Of Brothels and Babies

Sex Must Be Taken Seriously (The Library of Feminine Dissidence Vol. 01)

Thank you all for your patience and grace as it took me quite a while to pull this together. All passages in bold are the questions for the book club, to be answered and discussed in the comments. I decided against a podcast format as it felt forced and silly for me. I may try again in a different context in the future! Enjoy!

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Louise Perry dedicates her book “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution” to “the women who learned it the hard way”. This line has stuck with me since I first read this book back when it came out in 2022. I am a woman who learned it the hard way, a million times over, in innumerable ways. To see women like myself acknowledged in such a stark and earnest way gave (and gives) me shivers. A shock of physical recognition of the errors and horrors I have put my body through runs through me to remind my brain that it has not forgotten the trials I have chosen for myself.

Perry goes on to quote both Mary Wollstonecraft and Hollie McNish in her acknowledgements. I found both quotes, added below, to be very evocative of the history upon which we walk, but McNish’s words are particularly confronting:

“he said they'd found a brothel on the dig he did last night

I asked him how they know he sighed:

a pit of babies' bones

a pit of newborn babies' bones was how to spot a brothel

Hollie McNish, 'Conversation with an archeologist'

It makes one think-where there are discarded women, there are discarded babies. It’s the sort of sobering thought that brings forth very viscerally the weight of what it is to be female, what it is to have life potential inside, at the core of it all, and at the worst of it all. It’s the highest gift with the highest potential for burden and suffering.

Also quoted, and related:

“The little respect paid to chastity in the male world is, I am persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies that degrade and destroy women.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The bit of this quote that stood out to me was the bit about “vices and follies”. Let me just tell you-I am a woman who has suffered some vices and follies. Many of which can be connected, at least at some point, to unbridled male desire in its worst form. Not to say I would blame the men I have known and sometimes loved for all vice and all folly I have embroiled myself in-but they were key players.

This is on a very personal and anecdotal level of course, but I think having grown up in the first generation who had steady access to the internet by the time we were adolescents perhaps created a distorted sort of male desire. This paired with the dawn of dating apps, hook up culture and Plan-B pills-the chastity of not only men, but also of women, was completely tossed out. I think the moral circus that has ensued with this has been a long-game study in torment indeed.

I want to ask-what stood out about these quotes and the choosing of these quotes to you all? Has your own experience with “vice and folly” been influenced by the way culture has disavowed chastity for both men and women?

Further of note, in Kathleen Stock’s forward to the book, Stock states “Perry turns to biology and evolutionary psychology, asking: What does a woman tend to desire, given the kind of female animal she is, with the specific reproductive capacities she tends to have?”

I enjoy this question and I think the answer is quite easy, but the current climate has tried to trick us into believing it isn’t. We, as the female animals that we are, tend to desire to be desired, which leads to affection, followed by love and security, and ultimately resulting in offspring to care for-something we also desire. Women desire to be taken care of and to take care for. We can complicate this with egotistical talk of ambition and accomplishment, art and academics-but in the female hierarchy of needs the realm of care taking and taking of care is base level.

"Centaur in love" by Angelo Jank, 1897.

With this I must ask-what do you, as a female or male animal, desire?

Perry begins this first chapter, entitled “Sex Must Be Taken Seriously” discussing Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner’s obsession with her. This obsession began with a violation-publishing nude photos of Monroe that she had taken for $50 dollars years before when hard up for cash in the first ever edition of Playboy and which she did not consent to the publishing of. This obsession ended with a violation-his choosing the burial plot next to hers, her not having any choice in the matter of course. The common thread is the thread of entitlement carried out via violation.

The quote Perry includes from Andrea Dworkin on Monroe is as follows:

“She grinned, she posed, she pretended, she had affairs with famous and powerful men. A friend of hers claimed that she had so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her reproductive organs were severely injured. She died alone, possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time . .. Her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death, and her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer: no, Marilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.”

Again-a quite sobering quote, and when you attach it to the face you see peering back at you in the photograph below, quite a necessary reminder to look for the humanity in the people we choose as representations. Monroe represented sex and playfulness and lust. She was in reality just another female animal, just like us.

Perry then compares Monroe to Bettie Page and Britney Spears, both women who have been hyper-sexualized, both women whose sanity has been questioned later in their lives. Perry states “The libidinous public asks a lot of the women it desires. And when it all goes horribly wrong, as it usually does, this public labels these once-desired women 'crazy’ and moves on. There is never a reckoning with what sexual liberation does to those women who follow its directives most obediently.” It is not enough to simply be beautiful, the sex symbol must be willing to be vulnerable in the most potentially harmful and dangerous of ways.

This is where my answer to the question on female desire becomes problematic. I said we desire to be desired. That desire is not standalone, however. The desire to be desired is matched with an equal desire for security and love. It is cases like these women’s where the desire of others becomes venomous because it is not paired with love or security, only expectation.

When figures like this are who is presented to young women as the image of femininity, what does that mean for them?

I grew up at the time where I should have been interested in Britney Spears but actually modeled my image after Bettie Page in my late teens/early twenties. I dressed up like her for Halloween. Yes, I even had the bangs. I didn’t know she had rode out her elder years in a psychiatric hospital after attacking her land ladies at knife-point and was diagnosed as schizophrenic. I didn’t truly understand exactly the heaviness of that which I was idolizing. Page was molested by her father as a child, turned into a nude model by a husband, and rode out much of her life in social isolation with severe mental illness-the way desire had manifested in her life was not tempered with love and security-but I just saw bangs and bad-girl allure. Did you too bow at the feet of any problematic sex-symbol idols in your youth?

The bangs in action

The portion of the book that deals with Hugh Hefner is a fairly sizable part of the chapter but I will digress on the topic of Hefner and Playboy, as I don’t find him or his institution to be particularly compelling. What I do find compelling is the next idea that is posited in the chapter-that social norms around sex have loosened in the past as well, such as in the Roman Empire, but without hormonal contraception they were not able to persist. Essentially, nature course-corrected. In the past, the havoc wreaked when human sexuality was allowed to cross boundaries was enough to set things in line. This is no more.

Perry states:“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.”

I have been this creature. Have you been this creature too? What impact did temporary sterilizing yourself have, if you are willing to share?

What Liberalism Is

Perry states (this is a long one):

“Post-liberals draw attention to the cost of social liberalism, a political project that seeks to free individuals from the external constraints placed on us by location, family, religion, tradition, and even (and most relevant to feminists) the human body. In that sense, they are in agreement with many social conservatives. But post-liberals are also critical of the other side of the liberal coin: a free market ideology that seeks to free individuals from all of these constraints in order to maximise their ability to work and to consume. The atom-ised worker with no commitment to any place or person is the worker best able to respond quickly to the demands of the market. This ideal liberal subject can move to wherever the jobs are because she has no connection to anywhere in particular; she can do whatever labour is asked of her without any moral objection derived from faith or tradition; and, without a spouse or family to attend to, she never needs to demand rest days or a flexible schedule. And then, with the money earned from this rootless labour, she is able to buy consumables that will soothe any feelings of unhappiness, thus feeding the economic engine with maximum efficiency.”

This passage really clearly demonstrates the forces we are up against, the way individuals are perceived as resources-interchangeable and replaceable-and how certain tenants and natural limits create a framework which can protect us from this individualized mechanization.

Humans are, of course, resources. The difference is in who and what we are resources to-to our families, our neighbors, our friends, our churches, our localities, ourselves? Or to corporations, large institutions, conglomerates and elites? I think of the constraints listed in the above quote as “restraint-based frameworks of protection”. I want to be constrained by place and time and body and family and tradition-it feels right. These things protect my sense of purpose and protect me from identifying as a worker-above-all.

Who do you wish to be a resource for? And what sort of resourcing do you want to provide? And what restraint-based frameworks of protection do you feel are the most vital?

In the context of the liberal feminism of today, these questions would seem antithetical to everything it stands for. Limits?! Constraint? Allegiance to geographical location and family of origin? Religion?!?! Heritage and (gasp) female biology?! Those things all impose themselves on our personal freedom. But what if we just simply want the freedom to actually cultivate and tend to those things?

Perry then states that she is “critical of any ideology that fails to balance freedom against other values” So I want to ask what values you think we must balance freedom against?

Sexual Reenchantment

Perry goes on to reference sociologist Max Weber who “described the 'disenchantment of the natural world that resulted from the Enlightenment, as the ascendence of rationality stripped away the sense of magic that this 'enchanted garden' had once held for pre-modern people.” She compares this phenomenon to the way sex is viewed in the Western world post-Sexual Revolution. Through the workings of the influence that various aspects of the revolution had and their consequences, we are left with a world where people have been largely convinced that sex is not special or important. This is the only way hook-up culture could thrive, yet deep down we all know there is more to it.

I quite like the idea of a re-enchantment of sex. I look back on my life and can see where the comparison Perry draws lies-I can see the way the narrative of “it’s just sex” has been shoved down my throat and how I swallowed it to my own detriment, this idea sitting in the pit of my stomach twisting and churning and rotting. It made me uneasy, it made me unsure. Yet I bought it and I walked that road. Also though…I always knew it was wrong. I always knew there was a lot deeper of a well there. I felt it and I experienced it despite my many mistakes, my many willingly-taken-advantage-of moments. I imagine this is a story many other women and men could reflect back to me.

Sex isn’t just sex, it is a reminder of our humanity, our vitality, our potentiality, our fragility, our vulnerability, our beauty. It already feels enchanted to me, and perhaps it is wishful thinking, but I assume others feel the same. Is this one of those things we all know on an individual level but allow to play out differently on a macro level? Pretending sex is meaningless feels like just another The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes-ism we seem to love to engage in for show. Any concept which requires us to collectively play pretend is a concept based on greed and power hunger on the part of the small few of us who seek to benefit- this is no different. What say you-did/do you play pretend on this topic?

So I suppose yes, sex does need to be re-enchanted, if only by all of us recognizing its true nature and true purpose publicly. And this is important because Perry is correct when she says that the cost of this disenchantment falls “disproportionately on women”. Women bear the sexual brunt, we just do. This is the sort of statement people like to get worked up about, but really it’s a neutral, factual statement.

Perry introduces an analogy that proves what we all know-she compares being asked for sexual favors by an employer to being asked to make coffee. She says:“Everyone knows that having sex is not the same as making coffee, and when an ideology of sexual disenchantment demands that we pretend otherwise the result can be a distressing form of cognitive dissonance.” This made me think of another often dismissed and disenchanted form of human vitality at work-birth.

Our birth culture is one that also has tricked us into playing pretend. We pretend it is a medical procedure, a manageable and clinical thing. In fact, it is an unpredictable and wild thing. It isn’t the same as going to get a rotten tooth pulled, but listening to a doctor explain routine induction would have you thinking different.

Women know deep down the weight of this wild thing though, which is why when they allow it to be disenchanted by way of either their own fear or a doctor’s authority or the stories they have been told, that they then feel a guilt and a regret that is often then expressed and projected outward toward women who have chosen another path. We all know birth is magic and enchanting and human in a foundational way not many everyday things are-but society demands us to engage in cognitive dissonance around the topic just as with sex. It makes sense as one leads to another, and it again leads us back to greed and power.

What other parts of modern life feel disenchanted to you?

When sex is thought to be both morally neutral and an exchangeable good, and in an environment where liberal feminism is the feminism of choice, this leads us to the conclusion that no matter the choice an individual woman makes-whether it is to save herself for marriage, sleep with strangers she meets on the internet regularly (often endangering herself), be a serial monogamist engaging in several long term sexual relationships over time, become a street prostitute, have a harem of “fuck buddies” just for fun, do Only Fans, or allow sexual partners to beat her in the name of “kink”-that it is well and good! As long as consent is present, it doesn’t matter if a woman is bruised on the outside and broken on the inside as a result of sexual encounters, it doesn’t matter that the porn she made will poorly influence both the young men and women who will watch it, it doesn’t matter that her legitimization of prostitution through her own engaging in it will encourage other (potentially more desperate and less fortunate) women to engage in it.

Things are not good just because some of us say they are.

Perry ends this section saying: “So young women are forced to learn for themselves that freedom has costs, and they are forced to learn the hard way, every time.” I know I have paid those costs myself, in my dignity and happiness, in my tears and my self esteem, in my own bruises and my own understanding of what sexuality holds us for us. This isn’t to say that I regret every man I have shared myself with or every sexual encounter I had outside of my current relationship-it is to say that many of them were overly reckless and sometimes coerced and usually with needless consequences that I think I could have done without. Some of this I do think is just part and parcel with being a human of course-we are impulsive and heedless, especially in matters of sex, especially as young people-some of this is just a matter of life.

Have you paid these costs yourself? Or do you perceive them as merely a matter of life?

Questions of Chronology

At the end of the chapter, Perry quotes C.S. Lewis on the concept of “chronological snobbery”, defined by him below;

“'The uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”

In no realms should we be uncritical-it is naivety incarnate to do so. Our current intellectual climate is frankly often a cesspool of show-off virtue-signaling half wits and sex pests, and the fact that academia is the headquarters of this climate should make us question what exactly we want our children learning and from whom. Their general attitude of chronological snobbery is bolstered with the uprising of constant technological upgrades and the massive amount of research being done in every area (that often finds itself contradicted or proven wrong). Why wouldn’t we know better now? We have iPhones and AI and CRISPR and can clone things and gene edit and scan our wrists at Whole Foods to pay for our cashew cheese! Of course we’re smarter and better, right?!

Only among the technological and sociological progress-porn these people are drenched in, there is a lack, a deep and profound lack. A lack of connection to corporeality and heritage, a lack of a sense of being and of the animal self, a lack of the foundational sense of place and geography. This lack only reinforces the sense of superiority but it is woefully misinformed and lies on a very fragile bed.

Perry states “I reject the poisonous dichotomy that insists that the past must be either all good or all bad” and then:“Highlighting the evils of the past also serves to distract from the evils of the present.” We would all do good to hold that same rejection for the reasons stated above. A more clarified vision of the present can only be achieved by doing so. It is no coincidence that those same academics often engage in this highlighting of the evils of the past while simultaneously ignoring the present-perhaps because they are often the concoctors of the present day version of those evils.

Are we really so different from the past where babies were buried amass under brothels? Or are we just good at concentrating on the bright shiny things like the white lights of the Apple Store and the medical journals every idiot on social media likes to copy and paste from? Our babies may not be buried under the whore house but they are aborted so we can have leap years and study gender studies and go to the jungle to do ayahuasca and follow our influencer dreams. They are put off and created and stored away in labs so that we can pick through every man on Tinder while pretending to enjoy their sexual proclivities, breaking our own hearts over and over, little by little.

To this point, Perry brings up the fact that the 1950’s housewife and the Cosmopolitan-reading modern women both spend a lot of energy on pretending in the name of the men they want the attention of.

How much of our collective female life has been spent pretending? Is pretending necessary? Is it sometimes not so much pretending as it is just acquiescing? If so, is this in our nature? Or is it a result of conditioning? A little bit of both?

Thank you for your participation and patience in my getting this out to you all. Please feel free to only answer the questions that you feel most called to, I know I asked many!