Paedophilia is now condemned by liberals and conservatives alike, alongside a clutch of other paraphilias, including necrophilia and bestiality. For liberals, the wall between licit and illicit sexual behavior is now built upon an emphasis on consent...The problem with paedophilia, according to this argument, is that children can't consent, and therefore any sexual activity involving them will always be unacceptable...
But upon closer scrutiny, the consent argument fall apart. Liberals may be able to accept the banning of child porn without any qualms, since it necessitates the abuse of real children in its production, but what about images that the police term 'pseudo-photographs' that appear to depict real children? What about illustrations? What about adults dressing up and pretending to be children during sex? What about porn performers who appear to be very young? What about porn performers who make themselves look even younger? ...
Perry's point is that the sexual revolution lacks the moral competency to declare pedophilic-adjacent sexual desires and activity as illicit. Since no one is being harmed, no one can object. In short, the ethic of the sexual revolution is too narrow to capture all we want to declare bad or wrong in the sexual arena.
Perry goes on to describe other desires that most of us would consider illicit, along with the grey areas surrounding issues of consent. Perry reviews some #MeToo cases, like that of comedian Aziz Ansari, where consent was technically given but where everyone agrees that the man behaved badly. In case after case, our moral appraisals exceed and go beyond the narrow ethic of consent. There's so much we want to say about sex, but lack the moral framework to have the conversations and render moral judgments. The ethic of the sexual revolution is too thin and impoverished to handle the complexity of our sexual lives and the moral intuitions we all experience in making judgments, from paraphilias to the ambiguities of consent revealed by #MeToo.
Perry concludes the chapter by making a case for character, what she describes as "the virtue of repression." That's a provocative claim, given how the sexual revolution has stigmatized sexual repression. Today, repressing your sexual impulses is considered to be unhealthy Victorian prudishness. We've been encouraged to express ourselves and gratify our every sexual desire. But as Perry points out in this chapter, not everything we desire is good. Some desires are bad, and we should work to repress those desires. This seems like common sense, but the sexual revolution is quiet on this point. Worse, in many cases, as with pedophilic-adjacent or violent pornography, the sexual revolution encourages bad desires.
For Perry, the repression of bad sexual desires is an act of care that serves a protective function. Mortifying my bad desires makes room for a concern about the other, about what they most need and want. Perry writes,
I can't pretend that this is an easy issue to resolve, because 'How should we behave sexually?' is really just another way of asking 'How should we behave?' and, after a millennia of effort, we are nowhere near reaching an agreement on the answer to that question. Nevertheless, here is my attempt at a contribution: we should treat our sexual partners with dignity. We should not regard other people as merely body parts to be enjoyed. We should aspire to love and mutuality in all our sexual relationships, regardless of whether they are gay or straight. We should prioritize virtue over desire. We should not assume that any given feeling we discover in our hearts (or our loins) ought to be acted upon...
A sophisticated system of sexual ethics needs to demand more of people, and, as the stronger and hornier sex, men must demonstrate even greater restraint than women when faced with temptation. The word 'chivalry' is now deeply unfashionable, but it describes something of what I'm calling for.
Perry goes on to quote the feminist theorist Mary Harrington:
'Chivalrous' social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist. But...the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise.
We can discuss the various topics discussed above, from the grey areas revealed by #MeToo to the normalizing of pedophilia in our culture to the morality of pornography to if chivalry is good or bad for women. But the key point Perry is making that I want to highlight is summed up in her comment that we need to "prioritize virtue over desire." The point here is that the sexual revolution cannot deliver on what it promises. If we want our sexual lives to be characterized by mutuality, care, concern, kindness, and dignity--to say nothing about love--we need virtue to deliver that package. Desire itself will not get us to the Promised Land. Desire can, though, pave the highway to hell.
Simply put, given the harm and damage we can do to each other, sexuality demands more than consent, it demands goodness. And goodness is a virtue that demands the mastery of desires, especially bad ones. The "virtue of repression" isn't a retreat into a pearl-clutching puritanism, but the moral foundation of a mutual, concerned, care-full, other-oriented sexuality.
Virtue is how we come to treat our sexual partners with care and dignity. We need character as much as consent.
