by Maree Buscke

For those who aren’t aware of Louise Perry, she is a British journalist, author, and commentator known for her sharp, research-driven writing on sex, culture, and modern feminism. With a background that includes working at a rape crisis centre, she brings both intellectual seriousness and real-world sensitivity to conversations that are often dominated by ideology or slogans. Perry has become a clear and decisive voice in contemporary culture debates due to her willingness to question popular assumptions, especially around sexual liberation, and it was a Tiggernometry interview I saw her do late last year that had me digging out her book and wanting to know more.

Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is one of those rare books that feels both calmly argued and genuinely brave. She doesn’t rely on shock value, outrage, or easy moralising , a tactic so regularly employed by the ‘click bait’ generation. Instead, Perry takes a careful, compassionate look at the modern sexual landscape and asks a question many of us sense but struggle to articulate: has the sexual revolution delivered what it promised—especially for women?

What makes this book so compelling is Perry’s clarity. She writes with the confidence of someone who has done the reading, sat with the evidence, grappled with internal arguments and listened closely to real world experiences. She tackles taboo doctrines such as fatherlessness, Cad’s versus Dad’s, the childless epidemic, the war on the family and even porn. She’s made a genuine effort to understand what’s happening, and why so many people feel disconnected, disappointed, or unwittingly and quietly harmed by the cultural norms that we have been groomed to believe are ‘liberating’.

Perry’s arguments are at their strongest when she highlights the gap between theory and reality. In theory, a world of total sexual freedom sounds empowering. In practice, she suggests, it can often reward the confident, the emotionally detached, and the socially powerful, (more often than not, men) while leaving others (mostly women) feeling used, abused, pressured, invisible or even replaceable. She explores the ways that “choice” can become a kind of social expectation, especially in dating culture, and she does so with a tone that feels honest rather than accusatory.

The book is approachable and very easy to read. Perry acknowledges desire, pleasure, and the complexity of human relationships avoiding the temptation to reduce people to stereotypes. She’s critical of certain trends, yes, but she never seems contemptuous of individuals. That balance is hard to achieve, and it’s one of the reasons the book is so readable and worth adding to your reading list.

Ultimately, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution isn’t a call to panic or to return to a Stepford Wives simplistic past. It’s a grounded realistic invitation to reconsider what we mean by sexual freedom, what we owe one another, and how we build a culture that empowers without denying agency and most importantly, she challenges the entrenched societal norm of the past 50 years.

Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is available from all major book sellers.