The litany of concerns is familiar: that young people today fear catching feelings the way people 20 years older feared getting AIDS. That they are not just less sexually active than previous generations but eschewing physical connection in general, preferring to interact through the intermediary of a screen. That the little sex they are having is fraught and not very good. The birth rate is plummeting, anxiety is skyrocketing. If you were feeling especially catastrophic, you might imagine human beings becoming one of those species, like pandas, who fail so categorically at the whole sexual enterprise that our very survival becomes imperilled.

The path we beat to this point runs from the sexual revolution in the Sixties, to the purity-obsessed Nineties, to the hookup culture that reigns today. And here we find ourselves in a peculiar moment, in which the average young woman in search of romance sits around analysing the text messages of her current hookup like it is a cipher from the Zodiac killer. Does he like her or not? It’s an emotionally naked question that it is still taboo to ask, even if you’ve been literally naked together a dozen times.

At the heart of all this lies the eternal puzzle: what does a woman want? Sigmund Freud spent a lifetime plagued by his inability to solve it. Countless writers, from Russian classicists to pickup artists, have attempted to to tackle it. But now Louise Perry, in her new book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, takes a novel approach to the conundrum of wanting, and wanton, women: what if it’s the women themselves who are answering this question all wrong?

Observing the sexual marketplace — the anxiety, the unhappiness, the decline of intimacy and the rise of porn, the growing prevalence of strangulation as part of the sexual repertoire of ordinary couples — she sees not just a crisis but a broken promise. Sexual liberation was supposed to be, well, liberating — freeing women to pursue their desires free of shame or stigma. That the present state of affairs makes so many of us miserable instead is proof that the movement has failed us: women, she claims, have been sold a bill of goods.

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Perry isn’t the only one to question whether women are being ill-served by the total dissolution of the old rules surrounding physical intimacy, or to see the sexlessness of GenZ as an attempt to correct for the curse of having too much freedom. Katherine Dee predicted a backlash to sex positive feminism among the young people who “feel rightfully burned by America’s imbalanced relationship with sex”. Washington Post columnist Christine Emba released a book, Rethinking Sex, in March, which treads similar territory to Perry, albeit from a different angle. (Emba was raised evangelical with all the sexual suppression that entails, then “ping-ponged a bit, from purity culture to a rebellion against it to something in between”.) This isn’t your grandmother’s sexual moralising — no Bibles have been thumped in the making of this ideology — but the New Prudes nevertheless reach the same conclusions as the old ones. Sex is meaningful, and deep, and dangerous, and no amount of pretending otherwise will make it so.

Perry’s most compelling chapters make this point via evolutionary psychology, the hard-wired differences that once ensured the survival of the species and now lurk, like easily-enflamed vestigial organs, against the backdrop of contemporary sexual mores. Given our limited gestational capacity and the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, women evolved to be exceptionally picky about who we have sex with; men, who are technically capable of fathering as many children as times they manage to ejaculate, have a similarly strong evolutionary imperative to do as much indiscriminate screwing with as many women as possible.

Of course, biology is not destiny; of course, innovation throws a wrench in things. Against 200,000 years of evolution, the advent of birth control is a formidable foe — but as a species, we’re still in the infant stage of learning how to live (and love) having thrown off the shackles of reproductive biology. The sexual revolution and its attendant technologies have given us a world of commitment-free, casual sex, aka the ability to “have sex like a man”, whether you are one or not. Perry argues convincingly that this has not been a gift to women.

But what perplexes her, and where the book falters, is that women themselves often refuse to see it that way.

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Like the generations of prudes before her, Perry struggles to comprehend the notion that women might want sex, even enjoy it, on its own merits. The Case Against the Sexual Revolution argues openly that Some Desires Are Bad (this is the title of Chapter 3), yet cannot quite bring itself to levy this judgment against women; instead it suggests that women suffer a form of false consciousness when it comes to the pursuit of the kind of sex Perry considers not good for them (of the slapping and choking variety, for instance). They don’t really want this, she insists — and she attributes the fact that the woman themselves might disagree to “more or less subtle coercion”, fuelled as much by the dynamics of the sexual marketplace as pressure from individual partners.

The problem, per Perry, is that sex is something you do with other people. Everything a man desires, from the mundane to the pathological, creates a vacuum that requires a woman (or, in one much-riffed-upon hypothetical, a raw chicken) to fill it. It’s a remarkable vision of sexual economics, one that places women permanently and exclusively on the supply side; that they might have desires themselves is not only dismissed, but simply never even considered.

Versions of this idea have been advanced before, usually by social conservatives, often with a misogynistic bent. In the Victorian era, a sexually desirous woman might be diagnosed with nymphomania and put in a sanatorium; more recently, she’d be slut-shamed and derided for her lack of self-respect. But The Case Against the Sexual Revolution takes a different angle: women in this view are too infantilised to be condemned. Brainwashed by the notion that anything goes as long as it’s consensual, they unwittingly “promote paedophilia” by engaging in schoolgirl role-play fantasies with a partner or encourage violence by allowing (or even inviting) partners to tie them up and spank them. Perry bemoans the consent-focused framework of our present-day sexual landscape that “does not allow space for moral intuition” — which is to say, prevents women from realising that what they want is actually, in some greater cosmic sense, wrong.

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On this front, the book’s most scathing criticism (and an entire chapter) is saved for BDSM, which surged into the sexual mainstream in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey. Ironically, the popularity of Fifty Shades is perhaps the greatest example in recent memory of women’s demand-side power in the economy of sex, a fact which Perry acknowledges.

“Here’s the troubling thing,” she writes. “A lot of women loved it.”

More than anything else, to find women’s affection for Fifty Shades “troubling” seems a failure of imagination. Perry sees the mainstreaming of BDSM as beneficial primarily to abusive men who can now beat up women under cover of consent, and secondarily, to the purveyors of leather sex toys who are doing a booming business selling accessories. But she cannot fathom that it might offer something to women, too, especially in the MeToo era.

It is surely not a coincidence that Christian Grey became the heartthrob du jour at the same time as the fear of finding themselves at the wrong end of a sexual assault charge has turned many young men into consent-seeking automatons, nervously asking their female partner’s permission every time they want to shift the position of their hands. (Friends who have encountered one of these sexual interrogators in the wild report that there is no greater mood-killer.)

The obsession with consent as our sole framework for sex (which is roundly and compellingly critiqued throughout The Case Against the Sexual Revolution) has thrust women into the role of sexual gatekeepers, required to know exactly what they do and don’t want. As Katherine Angel has noted, this is ostensibly freeing for women “since it emphasises women’s capacity for — and right to — sexual pleasure”; but in practice, she suggests, it simply creates a new form of pressure: in this brave new world, women are expected to signal the okayness of the encounter by maintaining a state of unrelenting enthusiasm throughout.

Under those circumstances, is it any surprise that many women’s greatest fantasy is to just let someone else be in charge?

On the other hand, BDSM can provide a framework in which the usual script vis-a-vis who holds the power can be flipped to women’s benefit. In a post-sexual revolution world where so many old rules and taboos have ceased to apply, and mere consent has proved inadequate for replacing them, perhaps a community full of people who are happily playing with those power dynamics to everyone’s mutual enjoyment could offer some insight into making it all work. But Perry bemoans that “only” 34% of men in the BDSM community consistently preferred a submissive position (it’s not clear that this makes them worse, not better, than the heterosexual male mainstream).

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As always, the desire to redraw the lines of sexual ethics so that certain behaviours and desires are simply out of bounds is fuelled by good intentions. There’s no denying that the current wild west of dating apps, hookup culture, and near-zero taboos has left a lot of young people — women, but men, too — deeply unhappy and unable to connect. It is also clear that years of conflating male desire with predation has taken its toll on young women, and not for the better: having been told that trustworthy men simply do not exist and that seeking one out is a fool’s errand, they might be tempted to fall into bed with men they don’t trust, with all the calamity that entails.

So when Perry instructs her hypothetical reader not to sleep with any man who wouldn’t be a good father to her children, she’s trying to reintroduce the desperately-needed notion of intimacy to a population that has been taught to see it as frightening and impossible — and to save young women the pain of blindly trying to navigate a miserable minefield full of cads, jerks, and sexual swindlers.

It’s a noble impulse, but ultimately misguided: it is impossible to protect any one person from sexual disappointment by policing the sex other people are having, particularly when they’re enjoying it. And while The Case Against the Sexual Revolution argues persuasively in favour of measures to reduce sexual violence, it errs towards conflating criminal violation with the ordinary ups, downs, and disappointments of the dating marketplace.

“Young women are forced to learn for themselves that freedom has costs, and they are forced to learn the hard way, every time,” Perry writes. And indeed, learning the hard way — which is to say, by experience — can be one of the more painful parts of being human. But what is the alternative to learning for oneself that the freedom to make choices comes with the possibility of regret?

The only way any woman — any person — can know what she wants is to occasionally bump up against the boundaries of what she doesn’t. And given the choice between learning the hard way and getting no education at all, women have always known which they prefer — whether someone else thinks they should want it, or not.

Since signing on with a mainstream publisher in 2012, she’s sold over 150 million copies of her books worldwide. Last week, she released Freed, the final part of a retelling of the original Fifty Shades novels from the male love interest’s perspective. Again, James is following Meyer here, whose Midnight Sun (leaked in 2008 though not officially published until 2020) is the masculine take on the Twilight story.

Following, and, as usual, going further. Where Meyer contented herself with one volume of perspective-shifting, James has gone for a do-over on all three of hers; and where Meyer’s books sustained an atmosphere of age-appropriate repression and Mormon-appropriate sexual repulsion (Meyer is LDS), James went the whole hog-tied way into BDSM. James took the characters and relationships from Twilight, and rewrote the story to suit herself. “All my fantasies in there, and that’s it,” she said in 2012.

Edward Cullen still met Bella Swan, only now he wasn’t a 103-year-old vampire, and she wasn’t a depressed high-school virgin with a maddening tendency to bleed. He became an emotionally repressed (and very handsome) billionaire; she became a shy, klutzy (but beautiful!) student. In Twilight, Bella’s love helps Edward learn to control his instinct to suck her like a Capri-Sun; in Master of the Universe, Bella teaches Edward that there’s more to sex than trussing a woman up with cable ties and lovelessly banging her senseless.

Eventually Edward was renamed “Christian Grey” and Bella turned into “Anastasia Steele”; the whole thing was reworked and presented as an original fiction, and the cultural phenomenon we all know and masturbate to/hold in contempt was born. And there is so much contempt for James. Deriding her is as much of a compulsion for large chunks of the public as paddling Ana’s pert behind is for Christian. Feminists said she glorified abuse; BDSM-ers said she made BDSM look bad; conservatives said she was corrupting public decency; the sneery tag “mommy porn” was invented to describe her work.

And everyone, but everyone, said she couldn’t write. “In fact, if I were a member of the Christian Right, sitting on my front porch decrying the decadent morals of working American women, what would be most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena… is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level,” wrote Katie Roiphe in a 2012 article for Newsweek asking why the collective female libido seemed to have achieved a consensus around submission.

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Part of the strangeness of the reaction to Fifty Shades — both the passion of its fans, and the dismay of its detractors — is that it’s nothing very new, and nor would James ever pretend it was. As much as it owes to Twilight, and to the collaborative inventions of fanfiction, it’s also part of the grand tradition of the bonkbuster, which dates back to the 1970s. And the bonkbuster has always loved a bad boy: the caddish Rupert Campbell-Black, of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles, would make no better of a boyfriend than Christian Grey.

But bonkbusters also tended to celebrate variety and adventure for their heroines, not only sexually but professionally. Anastasia Steele is a retreat from that: a one-man woman whose eventual career is a gift of her wealthy husband (he buys a publisher for her run) and who gives up her surname when she marries him. After all the benefits of second-wave feminism, it seemed like what straight women really wanted was not to have it all but to give it all up; and they wanted it enough to buy James’s fantasies not just once but twice over.

Retelling might, in fact, be too strong a word for what James has done in her Christian-narrated novels. Comparisons of Master of the Universe and Fifty Shades suggest the shift from one to the other was not that extensive after all (Master of the Universe has been almost totally erased from the internet now); similarly, when you look at the original trilogy and the new one side-by-side, there’s often very little difference to detect.

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For example, the first time Christian gets Ana off, he does it by playing with her breasts in a “slow, sensual assault”. This continues until her “whole body sings with sweet agony”, at which point she tells us: “He kisses me, deeply, his tongue in my mouth absorbing my cries.” From his perspective, this is a “lascivious assault”, which ends when “I move quickly to kiss her, capturing her cries in my mouth.”

Where we do get new information from the Grey version, it’s mostly reassuring confirmation that he was always secretly concerned about Anastasia’s consent (take that, feminists worried about BDSM/BDSMers worried about being confused with rapists!), and childhood memories of his mother that help to explain his emotional remoteness. It’s not exactly Rashomon, but then, being Rashomon would be very much against the spirit of Fifty Shades. Nobody came here for the fracturing of reality into multiple perspectives, thank you very much.

The grand fantasy of Fifty Shades isn’t really the spanking or the restraints or any of the other delightful perversions that Christian introduces Ana to. It’s that a woman could know a (billionaire, handsome) man completely and, by loving him, redeem him. Through all the business in the Red Room of Pain, Ana achieves the ultimate in vanilla: straight, monogamous intimacy. To that end, nothing could be hotter than the revelation that Christian and Ana were having almost the exact same subjective experiences all along.

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I don’t share a lot of the moral concerns about Fifty Shades. Yes, much of what occurs between Christian and Ana would be deeply alarming if it happened in a real relationship, but prissy fussing about how it misrepresents consent overlooks the fact that this is happening in a fiction. People who enjoy submission are also enjoying a fiction: it’s necessary to believe in your own resistance in order to extract the pleasure of being possessed.

So however careless Christian appears to be about Ana’s boundaries, readers know that she ultimately wants to be totally his; and they know also that her surrender becomes a way of mastering him. Even writing as infelicitous as James’s has a huge advantage over visual pornography when it comes to sex, in that it can show us its characters from the inside, and fulfil the part of the fantasy which is about feeling rather than simply doing (or being done to). If there’s danger in Fifty Shades, it’s not the sex so much as the romance.

To love someone is always to be slightly at the mercy of the unknowability of the other. Ana is able to overcome that with what the rewrite trilogy now confirms is perfect understanding. But in the real world, there is much that women are never going to comprehend about the men they love, however much they prostrate themselves in the effort — and much that men never make any effort to understand about the women who love them. More than horsewhips and hemp ropes, it’s that gulf of sympathy that leaves real-life people hurt.

Throughout England’s history, it has been loved, respected and admired, as well as feared, loathed and resented. It has, however, rarely been ridiculed. And now it worries that — in its very public contortions, its prolonged inability to make up its mind or forge a course of action — it may at last be appearing ridiculous.

I was, admittedly, slow to register the emotional impact of English embarrassment, partly because I grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and had no experience of belonging to somewhere that might quietly congratulate itself on a landscape of stability, tolerance and common sense. I loved home, but our society had leapfrogged well beyond loss of face and into spectacular dysfunction.

At the risk of seeming pious, I also thought that — if the Westminster government was going to be embarrassed by anything — there was plenty to trigger that emotion before the 2016 EU vote. England had a rising number of working people who — despite being in employment — could not afford adequate housing or make it to the end of the month without using food banks. It was — and is — steadily wrecking the world-famous British criminal justice system for the sake of a relatively small investment. It has continued to ingratiate itself heavily with repressive states such as Saudi Arabia, while talking on the international stage about the importance of human rights.

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And despite these and many other issues becoming glaringly apparent, over a number of years, it seemed oddly impossible for anything to change course. It was as though the state had become a kind of smiling somnambulist, oblivious to the obvious. But these things, I suppose, were primarily regarded as internal, domestic matters, and few abroad had recognised or cared about the extent to which Britain now wasn’t working for so many of its citizens. The moment of globally visible chaos had not yet arrived.

It has now, in the three years of wrangling that have followed the vote for Britain to leave the EU — an outcome that took even its ‘Leave’ supporters by surprise. The long-held international belief in British competence has been steadily eroding ever since June 2016, as first Theresa May and then Boris Johnson proved unable to get their EU deals through Parliament.

Having at first, perhaps, hoped that the UK would change its mind, the EU now seems eager to see us off. The Brexit argument has exposed polarities of class, age, income, education and geography which grew unchecked and largely unseen over many decades, and have accelerated since 2010.

As anyone who has been through a personal and public crisis knows, one of the most difficult things about it is that it opens a space for other people to begin openly discussing your problems and personality. Often, along the way, they will characterise you in a way in which you would never choose to see or characterise yourself. It’s uncomfortable, and certainly embarrassing.

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The most obvious literary manifestation of this was Fintan O’Toole’s Heroic Failure, Brexit and the Politics of Pain, which has just been published in America as The Politics of Pain: Postwar Britain and the Rise of Nationalism. It’s a long and often caustic look at the national psychology of England and where it has led. He accepts, of course, that the Brexit vote was part of a global phenomenon partly triggered by “budgetary austerity”, rising inequality and anxieties over immigration — but argues that it was also brought about by “a drilling-down into the half-buried layers of a very distinctive English mindset. It hit pay-dirt, and out gushed a flow of feelings highly specific to the mental terrain of post-war England.”

According to the author, one of these is England’s belief that it is, by its very nature, exceptional, rendering it unhappy at being just one part of an organisation that included 27 other member states. Another is that the open expression of racism gradually became more unacceptable in Britain throughout the Eighties and Nineties, and that “this left a vacancy which was filled by the European Union”.

In rather an odd flight of fancy, O’Toole likens the appeal of Brexit to that of Fifty Shades of Grey “a fantasy of submission and dominance” with the EU playing the role of Christian Grey tying Anastasia Steele — the United Kingdom — up in acres of bureaucracy and red tape (I’m not sure to what extent this analogy works, since the point of the book, surely, was that Steele rather liked it). He argues that the belief that the UK was oppressed by Europe was a kind of false consciousness, a fantasy of humiliation, which has now resulted in the reality of humiliation — a post-Brexit Britain that must operate in the economic orbit of the EU without playing an active role in it. Play-acting has generated its own reality: “Brexit is a strange hybrid – a genuine national revolution against a phoney oppressor.”

The author — an extremely readable writer — is, with his outsider’s eye, incisive on the peculiarly English combination of camp, class, and parody that characterises the personae and popular appeal of Conservative politicians such as Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The anecdote that struck me most forcefully about Johnson is the one about the speech that he made as a prospective parliamentary candidate in 2001 to the selection committee for the seat of Henley-on-Thames. In it, Johnson described how his wife was brought tea and toast in an NHS hospital after giving birth to one of their children.

Since she was asleep at the time, Johnson ate all the toast, and when she woke up and asked for it he was then dismayed that the system did not allow him to pay for a second batch. There is something telling about the fact that Johnson not only ate his wife’s toast in such circumstances, but then subsequently used the anecdote to advance his career.

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As O’Toole’s broader psychological dissection continues, however, the English psyche is sketched as ever more unlikeable and dysfunctional: wounded by loss of Empire, infused with self-pity, dogged by a superiority complex and subliminally racist. Historically, England can do little right.

The Falklands War, for example, was “a last hurrah for Britain’s imperial pretensions” which “played out the invasion fantasy of SS-GB…but at a safe distance of 8,000 miles.” Furthermore, it helped that “the tiny Falklands population” was “almost entirely white” because it therefore served “as a kind of make-believe England with no black or brown immigrants”. The war itself is therefore depicted as a kind of communal exercise in emotional fraudulence.

But the Falklands crisis — although certainly played with echoes of WW2 by Margaret Thatcher, who had a popular instinct for such showmanship — was not of the British government’s making, nor primarily conceived as a kind of national drama. Argentinian forces under General Galtieri’s military junta — one which ruthlessly presided over the torture and disappearances of thousands of leftists and dissidents — had invaded British sovereign territory, an action condemned by the UN Security Council. The British government’s choices were to oppose this action or to acquiesce in it; if the latter, England might reasonably have been accused of a Little Englander mentality by simply abandoning to a fascist regime a faraway population which, while small, overwhelmingly supported British sovereignty.

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In this, and other passages, I kept getting the worrying feeling that the author’s pleasure in metaphor and analysis were running away with themselves, beyond blunter historical realities. And sometimes the argument seemed to contradict itself. On page 128, for example, a striking passage begins “Being angry about the European Union isn’t a psychosis — it’s a mark of sanity. Indeed, anyone who is not disillusioned with the EU is suffering from delusions.”

He goes on to describe its “slow torturing” of Greece — and also Ireland, Portugal and Spain – under the auspices of “fiscal discipline”. “There is a European technocratic elite (especially in unaccountable institutions like the European Central Bank) that has lost its memory.” It has forgotten, he says, that “poverty, inequality, insecurity and a sense of powerlessness have drastic political repercussions”. Instead, “the project became arrogant, complacent and obsessed with grand schemes like the ill-designed euro”.

That is a powerful and frank indictment of how the European project has played out in recent years. And surely it is possible to believe that quite a number of voters who shared O’Toole’s analysis were led in 2016 to vote ‘Leave’ by very similar conclusions, without being spurred to do so by nostalgia for empire, latent racism or the irrational embrace of nationalism.

To consider that, it is worth rewinding from the current garish national panto of UK politics to the period just before the 2016 EU referendum. The UK did indeed differ from other countries in one important respect: it put the question of EU membership directly to its people. Since the then prime minister David Cameron so clearly thought ‘Leave’ a highly undesirable option, that was an unwise move on his part.

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Aside from a small minority of voters for whom the EU question was historically of paramount importance, for the vast majority it sat well below those of housing, education and the NHS. But the trouble with asking a national question via a simplistic referendum is that the very act of answering arrives with politics of its own. Many voters who felt — just as O’Toole argues — that aspects of the EU had fostered economic inequality, and were instinctively uncomfortable with the dynamic and undemocratic nature of its grand projects, also felt that to vote ‘Remain’ was to give an active endorsement of both these things. It is one thing to rub along somewhat irritably with a flawed status quo, quite another to give it the thumbs-up.

Binaries were forced upon us — although the ‘Leave’ vote originally came in many shades and intensities, as did that for ‘Remain’. With time, the identities of ‘Leaver’ or ‘Remainer’ have hardened into tribes, a situation not helped by the ambivalence and obfuscation of the Labour leadership — including that of Corbyn and McDonnell, both lifelong Eurosceptics — which have in part permitted Brexit to become a project of the Conservative Right.

I enjoyed reading The Politics of Pain, even if I disagreed with significant elements of its tone and analysis: it is stylishly written and seethes with ideas. And its warm reception in large swathes of London literary circles confirms at least one stereotype: that the English upper middle-class are more amenable to flagellation than many other nationalities would be.

Every country, as with Tolstoy’s definition of unhappy families, is unhappy in its own way. I have difficulty, however, with the argument that England was predisposed to Brexit — and its attendant political convulsions — by a uniquely English combination of historical arrogance and contemporary hang-ups. Despite England’s long-term ambivalence about EU membership, the argument seems partly designed to make non-English onlookers feel better about themselves.

Yet, beyond that, any sense of complacency would be unwise, because right across the EU — including in Ireland — many of the same internal stresses that led to Brexit are apparent, and erupting in a politically unpredictable manner.

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A rapacious form of capitalism has taken root in much of Ireland, with Dublin in particular experiencing an acute housing crisis. Ireland itself now has its highest homelessness figures since its records began. Reliance on food banks has gone up, and for many Irish people, the nature of employment has become more insecure. There are public anxieties around higher levels of immigration which are beginning to express themselves in troubling and complex ways, such as local protests at the opening of large “direct provision” centres offering accommodation for asylum seekers in rural areas (centres in which it is also alleged that residents are sometimes subjected to tough and dispiriting treatment).

The knotty question “what does it mean to be British?” — including a widespread loss of faith in the protective power of the state — has thrummed through the Brexit debate. Something in the UK’s current nervous breakdown is attempting to puzzle that out, and I hope that, somewhere down the line, it might end up in the acceptance that we badly need a country that is closely and strategically planned to function better and more equally for everyone in it.

The question “what does it mean to be Irish?” has yet to bubble up with quite the same intensity, and the authorities are highly unlikely to give it an EU hook to hang itself on. But it would be reckless for Ireland to follow the example of the UK’s somnambulist state before June 2016 — and to believe that just because Ireland isn’t England, the painful fall-out from such a question is inevitably very far away.