Let's face it -- the "sexual revolution" is a disaster for women

Across cultures, men have more intense desire for sexual variety—or sociosexuality, as it is more officially dubbed—and are more open to casual sex than women. They are also (typically) far stronger than female partners. The strength gap means that sex is risky for women not just because they could get pregnant, as most evolution-minded thinkers emphasize, but because they could be raped—the brutal fate of so many of their sex throughout history. Perry puts it bluntly: “almost all men can kill almost all women with their bare hands but not vice versa.” …

In making her contribution to the growing literature of sexual discontent, Perry looks to evolutionary psychology. The post-1960s liberal-feminist regime rests on an ideological foundation of “human exceptionalism,” she argues, as if we are “uniquely detached from the normal processes of natural selection.” In the liberal view, whereas other species evolved sexual biology and practices that offered the best chance of perpetuating their species, humans seemed to have no instinctive baggage—except, of course, for sexual pleasure. When the birth control pill came along in 1960, followed shortly after by increasing access to safe abortion, it was enough to crumble the ancient social calculus that had limited women’s pleasure. A new sociological creature was born: “the apparently fertile young woman whose fertility had in fact been put on hold. She changed everything.”

Well, not quite everything, as the author herself understands. True, women understandably celebrated their new freedom from unwanted pregnancy and successfully created a culture in which the traditional double standard seemed like the absurd relic of an oppressive age. Yet, over the ensuing decades, as sexual taboos melted away, women found themselves marching to the beat of another set of equally ill-suited norms. These norms largely aligned with the preferences of those high in sociosexuality, which generally means men, writes Perry. The idea was to be able to “have sex like a man,” in Sex and the City’s memorable phrase—purely for fun, without any messy emotions or attachments. Perry catalogues magazine and web articles explaining how to avoid “catching feelings” after a hook up, examples of women who can’t quite explain why they’re unhappy in a friends-with-benefits “pseudo-relationship,” and porn showing women “begging men for painful or degrading sex acts.” The cool kids, goes the message, should be comfortable with any and everything purported to bring sexual pleasure: oral, anal, polyamory, threesomes, BDSM, breath play (i.e., choking). The only limiting factor, the only moral imperative really, is consent from both parties.