We Got a Mention in This Awesome Article on the Sexual Revolution + A Discussion on Sexuality

@FDSQueen absolutely! Please excuse any typos.

Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe, those two icons of the sexual revolution, never met, but they were born in the same year and laid to rest in the same place, side by side. In 1992, Hefner bought the crypt next to Monroe’s in the Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles for $75,000, telling the Los Angeles Times: “I’m a believer in things symbolic . . . [so] spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up.” At the age of 91, Hefner got his wish. The long-dead Monroe had no say in the matter. But then she never had much say in what men did to her over the course of her short life.

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

Monroe’s naked photos were four years old by the time of their publication. In 1949, the 23-year-old Monroe was paid $50 for a two-hour photoshoot with the pin-up photographer Tom Kelley, who promised he’d make her unrecognisable, and almost delivered. The woman curled up on a red velvet bedspread is not obviously Monroe: her hair was a little more brunette at the time, her pained face is half hidden behind an outstretched arm, and her pale, pretty body is indistinguishable from the bodies of most of the other models in Playboy.

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”. Hefner later said her centrefold was the key reason for the publication’s initial success. Monroe herself was humiliated by the photoshoot; she had resorted to it out of desperate need for money, signing the release documents with a fake name.

Hefner didn’t pay her to use her images and didn’t seek her consent before publishing them. Monroe told a friend 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.”

The courses of these two lives show 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 at the same historical moment.

But while Hefner lived a long, grubby life in his mansion with his playmates, Monroe’s was cut short by substance abuse and misery. Her 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. Likewise the pop star Britney Spears, who at the age of 16 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 countless other Monroes.

In particular, today’s female porn performers, the most successful of whom inhabit much the same cultural space that Monroe did 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 adults — all misfortunes Monroe suffered too. The libidinous public asks a lot of the women it desires. And when it all goes horribly wrong, as it usually does, this same public labels these once-desired women as “crazy” and moves on. There is never a reckoning with what sexual liberation does to those women who follow its directives most obediently.

In Sophocles’ Antigone, a play particularly attentive to the duty and suffering of women, the chorus sings: “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.

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There have been plenty of periods in human history when 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 it either with prostitutes or the small number of eccentric women willing to risk being cast out of respectable society. The Bloomsburys, 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 we can hardly see it for what it is. It was able to persist because of the arrival, for the first time in history, of reliable contraception and, in particular, forms of contraception that women could take charge of themselves: the Pill, the diaphragm and subsequent improvements on the technology, like 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.

The argument I make in my book The Case Against the Sexual Revolutionis that western sexual culture in the 21st century promotes the interests of the Hugh Hefners at the expense of the Marilyn Monroes. It is in the interests of playboys like Hefner to push a particularly radical idea about sex, that has proved remarkably influential despite its harms. This is the idea that sex is nothing more than a leisure activity, only invested with meaning if the participants choose to give it meaning. Proponents of this idea argue that sex has no intrinsic specialness, is not innately different from any other kind of social interaction, and that it can therefore be commodified without any trouble.

The problem with this attitude towards sex is that it defies the truth of our biology. We are a sexually dimorphic species. 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, there are profound physical differences between the sexes. Adult women are approximately half as strong as adult men in the upper body and two thirds as strong in the lower body. On average, men can bench press more mass than women can by a factor of roughly two and a half, and can punch harder by a similar factor. The consequences ought to be obvious if we set male upper body strength beside the fragility of the female throat and skull: almost all men can kill almost all women with their bare hands, but not vice versa.

Then there are the average psychological differences between the sexes, which may be unfashionable to acknowledge but are nonetheless very real. There is, for instance, copious evidence demonstrating that men are (on average) far more interested than women are in the kinds of sexual pleasures made newly socially acceptable in the post-sexual revolution era: casual sex, buying sex, watching porn, and experimenting with unusual fetishes.

It’s not that women never enjoy such things, because of course they do (with the exception of sex buying, which is always and everywhere an almost exclusively male pursuit). It’s just that average differences between male and female sexuality are extraordinarily obvious. And there is good reason to believe they are at least partially innate, given the consistency we see across time and place, and given the compelling explanations for these differences offered by evolutionary biologists.

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 repreported 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.

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I propose an alternative to the mismatch between average male and female sexuality, 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 women to meet the sexual demands of men, particularly when sex carries so many more risks for them, in terms of pregnancy and violence. A truly feminist project would demand that, in the straight dating world, it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual appetites.

There may be a shift under way. My friend, the writer Katherine Dee, has a talent for noticing change in the cultural winds and she observes more and more signs of a reaction against the excesses of the sexual liberation narrative, particular from Gen Z women who have experienced the worst of it. “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.”

I think Katherine is right on this. Celebrities like Billie Eilish are starting to speak out about the destructive effect porn has on their lives. On Twitter and TikTok, teenage girls are swapping their war stories. A group called Female Dating Strategy is offering tips on its website about how to survive in a hostile dating culture. Some women are opting out of sexual relationships altogether and adopting labels like asexual or “femcel” (female celibate). There has even been a rise in millennial nuns. These women are fighting back against an ideology that has

always best served the likes of Hugh Hefner.

In doing so, they are trying to rediscover their sense of self-worth. In 2021, a TikTok video by a young American woman called Abby went viral. 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 onscreen a series of childhood photos of herself, and explains that the men she’s hooked up with have often made her feel undeserving, not only of love but also 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.”

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 mothers are unwilling to offer it but because of the widespread demonisation of older women by a progressive narrative of sexual liberation that regards such women as hopelessly old-fashioned and not worth listening to. This means not only are they cut off from the voices of experience but, more importantly, from the person who loves them most. 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.

Yay! awesome

@NoThanks989 thank you!

I agree and I love your question. Two books have changed my view of women’s true sexuality: Sex at Dawn and When God Was A Woman.

In a non-patriarchal culture, women would be deeply respected, sex would be on their terms and for their pleasure. Rape wouldn’t exist, and neither would slut shaming. Violent & aggressive men would be exiled, and men would treat women with care and kindness. Women would feel deeply safe, and their sexuality would blossom like the beautiful flower it is.