The “feminist” case against having sex for fun

American conservatives are cozying up to British feminists who argue that the sexual revolution has hurt women.

In February, America’s most prominent conservative activist declared his opposition to having sex for fun.

In a post on X, the “anti-woke” crusader Christopher Rufo wrote, “‘Recreational sex’ is a large part of the reason we have so many single-mother households, which drives poverty, crime, and dysfunction. The point of sex is to create children—this is natural, normal, and good.”

Much gawking at Rufo’s grimly utilitarian take on sex ensued. Yet the firestorm largely ignored the woman whose anti-birth-control tirade had ignited it.

Rufo’s remarks were sparked by a video of a 2023 Heritage Foundation panel. In that clip, a bespectacled British woman details the supposed ravages of both oral contraception and the sexual culture that it birthed. She claims that the normalization of birth control has condemned women to higher rates of mental illness while offering them little in recompense beyond the freedom to endure “loveless and sometimes extremely degrading” sex. Therefore, she continues, the world needs “a feminist movement” that is “against the Pill” and for “returning the consequentiality to sex.”

That woman, the writer Mary Harrington, is an unlikely spokesperson for fundamentalist Christian morality. A onetime leftist, Harrington remains a fierce critic of free-market economics and an opponent of abortion bans. Yet her 2023 book, Feminism Against Progress, won her an avid following among American social conservatives, receiving adulatory notices in the Federalist and the National Review and earning her bylines at the conservative Catholic journal First Things.

Harrington’s appeal to these institutions isn’t hard to discern. She is a proponent of “reactionary feminism,” an ideology that shares Christian conservatism’s hostility toward permissive sex norms, birth control, rights for transgender people, and mainstream feminism. But instead of indicting social liberalism on theological grounds, Harrington does so on entirely secular and avowedly feminist ones.

Her complaint with birth control is threefold:

• First, Harrington argues that the Pill undermined sexual norms that had previously protected women from the hazards of single motherhood and exploitation.
• Second, she insists that the advent of oral contraception led the feminist movement to embrace an excessively individualistic vision of women’s liberation. Before birth control, according to Harrington, the movement aimed to challenge the values of capitalism, insisting that familial caregiving was socially indispensable even if it had no market price. But once they gained control over their fertility, feminists no longer felt compelled to defend the value of caregiving. Their critique of capitalism ceased to be that it valued what was profitable over what was socially valuable and became that it merely didn’t pay women equal wages.
• Third, by dramatically reducing women’s vulnerability to unplanned pregnancy, the Pill led feminists to indulge in the fantasy that there were no innate differences between the sexes that couldn’t be transcended through social reform and biotechnology.

In sum, for Harrington, feminism is now defined by the quixotic pursuit of women’s freedom from all social and biological constraints. And this anti-social, utopian quest has served most women poorly, condemning them to a sexually exploitative dating market, alienating them from their own bodies, leaving them vulnerable to the predations of Big Biotech, and exacerbating their caregiving burdens by promoting social atomization and male irresponsibility.

Harrington is not alone in staking out this ideological turf. Louise Perry, a fellow British feminist, championed a similar vision in her 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Like Harrington, Perry evinces opposition to free markets and blanket bans on abortion yet has nonetheless received a warm welcome from US conservatives.

The American Christian right’s enthusiasm for sex-negative British feminists may reflect the conservative movement’s present challenges. As the reaction to Rufo’s condemnation of “recreational sex” demonstrated, the moral intuitions of religious conservatives have become deeply alien to an increasingly secular American public. With religiosity and church attendance in sharp decline, conservatives need nonscriptural arguments for traditional social mores.

Reactionary feminism offers them precisely this. And the ideology appears to have some potential appeal among young women alienated by online dating, pornography, and birth control’s side effects. In recent months, Harrington-esque diatribes against contraception, online dating, and porn have trended on TikTok, a social media platform dominated by Gen Z.

Reactionary feminism therefore warrants liberals’ attention — and our critique.

Harrington and Perry are both strong writers whose work speaks to some genuinely problematic aspects of sexual modernity. But there are (at least) three broad problems with their worldview. First, where reactionary feminism speaks to genuine social problems, it offers few compelling answers for addressing them. Second, contrary to Harrington’s theorizing, there is no sharp trade-off between increasing women’s individual freedom and meeting society’s caregiving needs. Finally, this brand of feminism is reactionary in the pejorative sense: Many of Harrington’s and Perry’s complaints with sexual modernity are rooted less in careful reasoning than in a reflexive skepticism of change.

Why reactionary feminists want you to have less casual sex

Reactionary feminism is built atop one fundamental premise: There are unalterable differences between the sexes, and mainstream feminism has ignored them at women’s expense.

This idea is at the core of Harrington’s indictment of casual sex. In her telling, the Pill may have reduced women’s susceptibility to pregnancy, but it did not erase the psychological predispositions that males and females inherited from millennia of evolution. By downplaying or denying the persistence of these differences, Harrington argues, feminists abetted the emergence of sexual norms that harm women and benefit predatory men. (Her analysis of modern sexual relations is focused exclusively on straight, cisgender relationships. Beyond her opposition to trans rights, she has little to say about the sexual revolution’s implications for LGBTQ people).

Here, Harrington’s analysis converges with that of Louise Perry. In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Perry notes that psychologists have consistently found large sex-based differences in “sociosexuality” — a measure of an individual’s interest in sexual variety and adventure.

In every culture psychologists have studied, men tend to express a higher degree of interest in having lots of commitment-free sex than women do. This does not mean that every man is more interested in sexual variety than every woman. But in the aggregate, Perry argues, the divergence is clear.

She further insists that these patterns are rooted in evolutionary biology. Males can pass on their genes merely by orgasming inside a female, while women cannot reproduce without enduring an extensive pregnancy and risky labor. This gives women a greater incentive to be selective in their choice of partners and men a greater interest in sowing their wild oats. Over millennia, she says, evolution translated these disparate incentives into distinct psychological tendencies.

Alas, in Perry’s view, modern sexual culture ignores these distinctions. According to her, most women prefer a committed relationship to casual hookups. But the existence of oral contraception and legal abortion — combined with feminism’s insistence on male and female interchangeability — has left them without an excuse for withholding sex until commitment is offered.

More crucially, such women face a collective action problem: Perry argues that in a culture where casual sex is normative, refusing to placate male desire puts a woman at a competitive disadvantage in the race for desirable men.

Online dating exacerbates these problems. According to Harrington, natural selection has also bequeathed to modern women a preference for men with high social status (in addition to various coveted physical traits). Combine that predisposition with men’s taste for sexual variety and a norm of casual sex, and you end up with a highly dysfunctional dating market.

Harrington and Perry note that on the dating app Hinge, 10 percent of men receive 58 percent of all women’s “likes.” From this, they extrapolate that predatory high-status men are each stringing along several women at a time, exploiting them for degrading and unfulfilling sex (only 10 percent of women orgasm in first-time hookups) before assembling new harems. Meanwhile, legions of mediocre men go sexless and mutate into misogynistic incels. Mutual hostility between the sexes festers.

In the reactionary feminist narrative, all of this translates into fewer marriages, a collapsing birth rate, and, within Gen Z, a widespread, porn-addled celibacy. At the same time, partly because oral contraception is not always effective (especially when imperfectly used), the normalization of casual sex has yielded an increase in single motherhood. And although such mothers should not be stigmatized, Harrington and Perry argue, it’s nevertheless true that both mothers and children tend to fare better with a partner in the picture.

Thus, reactionary feminists validate the Christian right’s deep-seated conviction that birth control is lamentable and that women have suffered from the decline of traditional sexual morality.

And this is far from the only place where heterodox British feminists and fundamentalist American theocrats see eye to eye. As one might expect, reactionary feminists also share the right’s opposition to pornography, sex work, BDSM, and health care and inclusion for trans people.

Even on reproductive rights, Harrington and Perry aid the conservative project. Although both oppose the legal prohibition of abortion, they also maintain that modern feminism favors personal autonomy over social responsibility to a pathological extent and see the normalization of abortion as a case in point. Harrington writes that “as long as we uphold women’s right to end a pregnancy, we conclusively favour the Hobbesian vision of selfhood over one that makes room for dependency and care.” Perry has suggested that the trivialization of abortion puts us on a slippery slope to normalizing a sexual culture on par with ancient Rome, up to and including infanticide.

Modern sexual culture does fail some women

Reactionary feminists get a few things right. Harrington and Perry aren’t entirely wrong about human sexual psychology, and they speak to some genuine flaws in contemporary gender relations. But their inattention to public policy and their warped political priorities leave them ill equipped to provide solutions to the real problems they identify.

That cis men have, on average, a greater appetite for casual sex than cis women has been exhaustively documented. As the evolutionary psychologists David Michael Buss and David P. Schmitt noted in a 2011 journal article, a long list of studies have found that men are more likely than women to 1) seek one-night stands, 2) consent to sex with a stranger, 3) agree to have sex with a partner after knowing them for only a brief period of time, 4) and express positive attitudes about casual sex, among myriad other behaviors indicative of high sociosexuality. A large-scale survey of 52 different nations — spread across six different continents — found that in every single culture surveyed, male respondents expressed more interest in sexual variety than female respondents.

It is theoretically possible that these disparities are entirely the product of social conditioning. But their presence across cultures lends credence to the notion that biology plays some role.

Evolutionary psychology can be put to ill use. But Harrington and Perry are certainly right that we are all products of evolution, and it’s doubtlessly true that ejaculating requires orders of magnitude less time and energy than carrying a pregnancy to term. Given the centrality of sex to natural selection, it would be surprising if this fundamental asymmetry between what it takes for a cis man to pass on his genes and what it takes for a cis woman to do so left no imprint whatsoever on their respective average predispositions.

It does not follow, however, that the collapse of taboos against casual sex has been a disaster for women. Men may be more likely to desire casual sex than women. But plenty of women appreciate the prerogative to have a little fun (or, at least, to know whether they have sexual chemistry with a person before marrying them).

This said, there is a little evidence to back up the reactionary feminist claim that modern dating is serving men better than women, if only slightly. In a 2022 Pew Research survey, 57 percent of men who used online dating platforms reported primarily positive experiences with the apps, while 48 percent of women did. Men were also more than twice as likely as women to say that they were using online dating to “have casual sex,” with 31 percent of the former saying it was a “major reason” they used the apps and only 13 percent of the latter said the same.

But this data paints a far less dystopian portrait of modern dating than reactionary feminists do: Nearly half of women using online dating have had largely positive experiences, and a plurality of male daters (42 percent) are looking for a committed relationship, according to the Pew survey. Nevertheless, it appears to be true that some number of heterosexual women are having a rough time on the dating market, partly because their male dates tend to be more interested in commitment-free hookups than they are.

Some of reactionary feminists’ other complaints with sexual modernity are more indisputably well founded. There is no question that the percentage of children growing up in single-parent households has increased in the US since the arrival of the sexual revolution, rising from 9 percent in the 1960s to 23 percent in 2019. It is also clear that the overwhelming majority of single parents are women, that children of married parents tend to fare better than those of single parents (all else equal), and that single mothers suffer exceptionally high rates of poverty.

Reactionary feminists have few answers for what we should do about this

But reactionary feminists offer little insight into what, precisely, we should do about any of this.

Harrington and Perry both recognize that there is no going back to a world before the Pill (and grudgingly acknowledge that doing so would have significant downsides, in any case). In their prescriptive content, both Feminism Against Progress and The Case Against the Sexual Revolution more closely resemble self-help guides than political manifestos.

Harrington’s book encourages women to reclaim their “sexual self-discipline” by going off birth control, thereby ensuring that they only go to bed with men whom they trust enough to wear a condom or pull out.

Perry’s book, meanwhile, concludes with a chapter titled “Listen to Your Mother,” in which she advises young women to (among other things) love themselves, trust their moral intuitions, and hold off on having sex with a new boyfriend “for at least a few months” to discover whether he’s serious about them.

It’s plausible that some young women will find this advice helpful. But given that — in reactionary feminists’ own telling — so-called hookup culture is a downstream consequence of reproductive technology, it is unclear how Perry’s call for chastity is supposed to produce social change. Meanwhile, if one’s aim is to reduce single motherhood, encouraging women to abandon the Pill in favor of “cycle tracking” and the pull-out method for pregnancy prevention seems unwise.

Perry’s and Harrington’s books both evince disdain for free-market economics. And in an email to Vox, Harrington described American social policy as “frankly barbarous” in its failure to provide universal access to “perinatal healthcare or federally mandated maternity leave.”

And yet if reactionary feminists support economic reforms that would ease the poverty of single mothers and support family formation, they devote little time or space to advocating for such measures.

Indeed, the only political activity that Feminism Against Progress endorses at length is the struggle against trans rights. Rather than trying to elect parties that support expansions of family-centric social welfare policies, Harrington implores reactionary feminists to focus on capturing NGOs and educational institutions so as to push back against gender-neutral restrooms and policies on the use of trans students’ correct pronouns in schools.

This seems like a difficult set of priorities to justify, even if one were to accept all of Harrington’s own trans-exclusionary premises. Whatever one’s opinion on sex-segregated spaces or public schools’ pronoun policies, it seems obvious that these measures have less material impact on the welfare of cis women writ large than, say, whether the state guarantees them enough income to take maternity leave or keep their children out of poverty.

Giving women control over their fertility makes it easier to care for our society’s vulnerable, not harder

Harrington’s concern that mainstream feminism has grown excessively individualistic — and inadequately attuned to the interests of working-class women — is not entirely unfounded. Certainly, upper-middle-class women have dominated the feminist movement since its inception. And, at least in the United States, that movement has had greater success in dismantling barriers to women’s full participation in market commerce than in fundamentally remaking economic institutions.

Nevertheless, the belief that there is a sharp trade-off between increasing women’s individual autonomy and economic agency on the one hand and meeting our society’s collective needs for caregiving on the other is mistaken.

Women’s rising labor-force participation may have entailed a reduction in the number of hours that mothers spent with their own small children or older relatives. Yet the half century since the sexual revolution has also witnessed declines in poverty among both children and older adults. In material terms, the United States is taking much better care of its most vulnerable residents today than it did in the mid-20th century.

We have achieved this by funding social welfare programs that transfer income from the working-age population to those who are older, younger, and poorer. And women’s full participation in the economy makes it easier to fund such programs. If our economies could not draw on the productive capacities of one-half of all adults, there would be much less income to redistribute.

Of course, children need more from their caregivers than material resources. And Harrington is doubtlessly correct when she writes that many professional-class women can only escape the burdens of domesticity by “outsourcing chores” and child care to a mostly female “servant class.” She is also surely right that some nannies and child care workers would prefer to be at home with their own children if they were not economically compelled to nurture someone else’s instead.

But her book leaves the upshot of this observation unclear. By email, she clarified that she would like all public child care programs to include a cash benefit for stay-at-home parents. This is a reasonable idea. But it is also one with a long pedigree in progressive feminism — left-wing feminists have been demanding “wages for housework” since the 1970s.

Finally, Harrington and Perry’s notion that the push for legal abortion epitomizes mainstream feminism’s prioritization of personal freedom over obligation to others is highly tendentious. Their argument only holds if one accepts the metaphysical premise that a fetus is a person; if one rejects that notion, then getting an abortion can actually be an affirmation of one’s sense of obligation to other people. After all, the typical person having an abortion is already a parent, and parents often choose to terminate a pregnancy out of a desire to concentrate more energy and resources on their existing children.

Reactionary feminism’s case against biotechnology and BDSM is rooted in superstition

Harrington casts herself as a clear-eyed realist who learned to see through her progressive milieu’s unthinking dogmas. Ultimately, though, like her sympathizers on the Christian right, she tends to substitute mere intuition (if not superstition) for facts or reasoned argument.

This habit is best exemplified by her indictments of BDSM and biotechnology.

Harrington sees the rise of “kink” as a scourge, and one inextricable from the advent of contraception. She posits that people have gravitated toward BDSM as a way of compensating for the drab safety of protected sex, writing that eliminating the risk of pregnancy “takes much of the dark, dangerous and profoundly intimate joy out of sex” and that men and women seek to recapture that “darkness and danger” through “depraved fetishes and sexual violence.”

She provides approximately zero evidence for this theory. And although I am extremely ill positioned to speak to the unconscious motivations of masochistic women on hormonal birth control, it seems doubtful to me that the majority turn to BDSM in an attempt to recapture the lost “thrill” of worrying midcoitus that a condom just broke.

Meanwhile, Harrington’s hostility toward both contraception and gender-affirming medicine is rooted partly in a superstitious aversion to biotechnology.

Harrington says that she felt alienated from her female body as an adolescent but came to find comfort and joy in it later in life. She is therefore understandably concerned that young women going through a similar period of pubescent angst today might be misdirected toward unnecessary medical treatments with significant side effects.

But her concerns about trans-inclusive health care are scarcely confined to questions of pediatric gender medicine’s diagnostic protocols or the limitations of existing research on patient outcomes. Rather, she’s skeptical of all attempts to bring our bodies into closer alignment with our conscious needs and desires.

As she put the point to me, “The significance of the contraceptive revolution, as I see it, is that it breaks with millennia of medical tradition in seeking not to fix something that’s working abnormally, in the name of health, but to break something that’s working normally (female fertility) in the name of individual freedom.” Harrington regards the latter endeavor as inherently hubristic and liable to be corrupted by amoral profit seeking.

Yet her book also demonizes medical innovations aimed at preventing a patient’s imminent death. In Feminism Against Progress, she cites attempts to develop lab-grown organs — a line of research aimed at saving the lives of very ill people — as one of the nightmarish consequences of the contraceptive revolution. Her book’s only actual argument against the practice, however, is that it is “unnatural.”

But nature is not our friend. Evolution didn’t shape our bodies and brains with an eye to our welfare as conscious beings or our morality as social ones. Rather, it shaped us for survival and reproduction under a set of ecological and social conditions that our species long ago outgrew.

For this reason, the “normal” functioning of our bodies can be quite antithetical to our well-being. “Natural” bodily processes leave many of us susceptible to clinical depression, cancer, and gender dysphoria. For the bulk of our species’ history, meanwhile, the natural functioning of human fertility condemned many human communities to cyclical famines as population growth outpaced gains in economic productivity.

Of course, we should have humility when messing with biological systems that we do not fully understand, and novel interventions that radically disrupt bodily processes should be subjected to clinical scrutiny. But the idea that contraception and gender-affirming care are inherently bad because they “break” our “natural biology” — and open the door to further enhancements of the human body — is a quasi-religious argument, not a rational one.

If we should not reflexively venerate nature, the same is true of the sexual revolution. Any social transformation is liable to have some negative consequences. Reactionary feminists aren’t wrong to ask pointed questions about how well contemporary sex norms are serving women. But they’re wrong to provide regressive and misleading answers.

Focusing one’s public commentary on making a contrarian case for traditional sexual morality — and against trans rights — is a sound way of carving out a niche in a crowded culture war discourse and earning the patronage of American conservatives. But it is a poor approach to actually improving women’s lives.