Late modernity has inherited a revolutionary spirit, and sex is the easiest place to see that spirit and its costs. The harms of the Sexual Revolution are rampant: Dating culture has collapsed; hookup culture is unsatisfying; the decline in marriage and birth rates have become a rallying cry for policymakers and conservatives alike. Such realities point to fundamental elements of natural law, as sexual desire is a powerful force of human civilization and requires a strong institution to channel that desire in healthy, procreative ways. The only such institution proven over millennia to provide such a channel is marriage.
Christians, traditionalists, and conservatives recognize this element of natural law and seek to transmit an awareness of its existence to the next generation, paired with the Christian sexual ethic (Ex. 20:14; Matt. 5:27–28; 1 Cor. 6:12–7:5). Such discipleship sometimes takes odd forms, whether that be the True Love Waits campaigns of the 1990s or the cult of virginity in the High Middle Ages. Education is no cure for the strength of human desire; there has always been sexual activity outside of marriage. The issue therefore is one of ought. And up until the 1960s, the ought remained intact. But with the availability of artificial contraception, the Western world engaged in a cultural experiment: reject tried-and-true wisdom; assume that sex can be disconnected from morality, emotion, and long-term relationships; human flourishing will increase because the human animal is an autonomous sexual being fulfilled by varied sexual experiences. Sixty years into the experiment, the results are in: heartache and a lack of long-term, stable, happy marriages.
This description is no surprise to regular readers of Religion and Liberty, but for secular feminists supporting portions of the above argument, it is a surprise. Over the past four years, a group of female authors in both the U.S. and the U.K. have questioned whether the Sexual Revolution has been, in fact, a boon and explored what relationships between men and women should look like. These authors operate outside Christianity or even a theistic metaphysic, retain the term “feminist,” and reject thick understandings of gender roles. Their arguments, while encouraging in the civilizational quest to rediscover truth, fail to satisfy because they lack an appreciation of natural law. The authors in view are Mary Harrington and her book Feminism Against Progress (2023), Christine Emba and Rethinking Sex: A Provocation(2022), and Louise Perry’s second book, A New Guide to Sex in 21st Century: The Young Adult Adaptation of ‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution’ (2025).
Contrast is helpful; these authors stand alongside Peachy Keenan’s Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War (2023) and Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (2022). Both Keenan and Favale are interested in the same topics as Harrington, Emba, and Perry, yet because of their Catholic faith they accept the general tenets of the Christian sexual ethic as part of natural law.
Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress was widely reviewed upon release (see here, here, and here). Her writing style is provocative and her ideas rich. Attempting to summarize and evaluate her book is an impossible task; the below description is a teaser for those who’ve not read her work. She brings to what is a relatively conservative book a Marxist’s attention to material conditions, arguing that contemporary feminism has rejected the actual female body for a “Meat Lego” approach to humans: interchangeable parts without souls. Contemporary feminism seeks to use technology to overcome reality, resulting in a chemically tainted sexual culture with no moral restraints on what can be marketed.
Thus the “sexual marketplace” burrows ever deeper into our hearts, minds and bodies, waging war on every form of relationship save the transactional kind, liquefying every such potential and replacing it with freedom, and trade. And half a century of concerted feminist effort to stamp out sexed differences as baseless “stereotypes,” in the name of furthering that freedom, has succeeded only in shaping what’s for sale. … And on every side, according to the same market logic of independent rational actors pursuing self-interest, everyone has consented to such transactions and no one has the right to complain if they feel hollow, miserable or used afterwards.
Harrington’s focus on market logic is superb, and she points to the limitations of classical liberalism. Without a broader metaphysic, liberalism lacks the resources to explain why pornography, prostitution, and surrogacy ought not be subject to the law of supply and demand; Big Romance, in Harrington’s phrase, is big money. Harrington draws the reader to see the connections between human person as Meat Legos and transgender ideology. Her solutions are unexpected: She calls for a higher view of marriage, a restoration of men’s spaces, and “rewilding sex” by restoring the possibility of conception to every sexual encounter. Such steps, she contends, would result in a “reactionary feminism.”
While Harrington’s thesis, argumentation, and evidence are fascinating, she fails to draw the moral conclusion. Her framework lacks a reason beyond pain for why actions are in fact morally wrong. There is no moral law, no essential human nature that she can define. While she rejects the Meat Lego thesis, she cannot say anything about actual human nature beyond a vague statement that it exists. Harrington’s arguments, paired with the clarity of man and woman made imago Dei, would be far more cohesive.
In Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, Chrstine Emba describes the early 2020s dating scene as resulting in a lot of bad sex (see my original review here). She writes that “the fact that so many women around me relate so deeply to stories of harrowing dates and lackluster encounters show that a lot of us are having a lot of bad sex. Unwanted, depressing, even traumatic: if this is ordinary, something is deeply wrong.” Emba asks her readers to evaluate their desires. She expects pushback: “Because if we agree that some things are normatively good or bad, that some acts are morally acceptable and others are always wrong, or that some preferences and appetites might be unhealthy, that would mean that we might have to do ‘good’ things that we don’t want to do, or that we might no longer be able to do the ‘bad’ things we enjoy.”
In this context, Emba brings up pornography and the dehumanizing practices it glorifies, suggesting that a Kantian consideration of human dignity could help with developing this ethic. “But with effort we can question, critique, and reconstruct our culture and thus our desire. And we probably should.” Emba shies away from defining specific acts as right or wrong; she poses the question but does not draw a conclusion.
Emba closes her book considering the implications of her argument: “What if the answer is less, not more?… What if the answer was to have less casual sex? For that matter, what if the answer was to have sex under the standard of love?” Emba describes her position as “an argument for restraint. In every other situation common to the human experience—eating, drinking, exercise, even email—we have realized that restraint produces healthier results. Why not here too?”
Rejecting the Christian morality of her youth as an answer to the harms she describes, Emba fails to develop a strong sexual ethic that would create the boundaries for the restraint she encourages. Her diagnosis is nevertheless persuasive; the reader concludes that the status quo of romance in modernity is deeply problematized. But without embracing a natural law position obligating action, Emba cannot describe healthy relations between men and women.
Louise Perry released the same book twice. In 2022, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century made a stir (see here and here). This year, she released a Young Adult Adaptation of the book. Perry’s argument remains the same: Feminism offers young women a false narrative of equality with men. The narrative is false because it ignores physiological differences in strength and “socio-sexuality.” Perry leans on both psychology and evolutionary biology to argue that some people have a higher “socio-sexuality” characteristic and this explains why some men become rapists.
Perry writes to women, specifically in this volume to college women who are considering what kind of sex life they will develop. Perry draws perhaps the most conservative conclusions of the three authors considered: By the end, she advocates for marriage and for following the timeless advice of mothers and grandmothers. At the same time, Perry cannot bring herself to write against loose sexual morality. She defines the Sexual Revolution as “a period that began in the 1960s when previous restrictive ideas around sex were relaxed or abandoned.” She then proceeds to spend most of the book detailing sexual harms that have flowed from it. Perry also claims that while monogamous marriage is her preference, “Lifelong monogamy is not our natural state. Only about fifteen per cent of the societies that we know of have been monogamous.”
She advises her readers to “only have sex with a man if you think he would be a good father to your children,” and that “holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you, or just looking for a hookup.” Perry’s closing line reveals the contradiction running throughout her books: “Feminism needs to rediscover the mother, in every sense. Until we do, each individual woman will have to learn on her own the lie of the promise of sexual freedom. It was a lie all along. It’s time, at last, to say so.”
Louise Perry wants simultaneously to warn girls that rape is a real possibility and that marriage is the best route to prevent assault and bear children, without rejecting the initial premises of modern feminism or the Sexual Revolution. And that internal contradiction makes her book insufficient for building a healthy sexual ethic.
Across 2022 through 2025, at least three female authors have written excellent books with evidence, logic, philosophy, and stories arguing that a reckoning with modern feminism is needed. Traditionalist conservatives and Christians should be excited that these books exist. Each raises important questions. At the same time, these books points to a deeper truth that traditional Christianity has maintained for millennia: God as creator establishes the best systems for human flourishing; sex is both good and powerful; marriage is the only channel that can direct the powerful human sex drive to healthy ends (procreation, companionship, pleasure). Every other arrangement will eventually give rise to heartache, suffering, or dehumanization.
The natural law is written into creation order itself; one need not be Christian to accept that the Sexual Revolution has failed. The question before the West is this: Shall we pursue the Revolution into utter despair or reject its premises for the inherited wisdom of Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead”? The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob articulated the choice 4,000 years ago: “I set before you life, and death. Choose life!”
