Sex Realism

Meet the Counterrevolutionary Feminists Challenging Old-School Women’s Lib

Picture this: four women on a stage debating the merits of the Pill, porn, and the sexual revolution—one pop culture icon who goes by the name Grimes, one conservative journalist with a British accent (Louise Perry), and two podcast hosts with massive followings (Sarah Haider and Anna Khachiyan).¹ And they were all hosted by a no-nonsense lesbian, Bari Weiss, the former New York Times writer who went out on her own and started a rising, fair-minded news source called The Free Press. The title of the debate was, “Has the Sexual Revolution Failed?”

Can you believe this event actually happened? And not only that it happened, but that it was sold out, with thousands of young men and women of all lifestyles and convictions present and hundreds of thousands more having since watched it on YouTube? Admittedly, the format of the debate itself left something to be desired and by its very nature only skimmed the surface of the issues. But the very fact that this topic was openly broached in a respectful way between women with opposing views tells us something significant about shifts taking place in our culture.

This is just one example among countless others that reveals how many of the sacred cows of progressivism are being challenged. Men and women from a variety of perspectives are starting to question the sexual revolution, and there is a growing undercurrent of resistance and counterrevolutionaries who are seeking a better way forward. Some are Christian; some are anything but. But they all are asking important questions as a new generation reevaluates the narratives they’ve been told and the lifestyles they’ve been sold.

A Wide Array of Voices Asking Big Questions

There has been a flurry of activity in the past few years on these topics, adding much to the larger and longer conversation about the nature of men and women and their relationship to one another and to the wider world. Below are some highlights.

In March 2022, Christine Emba’s book Rethinking Sex: A Provocation was released. It ties together personal anecdotes, sociology, psychology, interviews with college students, and more to reveal the limits of the ethic of consent surrounding sex. Emba proposes that if consent is the only moral lodestar in our sexual ethics, we will be left feeling empty and isolated. There must be something more than simply consenting to putting this or that body part here or there. Sex is about much more than that.

Next, in July 2022, came Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory, which is probably the most explicitly Christian and theological book on this short list. Favale attempts to ground the discussion in something much larger than contemporary society or current gender debates by going back to the beginning, to the very creation of man and woman. In doing so, she paints a compelling and beautiful picture of the centrality of the body to what it means to be male or female and how the differences between the sexes are not biological accidents but are deeply embedded in our experiences of reality. She also shows how such sexual difference is an icon of the relationship between God and man and Christ and his bride, the Church.

Just a month later, in August 2022, British author Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution hit the shelves. Perry argues that the promises of the Sexual Revolution failed for women. If anything, it gave men more access to female bodies and sex without responsibility—and we’re all less happy because of it. She puts forward a more meaningful and empowering framework for a successful woman: that her life would somehow follow the three-stage pattern of maiden, mother, matriarch.

In April 2023, another Brit added to the conversation. Mary Harrington released Feminism Against Progress, in which she coins some memorable terms like “meat-lego Gnosticism” (to refer to our culture’s view of the human body as being raw material for fashioning in accord with one’s personal desires) and “cyborg feminism” (to refer to modern feminism’s ignoring of the female body, which nearly requires women to self-sterilize technologically to be on “equal” terms with men in the workplace). Harrington especially puts her finger on how technological changes are making it easier to objectify women and view reproduction as a controllable laboratory process with parents as commercial consumers and babies as the products. One of the many things she calls for in response is a “re-wilding” of sex, by which she means that we reconnect the pleasures of sex with its inherent potency and life-creating possibilities and responsibilities (i.e., we should think twice about the Pill and other reproductive and contraceptive technologies).

In September 2024, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, by Carrie Gress (author of Theology of Home), was released. Gress advances the argument that the past few generations of radical feminism have continued to uphold the male as the ideal human mold into which women should fit, which ironically doesn’t end up working for anyone—male or female. And she offers a call to reclaim true womanhood and motherhood, with all its uniqueness and vulnerability, and with all its interdependent connections with men.

There is also a growing number of thinkers who are developing the idea of sex-realist feminism as a way forward. Such an approach foregrounds sexual differentiation and the uniqueness of male and female bodies in the human experience. The body is real and should not be overlooked in any theory. The website FairerDisputations.org is a good place to get a sense of the major thinkers and how their perspectives apply to contemporary issues and everyday life.

Reckoning with the Wonders of the Body

While there are many differences in the types of questions and answers offered in these sources, one thread that consistently emerges is how the female body must not be ignored. Feminism’s prior waves attempted to eliminate the uniqueness of the female body, shoehorning women into the male template (think abortion, hormonal birth control, removing legal protections for women, treating men and women as interchangeable units, etc.).

But no more. We’ve let the effects pile high enough already. We must reckon with the body. And this reckoning with the givenness, potency, and unending mystery of both the male and female body has implications beyond just questions of feminism and the Sexual Revolution. It has impacts on what we think of the whole spectrum of LGBT issues, how we approach digital technologies like AI and transhumanism, marriage and family, the goodness of embodied work, and much more. And Christianity has the resources and traditions to offer the way forward. Many folks are beginning to wake up to the reality that what Christianity has been saying—and living (albeit with many failures)—all along is actually true.

Note
1. Bari Weiss, “First Free Press Live Event: A Clash of the Female Titans,” The Free Press (Jul. 31, 2023). The full debate can be found on YouTube.