Unfortunately, The WSJ requires a subscription to read most of their content, but sometimes they allow a few articles to be accessed for free.
In any case, I've highlighted several of the more important parts of her column which is titled, "How the Sexual Revolution Has Hurt Women." Ms.Perry writes:
Critics of free-market capitalism have observed that the pleasures of freedom are not equally available to all....the group of people who have done particularly well from the free-marketization of sex are men high in the personality trait that psychologists call “sociosexuality”: the desire for sexual variety.Much of this is well-known, of course, although many feminists have tried to gloss over the differences and portray women as just as "sociosexual" as men. One tragic result is the "hookup" culture:
The standard questionnaire used by researchers to assess sociosexuality asks respondents how many different partners they have had sex with in the past 12 months, how many partners they have had sex with on only one occasion, and how often they have spontaneous fantasies about having sex with someone they just met, among other questions.
Men, on average, prefer to have more sex and with a larger number of partners, while the vast majority of women, if given the option, prefer a committed relationship to casual sex. Sex buyers are almost exclusively male, and men watch a lot more pornography than women do.
Men and women also differ dramatically in their baseline levels of sexual disgust, with women much more likely to be revolted by the prospect of someone they find unattractive.
Disgust induces a physiological response that can be measured through heart and respiration rate, blood pressure and salivation, although the individual may not be aware of these indicators, and studies find that, on average, the sexual disgust threshold is much lower for women than it is for men.
Being groped in a crowd, or leered at while traveling alone, or propositioned a little too forcefully in a bar—all of these situations can provoke this horrible emotion.
It is an emotion that women in the sex industry are forced to repress. In fact, as the prostitution survivor Rachel Moran has written, the ability not to cry or vomit in response to sexual fear and disgust is one of the essential “skills” demanded by the industry.
It is crucial to remember that the sociosexuality difference between the sexes is an average one: There are some women who are exceptionally high in sociosexuality, and there are some men who are low in it.
In the West, hookup culture is normative among adolescents and young adults. Although it is possible for young women to opt out, research suggests that only a minority do.If men and women are psychologically the same why do so many women feel guilt and so few men do? Why do women often feel uised and men rarely do? It seems that women have much to lose in the "hookup" culture and nothing much to gain.
Absent some kind of religious commitment, this is now the “normal” route presented to girls as they become sexually active. And hookup culture demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to match male sexuality and thus meet the male demand for no-strings sex.
In a sexual marketplace in which such a culture prevails, a woman who refuses to participate puts herself at a disadvantage. As one group of researchers put it, “some individual women may be capitulating to men’s preferences for casual sexual encounters because, if they do not, someone else will.”
Yet studies consistently find that following hookups, women are more likely than men to experience regret, low self-esteem and mental distress. Female pleasure is rare during casual sex....Instead, a lot of women seem to be having unpleasant sex out of a sense of obligation.
If you’re a young woman launched into a sexual culture that is fundamentally not geared toward protecting your safety or well-being, in which you are considered valuable only in a very narrow, physical sense, and if your basic options seem to be either hooking up or celibacy, then a comforting myth of “agency” can be attractive.
But this myth depends on naiveté about the nature of male sexuality. Too many young women today ignore the fact that men are generally much better suited to emotionless sex and find it much easier to regard their sexual partners as disposable.
Too many fail to recognize that being desired by men is not at all the same thing as being held in high esteem.
It isn’t nice to think of oneself as disposable or to acknowledge that other people view you that way. It’s easier to turn away from any acknowledgment of what is really going on, at least temporarily.
I’ve spoken to many women who participated in hookup culture when they were young and years later came to realize just how unhappy it made them. As one friend put it, “I told myself so many lies, so many lies."
If you’re a woman who’s had casual sexual relationships with men in the past, you might try answering the following questions as honestly as you can: Did you consider your virginity to be an embarrassing burden you wanted to be rid of? Do you ever feel disgusted when you think about consensual sexual experiences you’ve had in the past?
Have you ever become emotionally attached to a casual sexual partner and concealed this attachment from him? Have you ever done something sexually that you found painful or unpleasant and concealed this discomfort from your partner, either during sex or afterward?
If you answer “no” to all of these questions, your high sociosexuality and good luck have allowed you to navigate successfully a treacherous sexual marketplace. But if you answer “yes” to any of them, you are entitled to feel angry at a sexual culture that set you up to fail.
Today’s sexual culture however, prefers to understand people as freewheeling, atomized individuals, all looking out for number one and all up for a good time. It assumes that if all sexual taboos were removed, we would all be liberated and capable of making entirely free choices about our sexual lives, sampling from a menu of delightful options made newly available by the sexual revolution.The revolution in sexuality has put young women in a very difficult spot:
In fact, our choices are severely constrained, because we are impressionable creatures who absorb the values and ideas of our surrounding culture. If I am, for instance, a young female student looking for a boyfriend at my 21st-century university, and I don’t want to have sex before marriage, then I will find my options limited in a way that they wouldn’t have been in 1950.
When sex before marriage is expected, and when almost all of the other women participating in my particular sexual market are willing to have sex on a first or second date, then not being willing to do the same becomes a competitive disadvantage.So who are the winners in all this? It's certainly not young women.
The abstinent young woman must either be tremendously attractive, in order to out-compete her more permissive peers, or she must be content to restrict her dating pool to those men who are as unusual as she is. Being eccentric carries costs.
It's a biological fact that, on average, men are innately more promiscuous than women. Men must be taught from the time they're young, preferably by their father, to value one woman above others, to value their children and to value their home.
Women, on the other hand, must be taught that if they want their man to suppress his innate desire to wander she must show him that she values him as a man, a provider and a protector.
None of that is easy in a culture in which so many children grow up fatherless, surrounded by sexual stimuli and voices telling them that "women need a man like a fish needs a bicycle," but it's the most reliable way for women, men and children to achieve happiness and self-respect.
Ms. Perry concludes with this:
The word “chivalry” is now deeply unfashionable, but it describes something of what we need.
As the feminist theorist Mary Harrington writes: “‘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.”