I had assumed that women, aside from the progressive “feminists” for whom all sex is good sex, knew perfectly well that the so-called sexual revolution only benefited men, giving them access to women’s bodies without fear of consequences. After all, feminist historian Sheila Jeffreys wrote Anticlimax, a searing takedown of the myth that women became sexually liberated post-1967, in 1990.

Failing to cite Jeffreys, or any of the vast number of feminists who have written against the sexual revolution, Perry even seems to be suggesting that she alone developed the critique. In response to an article written by the actor Emma Thompson, in which she said that the sexual revolutions of the Seventies and Eighties made women “more available” and encouraged predatory behaviour, she tweeted: “has…. has Emma Thompson been reading *me*?”

There is absolutely nothing wrong with blowing your own trumpet when you have a new book out, but Perry is in danger of giving the impression, to swathes of young women, that she is a sole voice of reason. There are, in fact, plenty of feminists who advocate against sexual libertarianism. But some of us also advocate for women’s sexual pleasure and liberation.

I joined the Women’s Liberation Movement at the very end of the Seventies as a 17-year-old lesbian. Many of the feminists I hung out with had escaped miserable or even violent relationships with men and, realising that they had been railroaded into compulsory heterosexuality without making a conscious choice, they were now making up for lost time by having great sex with women.

The feminism I practised prioritised women’s sexual pleasure and liberation alongside the campaign to end unwanted sex and male violence. Thinking back to those days, where true sexual liberation felt possible, I can’t believe that more than 40 years later pre-feminist sexual modesty is being peddled as a response to male violence and exploitation.

What Perry suggests as the way forward is, to me, both shocking and depressing. To address the appalling levels of sexual violence towards women and girls it is, she argues, necessary to give up on the notion of sexual freedom and instead return to traditional monogamous marriage.

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There is much to applaud in Perry’s book, which is why I gave it a glowing cover endorsement. It is well-written, rigorously researched, and it is clear that Perry has a genuine commitment to ending male violence. I share that commitment, but here’s where we differ: I would never recommend that women invest in a hypothetical chastity belt and accept as inevitable that men will rape and pillage unless we contain them.

In Perry’s view, the choice is between old-fashioned chivalry and the kind of “tits out” feminism in which porn, kink, sex work and hook-up culture becomes “empowering”. “The Hugh Hefners of the world do not quail at the thought of a ‘sexually liberated’ womankind,” she argues. But she misses the point that the type of feminism that demands true sexual liberation makes Lotharios as well as conservatives wince — because as long as a woman isn’t subservient to a man, she is clearly a threat to his erection.

I agree with Perry that porn is a vile misrepresentation of female and male sexuality, with women being the direct victims. To translate that into “casual sex is bad”, which is what Perry does, is like saying the occasional Burger King take out means you don’t like food. But even if you accept Perry’s argument, she misses the feminist point again, which is that although the porn industry may have been allowed to flourish in the wake of the sexual revolution, it was produced by a toxic combination of other factors: misogyny, unbridled capitalism and the technological revolution.

The cover of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is a box of tissues, and I could not help but wonder, when I first saw it, whether it signified women’s tears or… something else. If I were a heterosexual woman in today’s culture of unbridled misogyny, I would feel like crying — especially if I were reading Perry’s pessimistic take on how to cope with it.

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She appears to do what many feminists, me included, have long questioned, which is persuade women to have children. She offers a salutary warning, pointing to the example of second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex (1970)‎, who argued that women should give up having babies in order to be truly liberated. Having never married or produced children, according to Perry, Firestone “spent the final years of her life in a state of profound vulnerability caused by severe mental illness”. Hell awaits any woman who dares remain childfree!

Some of Perry’s arguments, then, support the “biology is destiny” ticket that most feminists roundly reject. For her, women going out to work after having babies means “physically prising apart women from their children”. Men are biologically programmed to spread their seed, and so they primarily rape women aged between 12 and 25, because this group is most physically attractive to them. Perry also claims that most rape is committed by men who are at their sexual peak — even though we know that a significant minority of married men have sex with their wives when they are not consenting. To blame a biological “urge” for rape is no different from arguing that because some men are more likely to beat their wives when they are drunk, their behaviour is the fault of the alcohol.

A pessimistic view of men runs through this book like a stick of Blackpool rock. Perry accuses radical feminists — barely mentioned, despite our impressive track record of putting the issue of male violence on the political, legal and social stage — of “utopianism”. I freely admit to having a vision of a world free from male violence, where rape, prostitution and femicide are distant memories. And although utopian thinking can never be a substitute for action, we cannot change the world without imagining a better one. Every single refusal to accept the status quo edges us a little bit closer to a world free of sexual violence, a world which I believe it is our imperative to strive for.

Perry, on the other hand, seems to doubt that we can end male violence and suggests that all we can do is contain men’s behaviour, preferably via marriage. I struggle to see how this argument is any different from the suggestion that giving violent men an outlet through prostitution reduces violence against women; surely it simply designates a category of women whom it is acceptable for men to abuse? And I am too optimistic to think that women will always need to be protected by chivalrous men from their predatory counterparts; this is the antithesis of the freedom I crave and deserve.

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But for Perry, chivalry is a good thing and monogamous marriage is the best foundation to build a family. Girls and women should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or who give them the creeps; sexually aggressive men can often be readily spotted because they are impulsive, promiscuous, hyper-masculine and disagreeable. A woman should, she suggests, court a man for a few months without offering any sex and see if he plays nicely. If he does, he is husband and father material, so marry him, have the baby and stay married — even if you get a bit miserable and bored further down the line.

Aside from transporting women back to the Victorian era, as a solution to the danger of rape and abuse, this completely defies logic. Men who beat and rape their wives are often Jekyll and Hyde. In the first few months of a relationship, they are charming, almost too good to be true. It is only when a woman is trapped as his wife and the mother of his children that the violence emerges. Prior to 1992, rape in marriage was not even a crime, and many women still feel that if they unwillingly have sex with their husband it doesn’t count as rape. Contrary to Perry’s view, getting married and staying married is perhaps the most straightforward way to ensure that a woman will be compelled to endure male sexual aggression and coercive control.

Perry tells us that loveless sex is not “empowering” for women. So what? It can be fabulous fun. If our actions were guided by this depressing idea, as well as Perry’s passionate endorsement of marriage, we would indeed return to the status quo of the Fifties.

We need not accept either the progressive creed that “all sex is good sex”, or the conservative recommendation that marriage and monogamy are best. There is another, bigger, much more daring and ambitious project that feminists have been engaged in — with some success, despite the huge misogynistic backlash we are facing at the moment — and that is the true liberation of women. If we fail to imagine a world free of all forms of male violence, we will never achieve it. Rather than tell women they should contain the beast, should we not rather be equipping her to slay him?

An investment of $391 million would address root causes of incarceration by funding mental health services, housing and rehabilitation, along with a programme named “Community Based Violence Reduction”. So far, so good. But the reforms would also redefine how victims and offenders should be dealt with, with increased funding to “restorative justice” in “serious felony level cases that would otherwise result in detention and incarceration”.

Restorative justice (RJ) is described as an alternative to prison; it is a non-punitive response to criminal behaviour. The idea is to bring together the person who inflicted the harm (the “responsible person”, in RJ terminology) and the victim, often in the presence of community representatives. The perpetrator is supposed to accept responsibility for the harm inflicted and reach an agreement with the victim about how to make amends.

De Blasio’s reforms were welcomed by prison reform campaigners, as well as pretty much every liberal in the State. Alissa Ackerman, a sex crimes policy researcher at California State University and one of the few facilitators of restorative justice sessions for rape victims, has said that RJ, “allows survivors to have their pain heard and stories acknowledged, and is an opportunity for the person who caused the harm to be accountable for their actions”.

I spoke to one proponent of RJ, who asked not to be named “in case I am seen as colluding with carceral white women”. White himself, he is a newly trained lawyer in Washington DC, specialising in “replacing the racist system with a true healing process for both parties”. “Anti-rape feminists are probably responsible for more black men being incarcerated than anyone else in modern-day America”, he says. “Locking up African Americans is a product of slavery.” Ben went on to suggest “community resolution” and “non-violent strategies” to address sexual assault.

But for feminist activists campaigning against male violence, who have seen the consequences of the reforms up-close over the last three years, RJ constitutes the very opposite of justice.

Sarah, whose name I’ve changed, runs a support service for victims of male violence in NYC and is “appalled” that RJ is becoming a substitute for criminal justice sanctions. “What we are seeing is what we have seen forever”, she tells me, “which is the under-policing and under-protection for women, including women of colour. But some BLM activists are claiming that feminists calling for CJS sanctions for rape and domestic abuse is flat-out racist, because black men are overrepresented in the prison population.” As a result, she told me that “black and brown women, indigenous women … are the ones who are bearing the consequences of us not holding men accountable for their violence. They are the ones who are being murdered and raped and their abusers are walking free.”

According to the ideals of RJ, after a crime is committed the offender and the victim should meet face-to-face. The victim is not to blame or judge the perpetrator, but rather describe the impact of the offence, in order to “heal” and become “empowered”. RJ sees victim and perpetrator as equal, both in need of support and understanding. Supposedly modelled on the conflict resolution practices of certain indigenous cultures, there is much talk of circles. Healing circles are held for the perpetrator, before a sentencing circle takes place; later, there are follow up circles. The outcomes may include an apology or financial compensation. Some participants, including the victim, sign a confidentiality agreement.

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RJ is considered a suitable remedy for domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse and sex trafficking, among other violent crimes predominantly committed by men. Most of these crimes are committed against women by men known to them: male family members, partners and colleagues. “The perpetrators have worked very hard, often for years, to condition the person they are abusing to not disclose, to minimise, to protect his emotions: to protect his character publicly”, says Sarah. “They’ve been using manipulative tactics to inspire self-doubt, blame and fear, in the person they are abusing.”

And victims of this kind of abuse may feel coerced by RJ practices, which are conducted, as Sarah said, “without any understanding of the dynamics of power and control, the impact of a trauma-coerced bond, and also the amount of time and commitment that it actually takes to elicit genuine behaviour change in abusers”.

I meet with Diane, whose name I’ve changed, at a café in Harlem, NYC. She was introduced to me by her rape counsellor. Diane was seriously sexually assaulted by a senior member of her church, having been targeted and sexually harassed by him for months. “I decided to report him to the police, despite the fact that my community is rarely well served by the cops.” Diane and the perpetrator are African American. “There are too many vulnerable young people in the church, and I didn’t see why he should poison the congregation.”

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The perpetrator, considered to be a man of “good character”, with no criminal convictions, admitted to the lesser charge of inappropriate sexual touching, denied committing serious sexual assault, and agreed to partake in RJ.

“I was contacted by the local service that runs these things,” says Diane. “They told me it was important that we reach an agreement and rebuild trust. I was told nothing could be gained from taking him on a route where he could end up in jail. It felt like I had no choice.”

But having read up on RJ, Diane decided not to participate in it. “I was judged and blamed by the service”, says Diane, “as though I should have accepted the scraps from the table and have him say ‘sorry’ or whatever. He got away with what he did to me, and a man like that pretending to regret what he did would just be lies.”

One report, published in 2016, is often used to justify replacing criminal sanctions with RJ. It is entitled “Restorative Practices in cases of Intimate Partner Violence, Sexual Assault and Dating Violence: A Roundtable Discussion”. While it claims that RJ focuses on victims of violence and their needs, the report also ironically reveals who is actually centred in the process. One attendee is quoted as saying about perpetrators of male violence: “Do we actually blame them as a perpetrator when they were violated at a young age?”

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To be taken out of the criminal justice system and put in a situation where everybody is required to empathise with him — including his victim, who is forbidden from blaming or shaming him — is a violent man’s dream come true.

Like most on the Left, I believe that only the most dangerous criminals should be locked up. I have criticised the fact that the most vulnerable and disenfranchised are most likely to be in jail. But the campaign to end male violence is my life’s work. Victims have to come first. One service provider working with sexual assault victims describes reports from young survivors in California that they are “sick of going to rape circles”. She has also heard from women and girls of colour being pressured to engage in RJ instead of making police reports.

While RJ is not yet widely practiced throughout the US, it is growing in popularity in several states — and threatens to become federal policy. In its 2022 budget, the Office on Violence against Women requested $25 million, “to support restorative justice responses to domestic/dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking, and research, evaluation, and technical assistance related to such responses”.

The media consistently reports that research shows RJ is very successful. One paper, by Mary P Koss, is often cited. Koss asked victims to complete a survey about their PTSD symptoms before and after they engaged in RJ, and concluded that victims who complete an RJ process exhibit a marked decrease in those symptoms. But PTSD symptoms almost inevitably decrease as time passes after the traumatic event. Asking the victims and perpetrators of serious crimes to “hug it out and move on”, as Sarah describes it, was simply not shown by the research to be effective.

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I asked several experts on violence towards women if there is any reliable data about the efficacy of RJ and was met with a resounding “no”. When I spoke to Marcia, a veteran advocate for victims of male violence, she pointed out that in cases of domestic violence, putting the perpetrator and the victim in a room together is “outright dangerous”. Perpetrators of domestic abuse, and of sexual assault, are more likely than any other offenders to repeat their crimes — often against the same victim. But the well-publicised evaluations of RJ don’t include follow-ups that measure the recurrence of violence within domestic abuse scenarios.

Marcia asked for anonymity because “right now there is so much intolerance on the Left that even those of us who are part of the Left fear retaliation if we don’t conform.” She emphasised that rape victims want their rapists prosecuted, but with the Left advocating for RJ, victims “feel that there is no movement standing behind them. They feel utterly alone.”

The idea that serious, sexual and violent crimes should be dealt with by “community leaders”, outside the criminal justice system, is shockingly naïve at best. At worst, it is re-victimising women, and giving perpetrators a free pass. Liberal cities like New York are conducting an experiment with women’s safety and lives — and ignoring whatever they have to say about it.

But masculinity takes its toll on men. Most glaringly, there’s the suicide rate. In his new book You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed to Be: Into the Chaos of Modern Masculinity, author Martin Robinson describes this as “an orange flare in the night sky, illuminating a heaving ocean of self-harm, addiction, eating disorders, violence and anti-social behaviour”. In England and Wales, three quarters of those who died by suicide in 2019 were male — a trend which has been consistent since the mid-1990s. That’s a horrifying 4,303 men, in just one year.

And there’s more. Robinson lists the stats: “95% of prisoners are male, 86% of homeless people, 73% of deaths from drug misuse.” Some of these figures are not quite as clear cut as suggested, thanks to a data gap that consistently under-measures women (female homelessness, for example, is often hidden in official figures). But nevertheless it’s true that some men pay a hell of a price for masculinity.

Yet the informal man code requires that men accept this suffering without complaint. Robert Webb put the predicament vividly in his own memoir-slash-dissection-of-manhood, How Not to Be a Boy: “if you want a vision of masculinity,” he wrote, “imagine Dr Frankenstein being constantly bum-raped by his own monster while shouting, ‘I’m fine, everyone! I’m absolutely fine!’”

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Robinson is neither imprisoned, nor homeless, nor addicted (although he does make a point of mentioning just how many of his encounters over the course of reporting this book took place drunk, wasted or straight-up pissed; the use of booze as a solvent for male reticence is one trope of masculinity that isn’t getting reassessed here). He lives with his partner and their two children, and until 2016, he was a magazine journalist; in 2018, he launched the website The Book of Man, with a self-defined brief to “open up the possibilities by questioning masculinity”. You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed To Be is the book-form version of that mission.

Whose benefit is all this questioning for, though? Robinson notes that the audience at one of his many “events encouraging men to talk” is “as ever” made up of almost completely women. Most reviewers of Webb’s book were female, and here I am, female also, writing about Robinson’s. Women, it seems, feel compelled to understand men — to do the emotional picking-up. And while there is certainly a male market for introspection, the success of Jordan Peterson shows that there’s an even bigger one for hearing that maleness has been cruelly traduced.

Peterson tells men that their problems lie, not with masculinity itself, but with a society that fails to value masculinity properly. For Robinson, masculinity is the problem. He sets up the ideal of manhood in his chapter headings — “in control”, “one of the lads”, “hard”, “ripped”, “straight”, “the breadwinner” — and then tries to understand why aspiring to this role hasn’t made him happy. His explorations take him to men’s groups, to a cage fight and to a drag queen who paints him up in full femme mode (Robinson is disappointed to discover that this does not unleash an inner reservoir of campy wit).

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Robinson is interested in how gender stereotypes make men unhappy. He is less curious about what they do to women. We’re halfway through the book before he mentions the problem of male violence against women, and three quarters before the wage gap comes up. A discussion of domestic abuse focuses on men and boys as unrecognised sufferers, but elides the fact that, while female perpetrators do exist, most perpetrators are men whatever the sex of their victims.

One of feminism’s perpetual battles is the insistence that to address violence, we must “name the agent”. That means rejecting passive constructions like “woman killed”, which suggest some inevitable and impersonal force at play, and instead use formulations such as “man kills woman”, identifying both the human source of the violence and the fact that committing it is a voluntary act. When Robinson baulks at naming the agent, it’s hard to resist the suspicion that his interest is less in solving the problems masculinity causes, and more in repositioning men as an afflicted class deserving of sympathy.

It’s right to sympathise with men, as it’s right to sympathise with anyone, but doing so is not a radical reframing of gender politics. It is usual for male subjectivity to take centre stage (the philosopher Kate Manne calls this phenomenon “himpathy”). The flow of feeling from women to men is one of the mass transfers of resources ensured by men’s social dominance, and if Robinson had read much feminism, he would perhaps have come across that concept.

In fact, he seems hardly to have engaged with feminism at all — there are cursory mentions of de Beauvoir and Butler, but that’s as far as it goes. And this is very strange, because masculinity and femininity exist in relation to each other. When feminists address the state of women, they write about men because it would be impossible not to. Yet women barely figure in Robinson’s book, which suggests he is less willing to leave the strictures of masculinity than might be hoped.

When it comes to the vexed issue of gender identity which has lately ripped feminism in two, he has a splendid obliviousness to the detail that I can only envy. At one excruciating point he announces that “the trans community should be worshipped as the ultimate humans, for showing the rest of us how it’s done”. This is embarrassing for everyone, including trans people, who surely do not want the burden of sainthood.

The most curious thing about gender is that while its outward forms can be flexible, its function rarely is. There have been many versions of being a man, ranging across history and geography; but however masculinities differ, they share the property of dominance over femininity, and that dominance ensures the flow of goods (power, property, reproductive labour, sex, compassion) from women to men.

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If men want to stop the Frankenstein of masculinity from committing its daily violations, they need to start by admitting that this monster was made for a reason. In 1980, philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards put the matter with perfect clarity in her book The Sceptical Feminist:

“What, for instance, must be happening if an employer passes over a competent woman in favour of a less competent man? It means that the job will be less well done, and therefore (to put it schematically) that he will be losing money by appointing the man. Why should he do that? He is actually willing to pay for something or other, and it is hard to see what it could possibly be other than the simple cause of male supremacy.”

Some men are paying a hell of a price for masculinity. That price is the cost of dominance. (Of course, the class system and racism help to ensure those prices aren’t borne evenly.) Robinson says towards the end that men must “cede power for parity with others”, and deserves credit for that; he’d deserve more credit if he outlined exactly how that might happen.

Advocates for women’s rights have always known that attaining justice for their sex meant giving up the illusory securities of feminine subordination. Men who want to break the constraints of masculinity similarly have to embrace the losses, as well as the gains. Books like Robinson’s will be half-hearted so long as they are only seeking a version of masculinity with the sharp edges worn off. Men can have their new version of manhood: it starts, not with a glorious expression of pent-up emotion, but with cleaning their own bathrooms.