A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century by Louise Perry. Polity, 176 pages.

The birth of my daughter radicalized me. Stereotypes of the next generation of young women as liberal and lonely, sexually liberated yet secretly miserable, were once just numbers. Now they wear a precious, familiar face. While the challenge of raising sons in the 21st century is not to be glossed over, the challenge of raising daughters is unique and distinct, particularly in the wake of the sexual revolution. Young women today have everything they once demanded—jobs, money, stigma-free sex, and dishwashers to boot—yet have found themselves not more fulfilled, but less. 

In her 2022 book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry argued that the so-called sexual freedom of the 21st century has benefitted a few powerful men at the expense of most women, who find themselves spiritually impoverished by the liberal feminist approach to sex. Liberalism’s toothless response to rape and sexual abuse (consent!), the pornified minefield of casual sex, and especially the breakdown of traditional marriage have served only to make women less happy, not more free. In other words, the sexual revolution really was terrible for women, and those who pretend otherwise are foolish. A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, Perry’s young adult edition of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, applies these lessons to practical scenarios for girls who wish to escape the debased culture of Tinder and OnlyFans but don’t know how. 

“Instead of asking ‘how can we all be free?’” as feminism did, “we must ask instead, ‘how can we best promote the wellbeing of both men and women, given that these two groups have different sets of interests, which are sometimes in tension?’” Perry writes. Or, put another way, what should mothers teach their daughters about sex, love, and marriage, since clearly, the liberal feminist line isn’t cutting it? 

While reading, I asked myself: Would I give this book to my daughter? 

Perry’s advice for young women is, by her own characterization, mostly the sort of thing her grandmother would have said. It is advice that should be painfully obvious, yet has not been taught to a majority of the last two generations of young women. She calls consent workshops “mostly useless” for preventing rape, scorns dating apps for lacking the built-in vetting of mutual friends, and asserts, somewhat provocatively, that a woman should “only have sex with a man [she thinks] would make a good father to [her] children.” Not because she actually wants him to father her children, interestingly, but because this is an effective rule of thumb. (The reader, surely, can surmise why.)

Pornography and casual sex occupy much of Perry’s treatment as key sources of female misery in the modern sexual landscape. Engagement in both is lauded by feminists as anti-patriarchal, yet it gratifies lustful men and degrades women: “The Hugh Hefners of the world are not threatened by ‘sexually liberated’ women,” Perry writes. “Quite the opposite, in fact. They are delighted to find themselves with a buffet of young women to feast on, all of them apparently willing to suffer mistreatment without complaint.” 

Sociology, of course, has been demonstrating this point for decades. Women naturally look for “identical qualities” in a hookup as in a husband, while men look for just the opposite, having low standards for casual sex and high ones for a spouse, Perry reports. While female biology is predisposed to be selective in sexual intimacy, male biology is the opposite. Perry attributes this intelligent design to evolutionary biology: Men cannot have babies. The effects on women in an era of sexual disenchantment are wretched. A woman who allows herself to be a casual partner will rarely be considered “marriage material” by the same man. If she gives it away for free—and everyone is telling her she must give it away, because it’s just sex—he will not simply grow to respect her later.

This is why, Perry argues, the traditional institution of marriage actually served women’s interests, balancing them against men’s natural physical dominance and freedom from the physical work of childbearing. Indeed, it is on the subject of marriage that Perry is at her most interesting. The advice only to sleep with a man whom you could respect enough to father your children dovetails with a pro-child approach to sexual politics, and not accidentally; Perry quite consciously reminds her reader that sex and children are inherently bound for women, contraceptives notwithstanding. These days, this is not as obvious as it should be: Young women reflexively separate romance from children, and are then perplexed when the long-term live-in boyfriend is indifferent to their personal quests for offspring. Female happiness requires sex and children to be made a package deal for men too, Perry argues.

Childbearing saves women not once but twice in Perry’s treatment. The second instance is in her revelation of where young women should turn for good advice, contra the secular rot: mothers.

“Feminism has a blind spot when it comes to motherhood,” Perry writes. “It has shut mothers out. That’s important, given that at least three-quarters of women become mothers.” And again: “It’s no coincidence that most of the feminists who opposed marriage never had children.” Perry does not mention Mary Wollestonecraft’s own gnarled relationship with motherhood and marriage, but the fact that the founder of feminism chased the father of her illegitimate child around Europe, so desperate for his approval that she twice attempted suicide, and was still ultimately rejected by him, seems relevant.

In the spirit of restoring motherhood to its rightful place of honor, Perry calls her advice what “most mothers would tell their daughters, if only they were willing to listen.” This raises a painful question: Why are daughters not willing to listen? More to the point, if they would not listen to their own mothers, would they listen to Louise? Perry anticipates this problem. She knows the real matriarchs in a young woman’s life are the women walking with them in daily struggles. Girls become women by mimesis—imitation. Whether they know it or not, Gen Z women are already imitating certain matriarchs; Perry’s goal is to encourage them to choose good ones. 

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Perry is not a Christian, and she explicitly rejects traditionalism, the idea that a solution for our modern problems may be found by reinstating older ways of living. This leads to a muddled conclusion: Feminism needs to revive the nuclear family and the traditional role of the matriarch as model and teacher to young women, yet without rejecting certain post-’60s talismans, especially pre-marital sex and gay marriage.

Perry is right that young women should reject liberal feminism. But what she seeks to replace it with—a half-hearted endorsement of the wisdom of previous ages, cautiously dosed with assurances of pardon for modernity—is depressingly thin gruel. True, we cannot go backwards, and the past had its own issues that rival those of the present, yet the cure for liberal feminism cannot be simply a moderate version of the same. 

What is needed is not a softer feminism, but something entirely different: the sturdy love of real, Christian matriarchs. The solution to the sexual revolution is not a new book for daughters, but old virtues for mothers.