Louise Perry is a feminist and a writer for the New Statesman—not exactly the resume you’d expect from someone who has a book titled The Case Against the Sexual Revolution later this summer. I’ve read a review copy already, and it is brilliant—I’ll have a full review and an interview with Perry coming out in The European Conservative. But I want to draw your attention to a column Perry published in The Times last Friday titled “Women have been betrayed by a culture of porn gone wild.” I’ve been writing on how porn fuels rape culture on this blog for several years (and have an entire chapter on the subject in my book The Culture War), and this excerpt stood out to me:
So the situation we now find ourselves in is this. We’ve got one half of the population who are smaller and weaker than the other half, making them much more vulnerable to violence. This is also the half of the population that carries all of the risks associated with pregnancy. And this same half of the population is much less likely to be interested in casual sex, or indeed any of the other delights offered by our supposedly liberated sexual culture. Looked at like this, I’m minded to agree with my grandmother’s dark pronouncement when I first explained to her the thesis of my book: “Women have been conned,” she said.
For young people growing up in this pornified culture, the pressure is intense. In women’s media, we see young women advised to work on overcoming their perfectly normal and healthy preference for intimacy and commitment in sexual relationships. Guides with titles like “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 so as to avoid “making an intimate connection”.
Meanwhile, the influence of porn is evident in the vogue for strangulation (or “choking”) during sex. Research conducted by ComRes in 2019 found that over half of 18 to 24-year-old UK women reported having been strangled by their partners during sex, compared with 23 per cent of women aged 35 to 39, the oldest age group surveyed. This is particularly worrying given that non-fatal strangulation can cause injuries including cardiac arrest, stroke, incontinence, paralysis and other forms of long-term brain injury. Nevertheless, outlets like Men’s Health magazine are publishing articles with headlines like “How to Use Choking During Sex, According to Sex Experts”. This is normal, teenagers are being told — this is good.
What is going on here is that young women and young men are being encouraged to emulate the most loveless and aggressive caricature of masculine sexuality, and they are being told this constitutes sexual liberation. Thus they are being set up to fail by a culture that is fundamentally not geared towards protecting their health or their wellbeing.
That’s exactly right—and her entire book really is brilliant (although I have a couple of disagreements.) When I started doing talks/debates/columns on porn, choking wasn’t a thing. That’s how fast porn influences culture—now it is. According to one recent study, 24% of adult American women feel fear during intimacy due to porn-inspired choking—24%. Porn is fueling rape culture, and it is rotting our civilization from the inside out.
***
On that note, if you struggle with this poison—please get yourself an accountability partner and sign up for Covenant Eyes.
