Louise Perry says there’s no such thing as meaningless sex.

Men and women are different. Sex must be taken seriously. Not all desires are good. Loveless sex is not empowering. No, these are not lines from a conservative's manifesto; these are the chapter titles of UK writer Louise Perry's new book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

It's a controversial take, to be sure, but also one layered with nuance and complexity. In her chat with No Filter host Mia Freedman, Louise says that the overwhelming response to those who have read the book or listened to her speak about it has been: "Thank goodness someone is saying it."

So, just what exactly is Louise saying? To put it simply, she is arguing that the sexual revolution, which brought about sexual freedom and sex positivity, is not good for women.

And yes, in case you're wondering, she considers herself a feminist.

"I think that the term feminist should be understood and used quite loosely to mean 'are you interested in advocating on behalf of the interests of women?' And there are loads of people who can fall into that category on that basis. To some extent, it's going to be a subjective matter," Louise tells No Filter. "But yeah, I would definitely say yes [to being a feminist]."

Listen to Mia Freedman's full interview with Louise Perry on the No Filter podcast below. Story continues below.

According to Louise, the sexual revolution is both material and ideological. The material change is easy to recognise - the creation of the birth control pill in the late 50s to early 60s allowed women to manage their own fertility for the first time and delay childbearing. Things like washing machines and tampons made it easier for women to participate in public life, rather than being relegated to the home.

The ideological element of the sexual revolution has to do with "free love".

"One of the ideas, for instance, that comes out of the sexual revolution, which I think is a harmful idea, is the idea that sex doesn't necessarily mean anything; it doesn't necessarily have any kind of special status. It definitely doesn't have any kind of sacred status in a religious sense. All religious traditions have some kind of sacred ritual status associated with sex, but this new ideology, which we discover in the 1960s, says no, that's a hangover from the past. It's not only irrelevant, it's actually oppressive... Having sex with someone is just as meaningful or meaningless as shaking someone's hand," Louise says.

"I think, honestly, that no one really believes it. I think it's the sort of idea that people will talk about that has a lot of rhetorical power among some Progressives. I don't think, though, that anyone actually lives as if that was true. One of things I try to drill down into in the book is the points of contradiction, where you have people on the one hand, saying, 'Oh, of course, sex is just like making a cup of coffee, shaking hands, you can buy it, you can sell it, you can do whatever you like with it, who cares, right?'

"But people aren't actually behaving as if that's true. People are behaving as if sex does have a special status. And it might not be one that's very easy to describe, it might not be easy to rationalise, but we really, really feel it."

Louise also argues that men and women are fundamentally different, even though we are "morally equal".

"As human beings, every single one of us is as valuable as anyone else, regardless of our talents, abilities, whatever. But that doesn't mean that we have to say that men and women are identical. There are definitely some ways in which we're physically different, which are fairly obvious. Women are the ones who get pregnant, we are smaller than men, and we are less physically strong than men, quite profoundly so, more than people often realise... It's just the nature of testosterone that men's upper bodies are hugely more developed than women, which is obviously relevant for powerlifting. But it's also relevant in a social sense," Louise explains.

"Because it means that anytime you have a man and a woman alone together, it's almost always the case that the man could kill the woman with his bare hands. And the woman cannot do the reverse, right? So there's an obvious power differential there that you just have to reckon with in a social sense."

Aside from the physical differences between men and women, there are the psychological differences. And while these psychological differences are "hazier", open to social and cultural influence, and have outliers who do not fit the average, there are still gender traits.

"For instance, the fact that women tend to be more agreeable than men. This is this trait that psychologists call agreeableness, but we would probably call niceness. It is your tendency to put other people first, to be very softly-softly in social interactions, etc, etc," Louise says.

"It's one of those traits that has good sides and bad sides. Because, you know, agreeable people tend to be really lovely to be around, they tend to be really likeable. It's also bad sometimes to be agreeable, because you have a tendency to sublimate your own desires. Just think how agreeable you have to be as a mother in relation to your children, right? You're constantly, constantly putting yourself second. So a good trait. It's also sometimes a painful trait."

Another difference is in a trait called socio-sexuality, which is not quite the same thing as a sex drive. Men tend to have a higher socio-sexuality than women.

"Socio-sexuality basically describes how interested you are in sexual variety; how many different partners you want to have, how quickly you want to jump into bed with someone, how sexually adventurous you are in general," Louise explains.

"It is basically your desire to sow your wild oats, as my grandmother would say. It's worth bearing in mind that something that's really interesting about one of the ways that male sexuality differs from female sexuality is men have a wider range of behaviours and men are more flexible than women are, in a lot of ways. So typical female sexuality, with outliers obviously, is generally much more geared towards monogamy and knowing someone pretty well before you want to start a sexual relationship with them and so on.

"Some men are just as monogamous as the most monogamous woman. Some men are really quite low in socio-sexuality, some men are extraordinarily high in it. And it's something that changes across your lifetime. And it's something that changes also according to context quite a lot."

The argument that Louise makes is that she thinks a lot of the result of the sexual revolution, both in the material and ideological components of it, is that women have been encouraged to imitate the high socio-sexuality male model.

"That's considered now to actually be aspirational. It used to be the opposite, it used to be that women had to suppress any desires that they had to have casual sex or to be sexually adventurous or whatever. Whereas now I think the pressure is in the other direction. It's persuading women... I mean, that persuasion process is sometimes pretty direct, I've read accounts from women, I've spoken to women who will talk about boyfriends or hook ups, being pretty explicit in their desires for women to be more adventurous, to jump into bed more quickly than they want to, that kind of stuff. So sometimes it's actually quite coercive in a direct way," Louise says.

"But I think it's actually more subtle than that. It's more sort of in the cultural waters, this feeling that being really 'up for it' is now high status. And what a lot of young women say they're now scared of is being a prude or being frigid or getting laughed at because they're a virgin, which is historically really, really weird, right? Because up until the pill arrived, really, of course teenage girls were expected to be virgins."

Watch: The Basics of Sexual Consent. Story continues below.

Ultimately, Louise believes the sexual revolution was great... for men. Women have been "conned" into believing that sex positivity and the idea of having a lot of casual sex and being able to have sex "like a man" is a good thing, when it really isn't.

"I don't think that anyone sat down and set out to make it like this, with the exception maybe of the likes of Hugh Hefner - he really did want to make the pill as widely available as possible for his own purposes," she posits.

"So with some interpersonal exceptions, it was completely rational for feminists of the second wave to look at what had come before, and the fact that women had been so restricted in terms of their lives in general but their sexual lives in particular, and to see the links with religion in particular, and to think, 'Okay, this is our enemy, this is our problem. This is what we need to be fighting against.' I think this has been particularly true in America, where the Christian Right is still a very fearsome enemy, less so in UK and Australia, and other parts of the world.

"The problem with doing that though is it presents a really simplistic view of history, and a really simplistic view of how complex social norms work. What we've then done is say, all these sexual norms of the past, it's gotta go. Chivalry, it's out. The idea of chastity, it's gotta go. And all we end up left with - even the idea that sex shouldn't mean anything, it's got no special status whatsoever - what you end up with is the consent framework, which says that as long as you're capable of consenting, and as long as everyone does, then it's fine. 

"The problem with that is there are so, so many examples where actually the consent is there, but actually, it's not fine. For instance, it is so common now for young women who have grown up in this culture where this is completely normal, to feel under intense pressure to participate in hookup culture... There are loads of reasons why someone might consent to something, even if it's not actually in their best interest, and even if it doesn't actually make them happy."

Louise also cites survey data that shows how women feel about one-night stands. While women generally say they consent to one-night stands, they still feel disrespected and upset afterwards. Counter surveys with young men show that they use women for sex.

"Yes, maybe everyone's consenting, but actually, is this a healthy sexual culture? I don't think so. I mean, definitely not for girls, who are suffering all the risks associated with these encounters, which are sometimes violent, which do sometimes result in unwanted pregnancies. And they don't even really want to do it.

"Things like the orgasm gap - women so rarely orgasm during one-night stands. They are so much more likely to orgasm in committed relationships. In fact, women are more likely to experience pain during sex in one-night stands than they are to experience an orgasm."

Louise thinks that it is a mistake for women to think that if we behave like men, then somehow we benefit ourselves.

"There's quite a lot of evidence that Gen Z is in general turning against a lot of the sexual revolution's ideas. It's a bit of a complicated picture because there are some members of Gen Z who are really, really into sex-positive stuff. But there's also the opposite," she says.

"And you're increasingly seeing women not only reacting against this online, but actually organising online and speaking to each other and being much more assertive in a way that I really, really welcome. They've really wised up to some of what's going on. I think my generation of millennials are probably going to have been the high watermark for sex positive feminism. I think it is now waning. And I think partly the really positive reception to my book is an expression of that. I've had a lot of communication from young women saying that it really spoke to them, which is so nice.

"I think it was an experiment. The results are coming in and we're starting to see the flaws in the idea. And I'm hoping that what we're going to see now is a, as you say, neither a slut nor a prude, but something healthily in the middle. It ought to be possible to have some kind of moderate position somewhere in between. And I'm hoping that we are going to find it in the coming decades, and that hopefully, you know, Gen Z are going to be a little bit wiser than my generation were."

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry is out now.

Listen to the bonus episode of No Filter where Mia Freedman and Louise Perry talk about why nobody - yes, nobody - should be watching porn. Exclusive to Mamamia subscribers, listen here.

Feature image: Supplied.

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