who support the

legalisation or decriminalisation of prostitution. It is common to
hear proponents of this view compare sex work to other forms of
work and challenge their critics to name the difference. This
rhetorical move is effective only because it relies on a collective effort
to believe in sexual disenchantment. If you want to be a good liberal,
then you’re not supposed to believe that sex has some kind of
specialness to it that makes it different from other acts.

But even the best liberals do still feel that sex is somehow different,
even if they struggle to articulate the difference. People care if their
partner has sex with someone else, and not only because doing so
involves breaking a promise. A quick browse of any online
polyamorist forum will uncover a lot of people who are trying very
hard to practise ‘ethical non-monogamy’ and yet are tormented by
sexual jealousy.

And people know intuitively that a boss asking for a blow job in
exchange for a promotion is entirely different from a boss asking for
overtime in exchange for a promotion. I find it perplexing that so
many liberal feminists who argue vigorously that ‘sex work is work’
are hyper-sensitive to any suggestion of sexual impropriety in their
own workplaces. These women recoil at being asked out for dinner
by a male colleague or being touched casually on an arm or leg,
describing such acts as ‘sexual harassment’. But if that is sexual
harassment, then how should we describe what goes on in a brothel?

Cynically, I suspect that the different attitude towards these two

kinds of workplace comes down to self-interest. I don’t mean to
suggest that middle- and upper-class women don’t suffer from the
costs of the sexual revolution, because of course they do. Hook-up
culture also has a pernicious effect on Ivy League and Russell Group
campuses, and the boyfriends of economically privileged women are
just as likely to be addled by porn as any other men.

But there are certain forms of sexual harm that are far more
threatening to people who are simultaneously young, female and
poor. Prostitution is one of them. And it is telling that, when the
terrible consequences of sexual disenchantment are likely to
personally affect women who are not otherwise at risk of ending up
in prostitution, the inconsistency is laid bare.

For instance, in recent years there has been much media outrage in
response to instances of landlords offering young would-be tenants
‘sex for rent’ arrangements. Liberal publications such as Glamour
magazine describe such offers as ‘sickening’ and ‘terrifying’,32 while
The Guardian bemoans the fact that ‘more is not being done’ to
prosecute landlords who post such ads.33 The Labour Party has
promised to act on the issue if returned to government by
introducing a specific offence in relation to offering ‘sex in lieu of
rent’,34 and the Liberal Democrats support this call for a new law.35

A spokesperson for Rape Crisis England & Wales points out that
‘agreeing to have sex with someone under the pressure and fear of
homelessness, or in exchange for the basic right to have somewhere
to live, does not equate to agreeing by choice … Any sexual activity
without consent is a very serious sexual offence.’36 And yet this is a
feminist organisation that states on its website that ‘just because you
are or have been involved in the sex industry, does not mean that you
have experienced sexual violence’37 – in other words, selling sex for
money can be done with consent, but selling sex for rent cannot. And
while Labour and the Liberal Democrats are apparently appalled at
the ‘sex for rent’ phenomenon, the latter are officially in favour of
decriminalising the sale of sex for cash,38 and the previous leader of
the former – Jeremy Corbyn – has stated that he considers the
decriminalisation of the sex industry to be the ‘more civilised’
option.39

Why should exchanging sex directly for money be decriminalised and

destigmatised, whereas exchanging sex for accommodation should
not? We are all quite happy to recognise that rent has a cash value
when it comes, for instance, to negotiating nanny contracts. Forgive
me for being cynical, but could it be because we are in the midst of a
housing crisis, which means that middle-class young women – the
daughters of politicians and journalists – are newly anxious about
their ability to pay rent? With that anxiety made more acute by
media coverage that often highlights the particular vulnerability of
students to ‘sex for rent’ proposals, with ‘sordid offers [found] across
university cities, including Oxford, Bristol and Brighton’ – cities
home to some of the most prestigious universities in the UK.40

Or take, as another example of liberal feminist inconsistency, the

panic around incels: involuntarily celibate men who gather online to
complain about their lack of success in attracting girlfriends. In
2018, the libertarian economist Robin Hanson wrote a blog post in
which he voiced sympathy for incels:
 One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to
sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and
might similarly hope to gain from organising around this
identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least
implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met … Sex
could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in
compensation.41

All hell broke loose on progressive media. Slate asked if Hanson was
‘America’s Creepiest Economist’42 and Moira Donegan in
Cosmopolitan expressed outrage:

Central to the incel ideology is the idea that sex with another
person – specifically, penetrative sex with women – isn’t a
privilege for men, but a right. Incels talk about sex with ‘Stacys,’
their term for attractive women, the way that more reasonable
people talk about food, water, and shelter: as a basic necessity
for survival … Women are not interchangeable, we are not
commodities.43

Obviously I agree. I don’t think that incels are owed sexual access to
anyone, whether or not ‘cash is redistributed in compensation’. But
note the difference in tone between a passage such as this – ‘we don’t
owe you sex’ and ‘our vaginas’ – compared to other progressive
pieces on sex work, including those written by Donegan or published
in Slate and Cosmopolitan. When it is the sexual integrity of
prostituted women that’s at stake, a ruthless pragmatism takes hold,
and liberal feminists are concerned only with reducing the harm
resulting from stigma. But when it is non-prostituted women whose
bodies are at risk of ‘redistribution’, suddenly sexual disenchantment
is forgotten, to be replaced by pure rage. How dare incels think that
beautiful women would even give them the time of day?

This is the rage that comes from knowing, deep down, that sex is
different from other forms of social interaction, which also means
that selling sex is inherently different from any other kind of act.
Vednita Carter, prostitution survivor and anti-sex trafficking activist,
puts the point succinctly: ‘People ask me “what is the inherent harm
of prostitution?” – the inherent harm is the sex act itself.’44

Cultural death grip syndrome

‘Death grip syndrome’ is a quasi-medical term used to describe the
impotence that can result from excessive porn use. It’s partly a
physical problem caused by aggressive masturbation leading to
desensitisation, but it’s also partly a psychological problem caused by
an overload of sexual stimuli. Sufferers of death grip syndrome –
almost all of them men – become incapable of having sex with a real
person because their responses have been gradually deadened.

In chapter 5 I wrote about the fact that porn seems to have a

paradoxical effect on users, incentivising them to have less sex with
real people while simultaneously exposing them to more intense
sexual stimuli. That paradoxical effect does not confine itself to the
privacy of the user’s bedroom. As public life has become ever more
hyper-sexualised, I propose that we have entered an era of cultural
death grip syndrome. We are now routinely exposed to so much
sexual stimuli in the course of daily life that it no longer has much
effect on us.

When Wonderbra released their famous ‘Hello Boys’ ad campaign,

featuring Eva Herzigová admiring her own boosted cleavage, the
posters were so distracting to motorists that they reportedly caused
car crashes. That was in 1994. In contrast, try walking down any
British high street today and keep a tally of how many lingerie-clad
boobs and bums you see within a ten-minute interval: in shop
windows, on the sides of buses, and on the covers of newspapers and
magazines.

My local shopping centre currently has on display a six-foot-high

photo of a model in a swimsuit licking the inside of another model’s
open mouth. This is far raunchier than the 1994 ‘Hello Boys’ photo,
but I would never usually have noticed it, since such images are so
common now that they are little more than wallpaper. In a free
market, with no moralising impediment, sexualisation will go in one
direction, and one direction only, and for a simple reason: sex sells,
and businesses know it.

Occasionally, a new cultural event will push at the boundaries of

propriety with enough alacrity to attract attention. Most recently, the
music video for the song ‘WAP’ (‘Wet Ass Pussy’), by the American
rappers Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, was praised by liberal
commentators, who interpreted the pornified aesthetic and explicit
lyrics as, in the words of one Guardian columnist, ‘an unabashed
celebration of female sexuality’.45
But this was a strange kind of celebration. Even if we assume that the
repeated use of the word ‘whore’ in the lyrics is to be taken
figuratively, there is plenty else in the track to suggest a transactional
attitude towards sex. The male object of lust described in the lyrics is
assessed according to two standards: the size of his ‘king cobra’ and
the size of his bank balance. ‘Pay my tuition’, pleads Megan to this
imagined man, who must ‘make it rain’ if he wants her sexual
favours. ‘Ask for a car’ during sex, ‘spit on his mic’ to secure a record
deal, ‘let me tell you how I got this ring’ – the sexual generosity
described is all in service not of female pleasure but of material gain.

‘WAP’ has very little to do with authentic female sexuality, but it does
provide a very revealing insight into the worst side of male sexuality
– specifically, a compulsive and dehumanising side of male sexuality
that is readily exploited by those in search of profit. Because, while
there are almost no women who really believe in the idea of sexual
disenchantment, even if they pretend otherwise, there is a minority
of men who do believe in it, at least up to a point. They care about
youth, and they care about looks, but otherwise they don’t care who
they’re ejaculating into, and they certainly don’t care if that person is
enjoying themselves. If given the chance, these men will treat their
sexual partners as unfeeling orifices. Remember the memorandum
from the quartermaster general in 1886, quoted at the beginning of
this chapter: ‘it is necessary to have a sufficient number of women
[and] to take care that they are sufficiently attractive.’46 That is the
punter’s view of the matter.

This is a form of male sexuality that many women do not understand,

since it is so different from typical female sexuality. But anyone who
questions its existence should take a look at the comments that men
leave on sites such as Punternet which are dedicated to customer
reviews of prostitutes. A project put together by a group of Canadian
feminists called ‘The Invisible Men’ (since replicated in other
countries) collects quotes from these sites to demonstrate how little
regard punters have for the people to whom they buy sexual access.47
It doesn’t make for nice reading.

Cultural pornification puts the logic of these men at the helm. It

takes a – frankly – psychopathic view of human sexuality and allows
it to leach out into public life. It treats people as fungible – that is,
replaceable and interchangeable: in sexual terms, merely a collection
of relevant body parts. A tongue that could belong to anyone licking
the inside of a mouth that could belong to anyone. It is sex stripped
down to its barest mechanics.

‘Thanks to OnlyFans’
Only a culture in thrall to the worst of male sexuality could have
eroticised the dick pic and its amputated female counterparts. I don’t
know what men think we are supposed to do with their dick pics, but
I know of no woman who would masturbate to an image in which the
rest of the person has been cropped away, leaving only a slab of flesh
ready to be laid out on the anatomist’s table. Typical female sexuality
isn’t orientated towards these kinds of images. But the internet
abounds with them.
Many young women on social media have progressed smoothly from
posting selfies – the subject of much media discussion only a decade
ago – to posting ‘belfies’ (butt selfies). Instagram and TikTok, in
particular, are filled with the youthful breasts and buttocks of women
desperate for some positive male attention. For some of these
women, posting sexualised images of themselves online can set them
on a path towards setting up an account on OnlyFans, a platform that
allows ‘creators’ (overwhelmingly women) to earn money by giving
‘users’ (overwhelmingly men) subscription access to online content,
most of which is pornographic. If you are already used to marketing
sexy photos of yourself for ‘likes’, marketing those photos for actual
money may not seem like an especially consequential step.

And the incentives are attractive. Every now and again, a tweet by a
previously unknown OnlyFans creator will go viral, as she (always
she) shares photos of the house she has been able to buy ‘thanks to
OnlyFans’. But, as the blogger Thomas Hollands has found in his
detailed analysis of the OnlyFans model, such rags-to-riches cases
are very unusual.48 The distribution of income on OnlyFans is highly
unequal, with the top 1 per cent of creators making 33 per cent of all
the money. Using the Gini index – a standard measure of economic
inequality – Hollands finds OnlyFans to be significantly more
unequal than South Africa, the most unequal country in the world.
The tiny minority of creators who do well on the site are mostly
existing celebrities, meaning that the women who post ‘thanks to
OnlyFans’ success stories on social media are not at all
representative of ordinary creators but, rather, more like those rare
customers who walk out of a casino millionaires, having put it all on
red.

In fact, most of the women on OnlyFans probably make a loss, given

the amount of time they must spend creating content and engaging
with users. The median creator attracts only thirty subscribers, but
she carries just as much risk of public exposure and harassment as
her more successful counterparts. OnlyFans is not anything like as
dangerous as street- or brothel-based prostitution – it’s definitely
more like $200 than $20 prostitution – but it does come with perils,
primarily to a woman’s long-term relationship prospects, which are
key to her long-term happiness.

As I laid out in chapter 4, most men take a very negative attitude

towards what they consider to be a history of promiscuity in a
potential marriage partner, even if they don’t necessarily admit to
this publicly. This means that, although an OnlyFans account may
provide a woman with a short-term injection of self-esteem, and
perhaps also an injection of cash, it will also limit the pool of men
who are willing to marry her, because OnlyFans is to the marriage
market as a criminal record is to the jobs market.

And there are other costs associated with turning yourself into a
sexual commodity. The supermodel Emily Ratajkowski, widely
considered to be one of the most beautiful women in the world,
writes in her autobiography My Body about the dysfunction that
results from seeing oneself always through a commercialised lens.
For instance, Ratajkowski insists on watching herself in the mirror
when she has sex with her husband, ‘so that I can see that I’m real.’49
She’s aware that this isn’t healthy.

But, in an age of dating apps, it isn’t only supermodels who end up

with their sexuality warped by a sexual marketplace that turns people
into products. Tinder and its rivals are not dissimilar from shopping
sites. The format encourages users to browse the available
merchandise and select their preferred options from the comfort of
their homes, with very little effort and no intimacy whatsoever.

In a 2015 article on dating apps in Vanity Fair, one male user

describes the voracious impulse that the apps encourage:

‘Guys view everything as a competition,’ he elaborates with his

deep, reassuring voice. ‘Who’s slept with the best, hottest girls?’
With these dating apps, he says, ‘you’re always sort of prowling.
You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best
one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day – the
sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder
dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you
could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.’

Another interviewee is explicit about his instinct towards sexual

consumerism, comparing Tinder to an online food delivery service –
‘but you’re ordering a person.’50 This is, by his reckoning, a good
thing.

And yet, despite all this convenience, Tinder causes its users more
unhappiness than almost any other app.51 In a further iteration of
cultural death grip syndrome, users report that dating apps manage
to turn what should be an exciting experience into a dull and
depressing one, because an overabundance of options does not
increase the sexual thrill but instead kills it.

I don’t need to tell readers that street- and brothel-based prostitution

is dangerous and traumatic. If you’re reading this book, it’s unlikely
that you need to be persuaded on that point. But I think I do need to
warn against the consequences of sexual disenchantment that go
beyond the obvious. This means that, on a personal level, we can’t
just refuse to participate in the sex industry and then pat ourselves
on the back for a job well done. I’ve made it clear already that I don’t
think it’s possible to use porn ethically, and of course I’d apply that
same rule to prostitution. But refusing to view people as products
goes further than that: it demands that we challenge the
disenchanted idea of what sex ought to be.

The very many articles with such headlines as ‘8 very necessary sex
tips from sex workers’ and ‘5 insightful sex tips from a professional
sex worker’52 betray a view of sex that is becoming disturbingly
prevalent. 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, leaving the logic of the punter triumphant.

We must resist that logic at all costs. If we try and pretend that sex
has no special value that makes it different from other acts, then we
end up in some very dark places. If sex isn’t worthy 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’. If we voice no objection to the principle
of ‘sex sells’, then we can hardly complain when our public spaces are
saturated with hyper-sexuality and we find ourselves scrolling
through would-be sexual partners on a dating app in the same way
we scroll through any other kind of consumable. Once you permit the
idea that people can be products, everything is corroded.

Notes
1. Helen Mathers, Josephine Butler: Patron Saint of Prostitutes.
Stroud: History Press, 2014, p. 165.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 129.

4. Ibid., p. 165.

5. Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream

Feminism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020
[Kindle edn, location 1873].

6. Antoinette M. Burton, ‘The white woman’s burden: British

feminists and the Indian woman, 1865–1915’, Women’s Studies
International Forum 13 (1990): 295–308.
7. Kate Lister, ‘Sex and money’, in A Curious History of Sex. London:
Unbound, 2020.

8. Meena Seshu and Aarthi Pai, ‘Sex work undresses patriarchy with
every trick!’, IDS Bulletin 45 (2014): 46–52.

9. David Buss, Bad Men: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception,

Harassment and Assault. London: Robinson, 2021, pp. 15–16.

10. Rachel Moran, Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution.

Cork: Gill & Macmillan, 2013, pp. 112–13.

11. Sam Greenhill, 26 June 2010,

www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1289603/Romans-
killed-100-unwanted-babies-English-brothel.html.

12. F. H. Ampt, L. Willenberg, P. A. Agius et al., ‘Incidence of

unintended pregnancy among female sex workers in low-income
and middle-income countries: a systematic review and meta-
analysis’, BMJ Open 8 (2018): e021779; doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-
2018-021779.

13. Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for
Sex Workers’ Rights. London: Verso, 2018, p. 18.

14. Julie Bindel, The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex

Work Myth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, p. 60.

15. Douglas Fox, ‘Don’t criminalise our clients’, 19 November 2008,

www.theguardian.com/profile/douglas-fox.

16. Bindel, The Pimping of Prostitution, p. 22.

17. Elizabeth Bernstein, ‘What’s wrong with prostitution? What’s
right with sex work? Comparing markets in female sexual labor’,
Hastings Women’s Law Journal 10 (1999): 91–.

18. Emily Bazelon, ‘Should prostitution be a crime?’, New York

Times, 5 May 2016.

19. See https://quillette.com/2019/11/16/thorstein-veblens-theory-

of-the-leisure-class-a-status-update/.

20. ‘Prostitution – the facts’, 2015, www.streetlight.uk.com/the-

facts/.

21. Meredith H. Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and

Soldiering in the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2011, p. 207.

22. Ibid.

23. Jean Enriquez, ‘Globalization, militarism and sex trafficking’, 10

November 2006, https://sisyphe.org/spip.php?article2475.

24. Bindel, The Pimping of Prostitution, p. 132.

25. S. Cunningham, T. Sanders, L. Platt et al., ‘Sex work and

occupational homicide: analysis of a U.K. murder database’,
Homicide Studies 22 (2018): 321–38.

26. John J. Potterat, Devon D. Brewer, Stephen Q. Muth et al.,

‘Mortality in a long-term open cohort of prostitute women’,
American Journal of Epidemiology 159 (2004): 778–85.
27. Brooke Magnanti, The Sex Myth: Why Everything We’re Told Is
Wrong. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012.

28. Tiggey May, Alex Harocopos and Michael Hough, For Love or
Money: Pimps and the Management of Sex Work. London: Home
Office, 2000.

29. S. Adriaenssens and J. Hendrickx, ‘What can internet data tell

about safe work? Unsafe sex and contract breach as proxies of
quality of work in prostitution’, COST ProsPol Action meeting,
Ljubljana, 2016.

30. Ibid.

31. Aaron Sibarium, 23 September 2020,

https://americancompass.org/the-commons/three-theses-about-
cuties/.

32. Ali Pantony, 24 April 2017,

www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/sex-for-rent.

33. Harvey Jones, 2 April 2018,

www.theguardian.com/money/2018/apr/02/sex-for-rent-
accommodation-rogue-landlords-campaign.

34. Nigel Lewis, 10 June 2021,

www.landlordzone.co.uk/news/labour-seeks-mps-support-for-
specific-offence-of-sex-for-rent/.

35. See https://twitter.com/libdems/status/1221842805607276545?

lang=en.
36. Ibid.

37. ‘Support for survivors who are or have been involved in the sex
industry’, 2021, www.rasasc.org.uk/e-newsletter/outreach-with-
women-in-sex-work/.

38. See www.libdems.org.uk/f9_towards_safer_sex_work.

39. Rowena Mason, 4 March 2016,

www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/04/jeremy-corbyn-
decriminalise-sex-industry-prostitution.

40. Susie Coen and Talya Varga, 1 January 2021,

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9105215/Preyed-sex-rent-
landlords-Men-touting-rooms-exchange-sexual-favours.html.

41. Robin Hanson, 26 April 2018,

www.overcomingbias.com/2018/04/two-types-of-envy.html.

42. Jordan Weissmann, 28 April 2018,

https://slate.com/business/2018/04/economist-robin-hanson-
might-be-americas-creepiest-professor.html.

43. Moira Donegan, ‘Actually we don’t owe you sex, and we never
will’, 4 May 2018,
www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a20138446/redistribution-sex-
incels/.

44. Vednita Carter, ‘The pimping of prostitution’,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y-VmuKmsP0.
45. Arwa Mahdawi, ‘The WAP uproar shows conservatives are fine
with female sexuality – as long as men control it’, 15 August 2020,
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/15/cardi-b-
megan-thee-stallion-wap-conservatives-female-sexuality.

46. Mathers, Josephine Butler, p. 165.

47. See https://invisible-men-canada.tumblr.com.

48. Thomas Hollands, 24 April 2020, https://xsrus.com/the-

economics-of-onlyfans.

49. Emily Ratajkowski, My Body. London: Quercus, 2021, p. 102.

50. Quoted in James Mumford, Vexed: Ethics Beyond Political

Tribes. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020, pp. 77–8.

51. See www.humanetech.com/app-ratings.

52. Andre Shakti, ‘8 very necessary sex tips from sex workers’, 30
October 2015, www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-
love/news/a48407/sex-tips-from-sex-workers/; ‘5 insightful sex
tips from a professional sex worker’,
https://thoughtcatalog.com/melanie-berliet/2014/10/5-
insightful-sex-tips-from-a-professional-sex-worker/.
8
Marriage Is Good
In making the case against the sexual revolution, I’ve often run
across a particular kind of problem that is by no means unique to this
subject. I call it the problem of normal distribution.

The normal distribution is also known as the bell curve because the
graph it produces looks rather like a bell. It is a continuous
probability distribution that is symmetrical around the mean –
meaning, in essence, that most of the data points cluster around the
middle and, the further a value is from the mean, the less likely it is
to occur. The normal distribution is found again and again in the
sciences. The sizes of snowflakes, lifetimes of lightbulbs, and milk
production of cows are all normally distributed.1 So are human
physical traits such as height, shoe size and birth weight.

Social phenomena are a little more complicated, but, even so, the
normal distribution is often a good approximation for what we see
across human populations. Sociosexuality, for instance (an interest
in sexual variety), is close to being normally distributed. Most people
are close to average, and a minority of unusual people are found at
one or other pole, meaning that there are some people who have no
interest whatsoever in casual sex, and some people who are off-the-
charts horny. Importantly, though – as I first laid out in chapter 2 –
the bell curves for men and for women are somewhat different, with
the male mean further towards the higher end of the sociosexuality
spectrum. This means that there are a lot more super-horny men
than super-horny women, and a lot more super-not-horny women
than super-not-horny men.

The problem of normal distribution is this: when you impose some

change on a population, different people will experience it
differently. It is very, very difficult to design a policy that will home
in on just one group of people at just one point on the graph, leaving
the rest of the curve unchanged. And when it comes to a big
historical event such as the sexual revolution – which nobody
designed, or even fully foresaw – that imprecision is even more
marked.

Marital satisfaction is (almost) normally distributed.2 Most people

report being quite happy in their marriages, with a minority who
report being very happy and another minority who report being very
unhappy.

It used to be exceptionally difficult for those very unhappy couples to

divorce. Journalist Megan McArdle describes the process of
acquiring a divorce in nineteenth-century America:
 It took years, was expensive, and required proving that your
spouse had abandoned you for an extended period with no
financial support; was (if male) not merely discreetly dallying
but flagrantly carrying on; or was not just belting you one now
and again when you got mouthy, but routinely pummelling you
within an inch of your life.

After you got divorced, you were a pariah in all but the largest
cities. If you were a desperately wronged woman you might
change your name, taking your maiden name as your first name
and continuing to use your husband’s last name to indicate that
you expected to continue living as if you were married (i.e.
chastely) and expect to have some limited intercourse with your
neighbors, though of course you would not be invited to events
held in a church, or evening affairs.

Financially secure women generally (I am not making this up)

moved to Europe; Edith Wharton, who moved to Paris when she
got divorced, wrote moving stories about the way divorced
women were shunned at home.3

If you sought a divorce during this period, it was almost certainly

because you were at the very unhappy tail of the normal distribution,
and thus – and I don’t think this is a controversial statement –
deserving of help and sympathy. That was certainly the attitude of
the social reformers who began to campaign for the liberalisation of
divorce laws in the years following the Second World War. From
roughly the 1960s onwards, and across the Western world, it
suddenly became much easier to get divorced, and people who had
been legally trapped in hellish marriages were freed from them,
which was a good thing. But then came the problem of normal
distribution.

In reading the parliamentary debates on what would become the

1969 Divorce Reform Act – the key piece of liberalising legislation in
the UK – it does not appear that the supporters of the Bill knew what
was coming. They believed that their reforms would be an act of
kindness towards the small number of people on the unhappy tail of
the normal distribution, but that the rest of the curve would be left
intact. ‘This Bill does not open the door to easy divorce,’ announced
Lord Stow Hill, onetime Attorney General. ‘That door is wide open
now, under the existing law, and it would be hard to open it wider.’4

And yet open it did. In the decade following the Divorce Reform Act,
the number of divorces trebled and then kept rising, peaking in the
1980s.5 Since then there has been a slight decline in the divorce rate,
not because of a genuine return to marital longevity but, rather,
because you can’t get divorced if you don’t get married in the first
place, and marriage rates are at an historic low.6 In 1968, 8 per cent
of children were born to parents who were not married; in 2019, it
was almost half.7 Today, there are just two marriages for every
divorce in the UK each year.8 The institution of marriage, as it once
was, is now more or less dead.

In the United States it is deader still. There, almost half of marriages

end in divorce,9 and there is also a new and significant class divide.
Before the 1970s, the vast majority of Americans got married and
stayed married, regardless of family income. Now, of those
Americans in the top-third income bracket, 64 per cent are in an
intact marriage, meaning they have only married once and are still in
their first marriage. In contrast, only 24 per cent of Americans in the
lower-third income bracket are in an intact marriage.10 A durable
marriage is fast becoming a luxury of the upper classes.

Of course, some marriages should end, and in those cases the

liberalisation of divorce laws was a blessing. Although married
women are not at greater risk of domestic violence than unmarried
women – the opposite, in fact11 – it is obviously better when abused
wives do not face serious legal obstacles in trying to leave their
husbands. The extreme unhappy tail of the normal distribution really
did need to get divorced, and, before the reforms of the mid-
twentieth century, they often couldn’t.

But the problem of normal distribution made it impossible for the

reforms to laser in on these extreme cases. Most modern divorces are
not a consequence of domestic abuse12 – most involve a couple
growing apart, falling out of love, and trying for a fresh start. But, in
many of these cases, the promise of happier alternative relationships
remains unfulfilled, particularly for women, who are more likely than
men to remain permanently single following divorce.13 What’s more,
between a third and a half of divorced people in the UK report in
surveys that they regret their decision to divorce.14 There is a lot of
space between ‘happy’ and ‘irreparably unhappy’. In the past, those
people remained married; now they usually don’t.

And, in a culture of high divorce rates, even those marriages that last
risk being undermined. When marriage vows are no longer truly
binding, couples seem to become less confident in their
relationships. One study by the American economist Betsey
Stevenson, for instance, found that marital investment declined in
the wake of no-fault divorce laws, with newly-wed couples in states
that passed no-fault divorce about 10 per cent less likely to support a
spouse through college or graduate school and 6 per cent less likely
to have a child together.15

When marriage became impermanent, the institution as a whole was

changed, and with it much else. I doubt very much that any of the
well-meaning reformers of the 1960s ever envisioned such an
outcome. Their intention had been a noble one: to offer a way out for
people stuck in wretched marriages and to lift the stigma from the
then tiny minority unfortunate enough to have been through divorce.
But the problem of normal distribution interceded. There was always
a threshold of dysfunction above which a marriage was considered
beyond saving, and reformers intended to nudge it only a little. But
as the marginal divorce made the next one more likely, and the one
after that more likely still, that threshold went hurtling downwards
at great speed.

My money, my choice
Divorce reforms were not solely responsible for the death of
marriage, of course. They formed part of a suite of factors, all of
which can be traced back to several important material changes of
the mid-twentieth century. Lawmakers loosened the limits on
divorce because the institution of marriage was already starting to
stumble. Their reforms acted as a final shove.

The most important of these material changes was the invention of

the contraceptive pill, which presents a particularly clear example of
the sometimes unpredictable consequences of a technology shock.
It’s odd, in retrospect, that the introduction of a new form of
contraception led to an increase rather than a decrease in the
number of births out of wedlock, and yet that’s exactly what
happened. This was because the Pill ended the taboo on pre-marital
sex, while not actually providing complete protection from
pregnancy. It still doesn’t, even though it remains the most popular
method of prescribed contraception in the UK and the US:16 with
perfect use, the combined contraceptive pill is 99 per cent effective,
but with typical use it is 91 per cent effective, meaning that around
nine in 100 women taking it will get pregnant in a year.17 Across a
population, that is a huge number of unwanted babies.

The decriminalisation of abortion across the Western world, which

arrived shortly after the introduction of the Pill, provided a ‘back-up’
option in these cases of contraceptive failure. 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. For a married
woman who can cope with an ‘oops’ baby, the Pill is a good option.
But, for everyone else, it doesn’t actually deliver what it’s supposed
to. And yet it was effective enough to change social norms
dramatically. The columnist Virginia Ironside reflected in later life
on the effect on young British women of the introduction of the Pill
and the decriminalisation of abortion:

It often seemed more polite to sleep with a man than to chuck

him out of your flat. True, we’d been brought up to say ‘no’ to
sex, but the only reason for that was because we might get
pregnant … But now, armed with the pill, and with every man
knowing you were armed with the pill, pregnancy was no longer
a reason to say ‘no’ to sex. And men exploited this mercilessly.
Now, for them, ‘no’ always meant ‘yes’.19

From the 1970s onwards, it became much less common for women to
wait until marriage or engagement before having sex. And while, in
theory, the choice to refuse pre-marital sex still existed, in practice it
became a much harder option to stick with. In twenty-first-century
America, unusually old virgins report being stigmatised by their
peers, and they are less favoured as relationship partners.20 The
stigma is stronger for male virgins, but – perhaps for the first time
historically – it clings to female virgins too.

The sexual revolution gave women the opportunity to make the

choice not to wait until marriage because so many people believed
that new contraceptive methods meant that extramarital sex no
longer carried the risk of an unwanted pregnancy. Of course it still
did, but the decriminalisation of abortion was there as a back-up,
meaning that no man need ever again fear a shotgun wedding. When
motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood
became a social choice for men. Or, as the comedian Dave Chappelle
has put it (in jest, but describing a very real attitude): ‘Not only do
[women] have the right to choose, I don’t believe they should have to
consult anybody except for a physician…. Gentlemen, that is fair. But
ladies, to be fair to us, if you decide to have the baby, the man should
not have to pay … My money, my choice.’21

Plenty of modern men seem to agree with Chappelle’s take. Before

the death of marriage, only the most flagrant scoundrel would refuse
to acknowledge and provide material support to his children if he
was in a publicly recognised relationship with their mother at the
time of conception. Now, deadbeat dads are commonplace. In the
UK, less than two-thirds of non-resident parents – almost all of them
fathers – are paying child support in full.22 In America, the figure is
less than half.23 Not only are record numbers of children not growing
up with a father at home, but many of those children don’t even get
any money out of these absent men.

Despite the often valiant efforts of single mothers, the data clearly
shows that, on average, children without fathers at home do not do
as well as other children. As the sociologists Sara McLanahan and
Gary D. Sandefur write:

Children who grow up in a household with only one biological

parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a
household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the
parents’ race or educational background, regardless of whether
the parents are married when the child is born, and regardless of
whether the resident parent remarries.24

Fatherlessness is associated with higher incarceration rates for

boys,25 higher rates of teen pregnancy for girls,26 and a greater
likelihood of emotional and behavioural problems for both sexes.27
This is not only because children are denied the material support
their fathers might have given them but also because single mothers
are obliged to take on the almost impossible task of doing everything
themselves: all of the earning, plus all of the caring, socialising, and
disciplining of their children.

Then there’s the sometimes malign influence of step-parents –

mostly, in practice, stepfathers, since in the vast majority of cases it
is mothers who are awarded primary custody, and therefore mothers
who are likely to bring a new partner into a young child’s home.
Evolutionary psychologists refer darkly to a phenomenon known as
‘the Cinderella effect’: the higher incidences of child abuse by step-
parents than by biological parents. The effect is so marked that
Steven Pinker has described step-parenthood as ‘the strongest risk
factor for child abuse ever identified’. A step-parent is forty to one
hundred times more likely than a biological parent to kill a child,28
and stepfathers are also far more likely than genetic fathers to
sexually abuse children.

Stepchildren, on average, find home life more stressful than other

children do. They leave home younger and are more likely to report
that family conflict was their key reason for moving out. They have
chronically higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. They suffer
higher mortality in general, not just from step-parent assaults but
also due to an increased rate of accidents. Their step-parents devote
fewer resources to their care, including nutritional resources,
resulting in their having a shorter average height than their peers of
the same age. All of this holds true across cultures.29
Of course it is sometimes better for children not to live with their
genetic fathers, or even have contact with them, particularly if those
men are abusive or dangerously unstable. And of course there are
plenty of devoted stepfathers and stepmothers who make
exceptionally good parents. We are talking about risks here, not
absolutes – the presence of a step-parent in a young child’s home
increases the risk of bad outcomes, but it certainly does not
guarantee them. However, the research findings are not promising,
and parents are kidding themselves if they think that a divorce or
parental separation will have no impact on their children. One
particularly egregious case of self-deception was published in the
New York Times in 2021, in a piece by the legal scholar Lara Bazelon
in which she described her own experience of divorce:

To this day, divorce is portrayed as precarious and grim. Parents

whose marriages break apart are made to feel they have failed
catastrophically. Divorce is shameful, traumatic and Bad For
The Kids.

But I’ve learned that divorce can also be an act of radical self-
love that leaves the whole family better off … I divorced my
husband not because I didn’t love him. I divorced him because I
loved myself more.30

Whether or not it is an act of ‘radical self-love’ for one or more of the

adults, children do not benefit from the divorce of non-abusive
parents. The research is unequivocal on this point. And while a
parent like Bazelon may be able to cushion the blow to her children
by paying for therapy, nannies and private schools, most single
mothers are not able to do so.

As so often, it is poor women who fare worst in the post-sexual

revolution era. For one thing, divorce harms mothers financially. As
Lenore Weitzman concludes, from her study of divorce in California:
‘For most women and children, divorce means precipitous downward
mobility – both economically and socially. The reduction in income
brings residential moves and inferior housing, drastically diminished
or nonexistent funds for recreation and leisure, and intense
pressures due to inadequate time and money.’31

And the situation is even worse for mothers who never get married in
the first place. A 2019 BBC documentary about homeless single
mothers included an interview with the father of one of the toddlers
featured in the programme. Both child and mother were living in a
hostel run by the local council, heavily in debt, and surviving on
welfare benefits. She desperately wanted to get back with her ex, and
he would occasionally swing by the hostel to spend time with their
son, making vague promises about them one day living together as a
family. Addressing the camera, he explained his view of the situation:
‘It’s always good to spend time with my kid. I wish that I could see
him when I want to see him, but I think sometimes you have to
prioritise your lifestyle.’32 Plenty of ‘radical self-love’ on display from
a man who seemed to be fond of his child and ex-girlfriend, but who
wasn’t willing to make even the most minor sacrifice in order to offer
them a stable homelife. And why should he? From his perspective,
she was the one who had decided not to have an abortion, and so she
must face the consequences alone.
Which means that she becomes dependent on the state. Here, too, is
a social change brought about by a material one. It was the economic
boom of the post-war period that made possible the construction of a
large welfare state, which then made it feasible – although neither
easy nor pleasant – for poor single mothers to survive without
support from the fathers of their children.

My friend Mason Hartman compares the modern state to a kind of

‘back-up husband’. If called upon, it will feed you, house you, and
protect you from violence, but it won’t do so especially well. And the
state will offer no warmth or companionship alongside these basic
necessities. I don’t suggest for a moment that this ‘back-up husband’
ought now to withdraw, because doing so would leave many single
mothers and their children destitute. The elaborate system of norms
that for centuries held together the taboo on pre-marital sex is now
long gone and cannot be readily reconstructed. If the welfare state
were to disappear, the result would be misery and mayhem for the
most vulnerable members of our society.

But nor do I think that the ‘back-up husband’ is anything like as good
as the real thing. Despite all of our efforts, feminists have not yet
found a workable alternative to a system that, as it turned out, did
serve a purpose in protecting the interests not only of women but
also – crucially – of their children.

A baby and someone

Some people consider the death of marriage to be a good thing, and
many of those people are feminists. Opposition to marriage was a
common theme in much of the writing of the second wave, with
feminists including Andrea Dworkin, Germaine Greer and Kate
Millett all arguing for its abolition. ‘The institution of marriage is the
chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women,’
insisted the American sociologist Marlene Dixon in 1969,
summarising the dominant feminist critique of the time. ‘It is
through the role of wife that the subjugation of women is
maintained.’33

But it’s no coincidence that most of the feminists who opposed

marriage never had children. I’ve written earlier in this book about
the conflict between liberal feminists and radical feminists on issues
such as prostitution and porn, issues on which there are clear and
important differences between these two feminist traditions. On
motherhood, however, the differences have always been paper thin.
Both groups have no answer to the question of how women are
supposed to reconcile their search for freedom with a condition that
necessarily curtails it.

If you value freedom above all else, then you must reject
motherhood, since this is a state of being that limits a woman’s
freedom in almost every possible way – not only during pregnancy
but also for the rest of her life, since she will always have obligations
to her children, and they will always have obligations to her. It’s a
connection that is only ever severed in the most dire circumstances.
Feminists have historically succeeded in challenging this restriction
on freedom through advocating for greater availability of
contraception and abortion, which has been effective up to a point, in
that it has allowed women more of a say in when or if they have
children. But what about when the children are actually born? Here,
we come upon an anti-natalist streak in both liberal and radical
feminist traditions that leaves mothers shut out, which means – even
with historically low birth rates – that at least three-quarters of
women are shut out. Motherhood is discussed in fewer than 3 per
cent of papers, journal articles or textbooks on modern gender
theory34 – but then, less than half of tenured female academics have
children,35 which makes the omission somewhat less surprising. The
whole topic has slipped out of sight.

And no wonder, since the logic of individualism collapses upon

contact with motherhood. The pregnant woman’s frame contains two
people, neither of them truly autonomous. The unborn baby depends
on the mother for survival, and the mother cannot break this
physical bond except through medical intervention that will result in
the baby’s death. Even after birth, the mother–baby dyad remains a
unit, tied together both emotionally and physically. And, for many
years following birth, the young child cannot be understood as an
autonomous individual because, without the devoted care of at least
one adult, death is a certainty.

The psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott has written

that ‘there is no such thing as a baby. There is only a baby and
someone.’ The writer Leah Libresco Sargeant expands the point:
 The liberal theory of the independent individual as the basic unit
of society is full of exceptions … It would be fairer to say that
dependence is our default state, and self-sufficiency the
aberration. Our lives begin and (frequently) end in states of near
total dependence, and much of the middle is marked by periods
of need.36

Some feminists insist that women ought to forego motherhood

altogether. Shulamith Firestone, for instance, famously argued in
The Dialectic of Sex, first published in 1970, that women could never
be liberated from patriarchy without liberation from reproduction
itself, and thus she suggested that babies ought one day to be
gestated outside of the human body. If women cannot participate in
reproduction as men do, Firestone argued, then they should not
participate at all.

This does work up to a point – for the individual, at least, if not for
the species. But it isn’t possible to reject dependency altogether
because, even if a woman chooses never to have children, she will
one day grow old and depend on other people as if she were an infant
all over again. Shulamith Firestone herself – having become
estranged from her family in later life, and having never married or
produced children – spent the final years of her life in a state of
profound vulnerability caused by severe mental illness. She was
supported for a time by a network of feminist friends and admirers,
but eventually the group dissipated, since they were not tied together
by blood or marriage, and relationships based on mutual liking or
idealism are not as durable as those that entail a lifelong obligation.
Firestone was left uncared for, and she died alone in her home aged
sixty-seven, with her body left undiscovered for some days. It was
assumed by the coroner that she had died of starvation.37

A modified version of Winnicott’s proclamation could be applied to

almost all adults at some stage of their lives: ‘there is no such thing
as a person. There is only a person and someone.’ Acting as that
‘someone’ means giving away some portion of your freedom, which
runs counter to what we’re all supposed to want. Many feminists of
the second wave described their goal as ‘women’s liberation’ –
womankind was in chains, they said, and those chains had to be
broken.

And that goal was not without merit, given that women are still too
often consigned permanently to the role of ‘someone’ – always
caring, never cared for. But the solution to this problem cannot be
individualism, because the whole concept is based on a lie. In a
natural human life cycle, we begin as dependent babies, spend a very
brief period as relatively independent young adults, before caring for
our own dependent children, and then ultimately ending our lives in
what Shakespeare called our ‘second childishness’.38 Modern
contraception has allowed us to stretch out that young adult stage
artificially, giving the illusion that independence is our permanent
state. But it isn’t – it’s nothing more than a blip, which some of us
will never experience at all. Either being ‘a someone’ or needing ‘a
someone’ is our lot as human beings. That means that we have to
find a way of being dependent upon one another.
The protection of an ordinary
marriage
But dependency continues to present problems for feminism,
particularly in relation to motherhood. To the extent that either
liberal or radical feminism has offered any hypothetical assistance to
mothers, it has been assistance located outside of the family and
within the bosom of the fully socialised state. The state as back-up
husband is tasked with providing institutional childcare in the form
of 24/7 day-care centres, which is an elegantly economical model,
since, instead of one mother devoted to one child (wastefully, her
own), the back-up husband allocates one worker to many children
(efficiently, not her own). Mothers can thus return promptly to the
workforce and put their tax revenue towards feeding the day-care
engine.

Such a model depends on physically prising apart women from their

children, making these two beings as autonomous as possible as
quickly as possible. Thus women’s freedom is maximised and the
mutual dependency of childbearing is resisted, or at least hidden
away. What this model doesn’t offer women is a way of being
physically with their children while also being materially and
emotionally supported by other adults.

Some feminists have attempted to resolve this problem through the

construction of new, family-like structures. In The Female Eunuch,
for instance, Germaine Greer wrote of ‘self-regulating organic
families’, in which groups of women buy a property together and live
communally, with the fathers of their children visiting only
occasionally39 and the role of mother frequently ‘deputised’ to
others. Writing fifty years after Greer, Sophie Lewis advocates in her
book Full Surrogacy Now for ‘gestational communism’, in which
‘mother–child bonds can more easily be discontinued, handed over,
and multiplied.’

The sociologist Nicholas Christakis observes that the idea of

collective childrearing was not unique to the radicals of the 1970s:

It has been periodically attempted as a desired social disruption

since antiquity. Plato believed that raising children communally
would result in children treating all men as their fathers and
thus more respectfully. Communist societies have also been
associated with collective child-rearing; the family is seen as a
threat to state ideology because it fosters a sense of belonging to
a family unit, and totalitarian ideology requires that family
allegiance be subordinated to allegiance to the party or state.40

But, as Christakis writes, ‘attempts to fundamentally restructure or

minimize the bond between parent and child have very rarely, if ever,
endured.’ The reasons for this should be obvious: humans are
animals, descended from individuals whose offspring survived to
adulthood, and natural selection therefore favours attentive mothers.

This means that, when social structures fall away, the result is
generally that the person left literally holding the baby is the person
whose natural instincts make her most devoted to the child.
Shulamith Firestone recognised this truth, writing that: ‘Since the
relationship “mother/child” remains intact, it is no wonder that
when the commune breaks up, all the “godparents” disappear, as
well as the genetic father himself, leaving the mother stuck – without
even the protection of an ordinary marriage.’ Firestone’s argument,
of course, is that even communal childrearing does not free women
from the oppression of motherhood, and that the whole thing should
therefore be rejected. But the phrase ‘without even the protection of
an ordinary marriage’ is well put. The reductive feminist analysis of
marriage sees it as a method used by men to control female sexuality.
And it does do that, of course, but that was never its sole function.
There is also a protective function to marriage, but it’s one that
makes sense only when understood in relation to children.

The faithless soldier

Marriage used to be defined as a conjugal union, ‘a holy mystery in
which man and woman become one flesh’, in the words of the
marriage service of the Church of England. While of course there
were always exceptions to this – infertile people were permitted to
marry, as were people beyond reproductive age – marriage was
nevertheless understood to be based, as Robert P. George, professor
of jurisprudence at Princeton, puts it, around a couple’s ‘sexual-
reproductive complementarity … [which was] specially apt for, and
would naturally be fulfilled by, their having and rearing children
together.’41

For most Westerners, this is no longer what marriage means. The

psychologist Eli Finkel has charted the historical development of
marriage in the Western world and attributes its changes to changing
economic conditions.42 Before the mid-nineteenth century, the
challenge of day-to-day survival, particularly for rural people, meant
that assistance with food production, shelter, and protection from
violence were what most people prioritised in a spouse. Later,
urbanisation and industrialisation led to greater prosperity, and
couples had the luxury in their marriages of placing more emphasis
on love and companionship. Then, in the affluent 1960s, we entered
the era of what Finkel refers to as the ‘self-expressive marriage’, in
which self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth became the
key markers of a marriage’s success.

Where once marriage was all about reproduction and the pooling of
resources, it is now more often understood as a means of sexual and
emotional fulfilment – ‘your relationship with your Number One
person’,43 as the philosopher John Corvino has put it. Thus it is now
perfectly intelligible – and, in my opinion, good and proper – to
extend marriage rights to same-sex couples, who necessarily lack
‘sexual-reproductive complementarity’. Since the old meaning of
marriage is now forgotten, denying same-sex couples the right to
marry in the present day is both cruel and nonsensical.

But we should not make the mistake of misrepresenting the

historical function of marriage, and indeed the historical function of
the prohibition on pre-marital sex. Modern feminists who have only
ever known a world with the Pill can easily forget that, in an era
without contraception, a prohibition on sex before marriage served
female, not male interests, because it protected the group of people
who bear (literally) the consequences of an extramarital pregnancy.
This point was well understood by feminists who were born long
before the Pill’s invention and who knew what an extramarital
pregnancy meant for a woman in a society without a welfare state.
Yes, it’s true that part of the harm was done through reputational
damage, with single mothers and their children stigmatised by their
families and communities. But this social catastrophe was second
order to the practical catastrophe of single motherhood itself, which
was disastrous enough to result, for some poor women, in a choice
between prostitution and starvation, or else other alternatives that
were just as terrible: a dangerous attempt at abortion, abandonment
of a child to an orphanage or infanticide. The stigma around single
motherhood caused a great deal of misery for its many victims. It
also existed for a reason: to deter women from making an irreparable
mistake for the sake of a worthless man.

The feminist theorist Mary Harrington uncovers the logic of the old
prohibition on extramarital sex within English folksongs about the
‘faithless soldier’ and the young woman he seduces:

Cold Blow and the Rainy Night tells of a soldier who arrives, hat
frozen to his head, pleading with a young woman to let him in.
She’s eventually persuaded, whereupon one thing leads to
another. Presumably in the afterglow, she asks him: ‘Now since
you had your will of me / Soldier will you marry me?’. Nope, he
replies:

O then she cursed the rainy night

That ever she let him in – O
Then he jumped out of the bed
 He put his cap upon his head
And she had lost her maidenhead
And her mother heard the din – O
…

Another song, The Greenwood Side, recounts the story of a young

woman who falls pregnant in an illicit affair, is abandoned by her
lover, gives birth alone in a wood and conceals the truth by
murdering her twin babies. The affair, abandonment, birth and
infanticide are briskly narrated, and the body of the song is a
hallucinated dialogue with her murdered babies. The deeply
unsettling lyrics blend horror at her deed with profound pity for the
woman:

Now, bonny boys, come tell to me

Oh, the rose and the linsey, oh
What sort of life I’ll have after dying?
Down by the Greenwood side, oh44

Such songs existed to warn young women about the dangers posed
by the faithless soldier and his kind. What might nowadays be
interpreted as ‘slut shaming’, or a fear of female sexual agency, in
fact had a very urgent purpose. That purpose is now somewhat
anachronistic in an age of contraception, but only somewhat. Illicit
affairs do still end in trauma and tragedy because sex is still just as
consequential as it ever was.

Many feminists who lived before the 1960s knew this better than we
do now. They looked at the asymmetries inherent in heterosexuality
and the grim consequences for women of ‘sexual liberation’, and they
concluded that the male libido needed containment. Which was why
two of the thirteen chapters in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman were devoted to bemoaning the lack of
chastity in men – the sex with the higher sex drive – and thus – to
Wollstonecraft’s mind – the greater responsibility for containing
their passions. ‘Votes for women, chastity for men’ was a real
suffragist slogan, now forgotten.45

The reinvention of marriage

But how to persuade men into – if not chastity – sexual continence?
I’ve written earlier in this book about what I’ve called the ‘cad’ and
‘dad’ modes of male sexuality, with the former orientated towards
casual sex and the latter towards commitment. Although there are
some men who are innately and resolutely focused on one or other of
these modes, it’s far more common for men to sit somewhere in the
middle, moving between the two depending on their age and social
context.

Having almost reached the end of this book, I hope I’ve managed to
persuade you that the cad mode of male sexuality is bad for women
en masse. The vast majority of women find it difficult to detach
emotion from sex, meaning that an encounter with a cad who doesn’t
call is likely to leave a woman feeling distressed, even if she attempts
to repress those feelings. Women did not evolve to treat sex as
meaningless, and trying to pretend otherwise does not end well.
Then there are the physical consequences of sex, which are
inherently asymmetrical, with the danger and pain of an unwanted
pregnancy borne entirely by the woman. Modern forms of
contraception are mostly effective – enough, at least, to have
transformed sexual relations in the post-1960s era – but they still
regularly fail. And whatever you think about the ethical status of the
foetus, we should all be able to agree that an abortion is not a good
thing for a woman to go through, given such medical risks as uterine
damage or sepsis, not to mention the emotional consequences, which
are not trivial.

All in all, attempting to mimic the cad mode of male sexuality, as

liberal feminism encourages, does not constitute liberation for
women. The Hugh Hefners of the world do not quail at the thought
of a ‘sexually liberated’ womankind. Quite the opposite, in fact. They
are delighted to find themselves with a buffet of young women to
feast on, all of them apparently willing to suffer their mistreatment
without complaint. Looked at in the starkest terms, I can’t help but
agree with the dark pronouncement my grandmother made when I
told her about the thesis of this book: ‘women have been conned.’

The task for practically minded feminists, then, is to deter men from
cad mode. Our current sexual culture does not do that, but it could.
In order to change the incentive structure, we would need a
technology that discourages short-termism in male sexual behaviour,
protects the economic interests of mothers, and creates a stable
environment for the raising of children. And we do already have such
a technology, even if it is old, clunky and prone to periodic failure.
It’s called monogamous marriage.
Before I start sounding too quixotic, I should make one thing clear:
lifelong monogamy is not our natural state. Only about 15 per cent of
societies in the anthropological record have been monogamous.46
Monogamy has to be enforced through laws and customs, and, even
within societies in which it is deeply embedded, plenty of people are
defiant. To date, monogamy has been dominant in only two types of
society: small-scale groups beset by serious environmental privation
and some of the most complex civilisations to have ever existed,
including our own.47 Almost all others have been polygynous,
permitting high-status men to take multiple wives.

But while the monogamous marriage model may be relatively

unusual, it is also spectacularly successful. When monogamy is
imposed on a society, it tends to become richer. It has lower rates of
both child abuse and domestic violence, since conflict between co-
wives tends to generate both. Birth rates and crime rates both fall,
which encourages economic development, and wealthy men, denied
the opportunity to devote their resources to acquiring more wives,
instead invest elsewhere: in property, businesses, employees, and
other productive endeavours.

This is, it seems, the solution to what anthropologists have called ‘the
puzzle of monogamous marriage’. How is it that a marriage system
that does not suit the interests of the most powerful members of
society – high-status men – has nevertheless come to be
institutionalised across so much of the world? The answer is that,
although monogamy is less satisfactory for these men, it produces
wealthy, stable societies that survive.
A monogamous marriage system is successful in part because it
pushes men away from cad mode, particularly when pre-marital sex
is also prohibited. Under these circumstances, if a man wants to have
sex in a way that’s socially acceptable, he has to make himself
marriageable, which means holding down a good job and setting up a
household suitable for the raising of children. He has to tame
himself, in other words. Fatherhood then has a further taming effect,
even at the biochemical level: when men are involved in the care of
their young children, their testosterone levels drop, alongside their
aggression and sex drive.48 A society composed of tamed men is a
better society to live in, for men, for women and for children.

The monogamous marriage model is also the best solution yet

discovered to the problems presented by childrearing. There was a
wisdom to the traditional model in which the father was primarily
responsible for earning money while the mother was primarily
responsible for caring for children at home. Such a model allows
mothers and children to be physically together and at the same time
financially supported. In an age of labour-saving devices such as
washing machines and gas boilers, it has become less time-
consuming to run a household and thus more feasible for mothers of
young children to do paid work outside of the home, as most of us
do. But attempting to play the traditional roles of mother and father
simultaneously – as single mothers are forced to do – is close to
impossible.

For some women, paid work outside of the home is a joy and a
privilege. For many more, it is a responsibility, and often an onerous
one. Even those women who enjoy their work are physically
incapable of performing it during the early months of a baby’s life. I
should know: I began this book at the beginning of my pregnancy
and completed it when my son was six months old. Writing is
probably one of the easiest jobs to combine with motherhood, but
even so there were weeks on end during which I didn’t write a word
because I was too busy caring for my baby. And while I could be
practically supported by other people, including my husband, I was
irreplaceable as mother – not only because I was the only person
who could breastfeed, but also because children have a relationship
with their mothers that starts from conception, and that relationship
cannot be handed over without distress to both mother and baby.

If we want to keep that maternal bond intact, then the only solution
is for another person to step in during these times of vulnerability
and do the tasks needed to keep a household warm and fed. Perhaps
we could call that person a spouse. Perhaps we could call their legal
and emotional bond a marriage.

Marriage is an institution that has a way of reinventing itself. In

2020, an initiative set up by a group of American students called the
Affirmative Consent Project began marketing a ‘consent kit’,
available online for $2.99. This pocket-sized kit contained a condom,
two breath mints, and a contract stating that the undersigned had
agreed to have sex. Couples were encouraged to take a photo of
themselves holding the signed piece of paper. (‘Why not invite family
and friends to witness the signing?’ some wags asked. ‘Why not hire a
professional photographer? Dress up? Make an event of it?’)49
Similarly, in 2021, the journalist Julia Ioffe was among the many
feminists who responded to the introduction of new restrictions on
abortion rights in Texas by suggesting that men ought to be
compelled to provide financial support to their sexual partners if they
became pregnant. Ioffe tweeted, apparently expecting conservatives
to be outraged by this extremely conservative proposal: ‘If you are
anti-choice and you want to make sure women carry every pregnancy
to term, why not make the person who created the pregnancy
contribute? Why not have men pay child support to the women they
impregnate?’50 Why not indeed? In fact I’d say that it’s quite possible
to be pro-choice and to insist that men ought to take responsibility
for the children they help to create. We used to have a social
institution established for exactly that purpose. We still could.

I have just one piece of advice to offer in this chapter, and you’ve
probably already guessed what it will be. So, here it is: get married.
And do your best to stay married. Particularly if you have children,
and particularly if those children are still young. And if you do find
yourself in the position of being a single mother, wait until your
children are older before you bring a stepfather into their home.
These directives are harder to follow now than they used to be,
because we no longer live in a culture that incentivises perseverance
in marriage. But it is still possible for individuals to go against the
grain and insist on doing the harder, less fashionable thing.

The critics of marriage are right to say that it has historically been
used as a vehicle for the control of women by men, and they’re right
to point out that most marriages do not live up to a romantic ideal.
They’re right, too, that monogamous, lifelong marriage is in a sense
‘unnatural’ in that it is not the human norm. The marriage system
that prevailed in the West up until recently was not perfect, nor was
it easy for most people to conform to, since it demanded high levels
of tolerance and self-control. Where the critics go wrong is in arguing
that there is any better system. There isn’t.

Notes
1. Aidan Lyon, ‘Why are normal distributions normal?’, British
Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (2014): 621–49.

2. H. J. Eysenck and James A. Wakefield, ‘Psychological factors as

predictors of marital satisfaction’, Advances in Behaviour
Research and Therapy 3 (1981): 151–92.

3. Jane Galt [Megan McArdle], ‘A really, really, really long post about
gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the
other’, 2 April 2005,
https://web.archive.org/web/20050406215537/http://www.jane
galt.net/blog/archives/005244.html.

4. Hansard, House of Lords debates, vol. 303, col. 297, 30 June 1969.

5. Gavin Thompson et al., Olympic Britain: Social and Economic

Change since the 1908 and 1948 London Games. London: House
of Commons Library, 2011.

6. Chiara Giordano, ‘UK heterosexual marriage rate falls to lowest on

record’, 14 April 2020, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-
 news/marriage-rate-uk-latest-figures-lowest-record-ons-
a9464706.html.

7. Births in England and Wales: summary tables, Office for National

Statistics, Release date: 22 July 2020.

8. Thompson et al., Olympic Britain.

9. Dan Hurley, 19 April 2005,

www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/divorce-rate-its-not-as-
high-as-you-think.html.

10. W. Bradford Wilcox and Wendy Wang, 25 September 2017,

https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-marriage-divide-how-and-why-
working-class-families-are-more-fragile-today.

11. Susan B. Sorenson and Devan Spear, ‘New data on intimate

partner violence and intimate relationships: implications for gun
laws and federal data collection’, Preventive Medicine 107 (2018):
103–8.

12. Paul Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk: Growing Up

in an Era of Family Upheaval. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997, p. 220.

13. Paula Span, ‘The gray gender gap: older women are likelier to go
it alone’, 11 October 2016,
www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/health/marital-status-elderly-
health.html; Kyrsty Hazell, 31 January 2012,
www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/31/divorced-men-are-twice-
as-likely-to-remarry_n_1243472.html.
14. Sonia Frontera, 4 August 2021, www.divorcemag.com/blog/if-
you-divorce-now-will-you-regret-your-divorce-later.

15. Betsey Stevenson, ‘The impact of divorce laws on marriagespecific

capital’, Journal of Labor Economics 25 (2007): 75–94.

16. Nicola Davis and Niamh McIntyre, 7 March 2019,

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/07/revealed-pill-still-
most-popular-prescribed-contraceptive-in-england; Kimberly
Daniels and Joyce C. Abma, ‘Current contraception status among
women aged 15–49’, December 2018,
www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db327.htm.

17. ‘How effective is contraception at preventing pregnancy?’, 17

April 2020, www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/how-effective-
contraception/.

18. See www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2018/about-half-us-

abortion-patients-report-using-contraception-month-they-
became.

19. Virginia Ironside, 18 January 2011,

www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1346813/The-flip-1960s-
sexual-revolution-We-paid-price-free-love.html.

20. Nikola Komlenac, Manuel Pittl, Susanne Perkhofer et al., ‘Links

between virginity beliefs, negative feelings after virginity loss and
sexual performance anxiety in a sample of German-speaking
heterosexual-identified women and men’, Journal of Sex &
Marital Therapy 48 (2022): 1–18.
21. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoudH-RPnEE.

22. Hansard, House of Commons debates, vol. 561, col. 229, 15 April
2013.

23. Timothy Grall, ‘Custodial mothers and fathers and their child
support: 2015’, January 2020,
www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020
/demo/p60-262.pdf.

24. Sara McLanahan and Gary D. Sandefur, Growing Up with a

Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 1.

25. Cynthia C. Harper and Sara S. McLanahan, ‘Father absence and

youth incarceration’, Journal of Research on Adolescence 14
(2004): 369–97.

26. McLanahan and Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent.

27. Nicholas Zill and Charlotte A. Schoenborn, Developmental,

Learning, and Emotional Problems: Health of Our Nation’s
Children, United States, 1988. Hyattsville, MD: National Center
for Health Statistics, 1990, p. 9.

28. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton,
2009, p. 434.

29. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, ‘The “Cinderella effect” is no

fairy tale’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 507–8.
30. Lara Bazelon, ‘Divorce can be an act of radical self-love’, 30
September 2021,
www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/opinion/divorce-children.html.

31. Quoted in Diane Jeske and Richard Fumerton, eds, Readings in

Political Philosophy: Theory and Applications. Peterborough,
Ont.: Broadview Press, 2011, p. 649.

32. The Hostel for Homeless Young Mums, episode 1, BBC Three, 7
June 2019.

33. Barbara A. Crow, Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader.

New York: New York University Press, 2000, p. 76.

34. Amy Westervelt, 26 May 2018,

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/26/is-
motherhood-the-unfinished-work-of-feminism.

35. Mary Ann Mason, ‘In the ivory tower, men only’, 17 June 2013,
https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/female-academics-
pay-a-heavy-baby-penalty.html.

36. Leah Libresco Sargeant, 7 December 2020,

www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/culture-of-life/dependence.

37. Susan Faludi, 8 April 2013,

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/death-of-a-
revolutionary.

38. As You Like It, Act II, scene VII.

39. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch. London: Harper Perennial,
[1970] 2006, pp. 264–6.

40. Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a

Good Society. New York: Little, Brown, 2019, p. 74.

41. Patrick Lee, Robert P. George and Gerard V. Bradley, ‘Marriage

and procreation’, 28 March 2011,
www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/03/2638/.

42. Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best

Marriages Work. New York: Dutton, 2017.

43. John Corvino and Maggie Gallagher, Debating Same-Sex

Marriage. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

44. Mary Harrington, 21 October 2020,

https://unherd.com/2020/10/feminists-shouldnt-have-sex-
before-marriage/.

45. Erika Bachiochi, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost

Vision. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021, p.
16.

46. D. R. White, L. Betzig, M. B. Mulder et al., ‘Rethinking polygyny:

co-wives, codes, and cultural systems’ (and comments and reply),
Current Anthropology 29 (1988): 529–72;
www.jstor.org/stable/2743506.

47. Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, ‘The puzzle
of monogamous marriage’, Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367 (2012): 657–69.
48. Lee Gettler, Thomas McDade, Alan Feranil and Christopher
Kuzawa, ‘Longitudinal evidence that fatherhood decreases
testosterone in human males’, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108 (2011):
16194–9.

49. Jennifer Savin, ‘Would you sign a sexual consent form?’, 13

March 2020, www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-
sex/sex/a31042298/sexual-consent-forms/.

50. See https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/1446113958650253313.

Conclusion: Listen to Your
Mother
I’m treading a fine line in this book. On the one hand, I’m arguing
against a naive kind of ‘choice feminism’ that fails to acknowledge
the subtle and not so subtle incentive structures that influence
individual decision making. On the other hand, I’m trying to
encourage readers to make particular choices, fully in the knowledge
that your agency is heavily constrained. In other words, I’m telling
you that your options are limited but that you do still have them.
‘There are ways out,’ as the poet Charles Bukowski puts it, ‘there is
light somewhere, it may not be much light, but it beats the darkness.’

So I’ve tried to offer chinks of light. Because I truly believe not only
that there is scope for individuals to behave differently, but also that
these individual actions can scale to something more significant.
Things can change very quickly when people realise that there are
others who secretly feel the same way as they do.

My friend the writer Katherine Dee has been predicting a change for
some time. ‘I believe the pendulum with sexuality is going to swing,
big time,’ she wrote last year. ‘We’re diving headlong into something
that’s been simmering in the background since 2013–2014 … The pot
is about to boil over.’ Katherine is one of those people who has a
talent for noticing changes in the cultural winds, and she observes
more and more signs of a coming reaction against the excesses of the
sexual liberation narrative, particularly from Gen Z women who have
experienced the worst of it.1

I think Katherine is right on this. And while I wrote this book in the
hope that it would be read by men and women of all ages, my dearest
wish is that it will be read by young women in particular – the group
who have been utterly failed by liberal feminism and who have the
most to gain from a swing back against its excesses.

So while there is advice within these pages that could be helpful to

any reader, it is worth repeating here the points that are most
relevant to these particular young women. This is the same advice I
would offer my own daughter:

Distrust any person or ideology that puts pressure on you to

ignore your moral intuition.

Chivalry is actually a good thing. We all have to control our

sexual desires, and men particularly so, given their greater
physical strength and average higher sex drives.

Sometimes (though not always) you can readily spot sexually

aggressive men. There are a handful of personality traits that are
common to them: impulsivity, promiscuity, hyper-masculinity
and disagreeableness. These traits in combination should put
you on your guard.

A man who is aroused by violence is a man to steer well clear of,

whether or not he uses the vocabulary of BDSM to excuse his
behaviour. If he can maintain an erection while beating a
woman, he isn’t safe to be alone with.
Consent workshops are mostly useless. The best way of reducing
the incidence of rape is by reducing the opportunities for would-
be rapists to offend. This can be done either by keeping
convicted rapists in prison or by limiting their access to potential
victims.

The category of people most likely to become victims of these

men are young women aged about thirteen to twenty-five. All
girls and women, but particularly those in this age category,
should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or men who
give them the creeps. Gut instinct is not to be ignored: it’s
usually triggered by a red flag that’s well worth noticing.

Get drunk or high in private and with female friends rather than
in public or in mixed company.

Don’t use dating apps. Mutual friends can vet histories and
punish bad behaviour. Dating apps can’t.

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.

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.

Monogamous marriage is by far the most stable and reliable

foundation on which to build a family.
I wrote in the first chapter that none of my advice would be ground-
breaking, and I stand by that. This is all informed by peer-reviewed
research, but it shouldn’t have to be, since this is pretty much what
most mothers would tell their daughters, if only they were willing to
listen.

If we are to challenge the social costs of the sexual revolution

effectively, then we can’t redesign society on the back of an envelope.
We have to look at social structures that have already proven to be
successful in the past and compare them against one another, rather
than against some imagined alternative that has never existed and is
never likely to exist. The technology shock of the Pill led sexual
liberals to the hubristic assumption that our society could be
uniquely free from the oppression of sexual norms and could
function just fine. The last sixty years have proved that assumption
to be wrong. We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been
torn down. And, in order to do that, we have to start by stating the
obvious. Sex must be taken seriously. Men and women are different.
Some desires are bad. Consent is not enough. Violence is not love.
Loveless sex is not empowering. People are not products. Marriage is
good.

And, above all, listen to your mother. In 2021, a TikTok video by a

young American woman called Abby went viral online. In the video,
Abby tells the camera:
 I, like many other college students, am someone who is
entangled in hook-up culture, and often hook-up culture makes
it difficult for me to determine whether or not what I’m doing is
good for me and kind to myself. Very often as women we are led
astray from what we actually deserve. So here’s what I’ve been
doing lately …

She pulls up on screen a series of childhood photos of herself and

explains that the men she’s hooked up with in the past have often
made her feel as though she’s undeserving, not only of love but also
of basic respect. So she’s trying to remind herself of her worth as a
person by playing the role of mother to her inner child. ‘Am I OK
with that for her?’, she asks tearfully, gesturing at her younger self in
the photo. ‘Would I let her be a late-night, drunk second option?
Would I let this happen to her?’ She shakes her head, weeping: ‘From
a third person, caretaker point of view, I would never let any of this
stuff happen to her.’2

Abby is trying to mother herself, though she isn’t quite sure how to
do it. And the thousands of young women in her replies are trying to
do the same (‘I’m sobbing’; ‘i rlly needed this, thank you’; ‘this just
changed my life’). They’ve been denied the guidance of mothers, not
because their actual mothers are unwilling to offer it but because of a
matricidal impulse in liberal feminism that cuts young women off
from the ‘problematic’ older generation. This means not only that
they are cut off from the voices of experience, but – more
importantly – they are also cut off from the person who loves them
most in the world. Feminism needs to rediscover the mother, in
every sense.
Until we do, each individual woman will have to learn on her own the
lie of the promise of sexual liberation – the lie that tells us, as Andrea
Dworkin phrased it, that ‘fucking per se is freedom per se.’ It was a
lie all along. It’s time, at last, to say so.

Notes
1. See https://defaultfriend.substack.com/p/72-the-coming-wave-of-
sex-negativity/comments.

2.
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