Nearly a decade after Princeton alumna and mom Susan Patton was skewered for urging young women at her alma mater to find husbands before graduation, UK feminist Louise Perry is encouraging young women to get married and stay married against the statistical odds of divorce and feminist animus. “Feminist analysis of marriage,” she writes, “sees it as a method used by men to control female sexuality. And it does do that, but that was never its sole function. There is also a protective function to marriage, but it makes sense only when understood in relation to children.” Perry has no illusions about the limitations of marriage in solving all social ills, but it is precisely her observation that marriage has succeeded in “complex societies” such as in the West that she places her confidence in its ability to improve conditions for women and children.
The Wave of Sex-Positive Skeptics
Just as some advocates have employed the language of children’s rights to protect the meaning of marriage, Perry’s feminist emphasis and focus on women’s rights re-describes marriage as an institution that protects women and children – a framing that could ultimately reach Gen Z, which has felt the practical effects of divorce and sexual excess more keenly than their theorizing predecessors. Perry’s appeal in The Daily Mail is an excerpt from her new book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which arrives on the heels of a myriad articles announcing the slow death of “sex positivity” and the rise of a “sexual counterrevolution,” including philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s Th e Right to Sex and Washington Post columnist Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. It arrives as Gen Z is having fewer sexual experiences than their grandparents did, being exposed to graphic depictions of sex online and in the movies, embraces consent as the primary ethical standard for sex, and rejects sex-positive feminism as “passé.” Where the hookup culture and relativism used to be, “puriteens” and consent-ism now prevail. Perry, like Emba and Srinivasan, are a part of this backlash to sexual excess, and while none of them advocate a wholesale return to “pre-1960 mores,” they each recommend their own particular brand of abstinence, chastity, or marriage.
You Can’t Have It Both Ways
While Srinivasan could not be mistaken for promoting “regressive” conclusions, Emba has been accused of smuggling in conservative arguments without following them to their logical conclusion – that reproduction requires the institution of marriage for the protection of women’s biological vulnerability and the child’s utter dependency on his mother. Furthermore, as Perry suggests, the prospect of raising a child ultimately curbs the individualistic tendency of some men to use others to their own pleasurable end, triggering the domestication of their passions for the sake of their family and society. Perry, though not much more insistent than Emba is upon pre-marital sexual continence, convincingly argues that marriage is the pro-woman and pro-child answer to the disproportionate disadvantages women face in an unabashedly sex-positive climate: “The Pill – along with the decriminalisation of abortion, which provided a back-up option – ended the taboo on pre-marital sex…Thus motherhood became a biological choice for women – but that also meant fatherhood became a social choice for men.” Perry echoes what proponents of traditional marriage and sexual integrity have been saying all along – that women suffer terribly when sex is severed from society’s and man’s responsibility to any child who is born of that union. In other words, women (and men) can’t have it both ways – they can’t embrace unfettered expressive individualism without consequences, either for themselves or their potential offspring.
Making Pro-Life Pro-Family
Especially as it seems likely that the abortion question will be returned to the states, it is incumbent upon feminists and “pro-life” politicians alike to recognize and defend marriage as a fundamental means of protecting women and children, born or unborn. Without this respect for marriage, it will be nearly impossible to work toward a real pro-life consensus where both women and the unborn are valued. The pro-life movement, in its broadest conception, depends upon the pro-family movement to promote a culture which makes room for caring and “being cared for,” where dependencies are welcomed and accommodated rather than rooted out eugenics-style. Thinkers like Perry and her UnHerd colleague Mary Harrington, as well as Other Feminisms author and LFN-favorite Leah Libresco Sargeant, rightly acknowledge that being pro-life means accepting dependency; it means letting go of the need for control and perfection, and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. It means abandoning the illusion that we can have it all by ourselves – in this, establishment feminism has a long way to go – so that we can have what is really good for us and those for whom we care by giving, not having.
