by Louise Perry
Provocative! Contrarian! Convincing? Partially.
Let’s put it in a nutshell: women lost something when we gained the Pill and the ability, nay expectation, to go around fornicating without repercussions (or so it seemed). Because contraception fails, and is not always used, women risk ending up with the life-changing experience of pregnancy without the societally ensured expectation of an ensuing marriage or means of support on the part of her paramour. Because men are bigger and stronger than women, women end up in situations where they can be overpowered and assaulted when they attempt to exercise their sexual freedom. Because (more controversially now) biology has built women to invest their emotions in sex more than men do, we just plain don’t reap the same rewards as men do from promiscuity. We have gained freedom, eliminated the stigma of out-of-wedlock birth and divorce, and these are no small things. But were they worth it?
The chapter titles give you a flavor:
- Sex Must Be Taken Seriously
- Men and Women Are Different
- Some Desires Are Bad
- Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering
- Consent Is Not Enough (this chapter about Porn Is Bad I ended up mostly skipping; wasn’t interested)
- Violence Is Not Love (anti-BDSM; again, I skimmed)
- People Are Not Products
- Marriage Is Good
This last chapter I thought would have and should have formed more of the meat of the book, because it was the strongest argument. The parts I skimmed or skipped just read like a monotonous litany of case studies, the kind of non-fiction I don’t like.
Tytania 