Penna Dexter

In her new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, British journalist Louise Perry employs facts, figures, human nature, and common sense to argue that the sexual revolution, and the “free sexual playing field” it gave rise to, have been terrible for women.

Ms. Perry is not a religious conservative. She states: “It’s precisely because I’m a feminist that I’ve changed my mind on sexual liberalism.” Feminists told women that the availability of birth control and abortion meant they could have so-called sexual freedom. So today’s young women are ”launched into a sexual culture that is fundamentally not geared toward protecting” their safety, their self-respect, or their well-being.

Biblical admonitions that sex take place only within marriage are protective for those who hold to them. But, as Ms. Perry points out, the world we now live in is “very far removed from the world in which traditional religious codes governing sex were formulated.”

She says, ”We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down.”

The book doesn’t preach. But it includes advice the author would offer her own daughter, like:

“Chastity is a good thing.” And:

“Monogamous marriage is by far the most stable and reliable foundation on which to build a family.”

She pointedly instructs young women: “above all, listen to your mother.”

Thousands of young women, she explains, have “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 women off from the ‘problematic’ older generation.”

Some mothers made their own mistakes and don’t think they have the right to caution their daughters to remain chaste. But, in fact, a mom would be derelict if she left her daughter “to learn on her own the lie of the promise of sexual liberation” which Louise Perry writes, “was a lie all along.”

Louise Perry says “It’s time, at last, to say so.”