The human species has always been scared of new technology, particularly when this technology threatens to change what we amorphously intuit as “culture.” Plato thought writing was a terrible thing, a cheapening of thinking, at best a way to capture, but never to generate, ideas. Opponents of the printing press worried about the loss of godly self-discipline that would come out of monks and scribes no longer needing to spend their lives copying text. Plus, peasants reading pamphlets would surely be against the divine order, no? Bicycles were viewed as a shocking tool allowing women to straddle objects other than their husbands. Photography? A gateway to vanity and narcissism. Condoms? Practically heralding the fall of Western civilization.
Among a certain subset of public intellectuals today, the cheap, reliable and widely accessible birth control options that modernity has blessed us with are seen as harbingers of moral decay. On its face, such an assertion is unexceptional: look closely enough and everything spells doom to someone. But the loudest voices arguing the societal harms of birth control are not only women, but self-described feminists. (And also British, which, hmm, is there something there?)
Louise Perry and Mary Harrington are both, in their own words, former liberal feminists who stopped drinking the kool-aid of female empowerment through reproductive freedom and are now advocating, respectively, Against the Sexual Revolution and Against Progress. Perry is in her early 30s and Harrington in her mid-40s, which I only mention because it makes sense given their particular areas of focus: Perry is concerned about the exploitation of women; Harrington worries about the breakdown of the family. But they both believe that sexual liberation is a Very Bad Thing Indeed.
Their central argument reads as follows: contraception enabled the Sexual Revolution by making women available for consequence-free sex at any time. This is obviously a good thing for men, because they love that sort of thing, and bad for women, because what they want are stable, committed relationships. (There is no discussion about the possibility of women wanting consequence-free sex within those relationships, but okay.) The result is a culture of disrespect and humiliation for women, because a) the only thing keeping men from being total cads is the threat of pregnancy and, b) the loosening of sexual mores leads inevitably to that most heinous of paraphilias, that veritable spawn of Satan’s wet dreams: rough sex (GASP.)
Look, I think Perry and Harrington’s argument from evolutionary biology is welcome: men and women are different. They are, if you’ll allow me, born this way: different roles in sexual reproduction (which, as far as biology is concerned, is Why We’re Here), different bodies, and different behaviors. A few years ago I would have thought this went without saying, but now that the Gender Unicorn and demisexuals are a thing, I’m not so sure. So, good on Louise and Mary for bringing common sense back.
But reactionary feminists (this is Harrington’s term), fundamentally misunderstand the premise of the Sexual Revolution: it’s not that women should be able to have sex like men do, which Perry in particular agonizes about, but that they should be able to have sex like they want to. Birth control does not amount to the removal of a check on men’s ability to have sex, because men have always been able to have sex with relative impunity. Ejaculating is easy; it’s rearing a child until self-sufficiency that’s difficult. And, for obvious reasons, the responsibility for child rearing has always fallen on the woman. Since no lopsided exchange is durable, women have historically received countless benefits in exchange for their carrying and birthing babies: they’ve been spared the hunt, war, and physically dangerous jobs. They’ve been offered assimilation and spared death during societal defeat. They’ve been treated, with few exceptions, as the more biologically valuable half of the species that they are.
And yet, until the hallowed morning of June 23, 1960, when the FDA first approved the oral contraceptive pill, a woman could never have sex spontaneously, without the careful application of a cumbersome barrier prophylactic, and be basically sure she wouldn’t conceive. A dramatic change indeed. (For men as well, I’m sure, at least cognitively; but I focus on women here because, having been pregnant myself thrice, once unintentionally, I can attest that the thought is always there.)
So dramatic, in fact, that pre-pill American society looks unrecognizable in broad ways that go far beyond sexual behavior. There are 250% more women working outside the home, and 100% more women getting bachelor’s degrees now than in 1950. In 1968, you couldn’t get a no-fault divorce anywhere. A woman couldn’t own a credit card in her own name until 1974. And Columbia University, where 55% of graduates are now women, did not become co-ed until 1983. From 0 to more than half of the student body in 40 years. That’s bound to give some folks whiplash.
Perry and Harrington’s primary whiplash symptom is a fundamental disbelief that women can, and in fact do, and in any case should, enjoy sex as a physical interaction for its own pleasurable sake. Men enjoy sex; women enjoy relationships. A woman who actively pursues sexual gratification is either the victim of a psyop and perpetually just 5-minutes-alone-with-a man away from rape (Perry) or a morally bankrupt bio-libertarian who has been brainwashed into favoring the transactional over the relational (Harrington.) The idea of women’s sexual agency is a lie invented by men to allow them easier access to the vagina. Consent is but an attempt to belipstick a pig, since there are Some Things (ranging from meh sex to choking) that simply cannot be consented to. At any rate, freedom, individualism, and the free market are to blame.
At the very bottom, beyond the fair arguments from biology, the myopic-though-not-unreasonable mistrust of men, and the apocalyptic vision of the future, Perry and Harrington show a deep discomfort with choice. A variety of options feels… icky. Icky and dangerous. Like Bernie Sanders lamenting the “choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants,” reactionary feminists decry the fact that humans now have the choice to treat sex as consequential — or not.
This does feel understandable; variety is often disorienting. Decision fatigue is a real thing. Choice is inherently complicated, and I can comprehend nostalgia for “simpler times,” no matter how misguided it might be. But ickiness and nostalgia are, as the kids might say, vibes. And vibes are a terrible basis for sweeping claims about the rightness of people’s behavior, particularly when such behavior is victimless and consensual.
This might make me a bio-libertarian. I’ll respect your agency to refer to me as such, or not. It’s your choice.