According to Louise Perry in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, sex has become "disenchanted," stripped of its special, sacred character. Sex is "no big deal." So don't get hung up about it. It's "just sex," after all.
As Perry will argue, the disenchantment of sex has a relational and emotional price, a cost mostly paid by women. Perry making this argument:
It is in their interest [the Hugh Hefners of the world, and playboys like him] to push a particularly radical idea about sex that has come out of the sexual revolution and has proved remarkably influential, despite its harms. This is the idea that sex is nothing more than a leisure activity, invested with meaning only if the participants choose to give it meaning. Proponents of this idea argue that sex has no intrinsic specialness, that it is not innately different from any other kind of social interaction, and that it can therefore be commodified without any trouble. The sociologist Max Weber described the 'disenchantment' of the natural world that resulted from the Enlightenment, as the ascendence of rationality stripped away the sense of magic...In much the same way, sex has been disenchanted in the post-1960s West, leaving us with a society that (ostensibly) believes sex means nothing.
Sexual disenchantment is a natural consequence of the liberal privileging of freedom over all other values, because, if you want to be utterly free, you have to take aim at any kind of social restrictions that limit you, particularly the belief that sex has some unique, intangible value--some specialness that is difficult to rationalise...But when we attempt to disenchant sex, and so pretend that this particular act is neither uniquely wonderful nor uniquely violating, then there is another kind of cost.
That cost falls disproportionately on women...
Why that cost falls disproportionately upon women, according to Perry, is something we will soon get to in this series. Today just a comment about the enchantment and disenchantment of sex.
As you might expect, as the author of Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age, I sat up and took notice when Perry described modern sex as "disenchanted." What is interesting in Perry's argument is that disenchantment is typically described as resulting from reason and the advance of science. But Perry makes the point that liberalism, in its quest for freedom, has also been a source of disenchantment. And we see this perhaps most especially in the area of sex. Sexual "emancipation" has to disregard any notion that sex is special or sacred.
The word "holy" means "to set apart." Anything we experience as sacred or special requires some form of "set apartness." It's a simple idea. If, say, you have a special set of dishes you only pull them out for Thanksgiving. And you only get a birthday cake one day of the year. For something to be "special" it needs some separation from the everyday. This "set apartness" is what separates the sacred from the profane, the special from the ordinary, and the enchanted from the disenchanted.
Perry's point is that when sex is stripped of its sacred, special and enchanted "set apartness" there are some relational and emotional costs. To be "liberated" sex has to become meaningless. So if you want sex to be "more," as emotionally and relationally meaning-full, well, you're just going to have to eat those feelings. As Perry will describe, women are the ones generally eating those emotional and relational feelings, carrying the costs of meaningless sex. Men, by contrast, benefit from the disenchantment of sex. Meaningless sex facilitates a transactional approach to sex that suits men much more than women.
So, yes, the sexual revolution has knocked down taboos and liberated us. But at a cost. Which raises a natural question: Who is paying that price?
