Sex and the City‘s Samantha captured the ethos of a certain brand of sex-positive feminism when she candidly declared that she liked to “fuck like a man.” In her new book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, British writer Louise Perry denies such a thing is possible. Her thesis sounds like something one would expect from a conservative evangelical parachurch ministry. Perry’s argument, however, is a feminist polemic against sex-positive feminism.

In an era when BDSM societies populate some colleges campuses, it is certainly countercultural to argue against sex-positivity. Perry stands athwart the tide of sexual liberation and inveighs, “It’s time for a sexual counter-revolution.” That’s because it turns out the beneficiaries of the sexual revolution have been lusty men unfettered from female restraint. Hugh Hefner was its avatar. Rebelling against the religious puritanism of his Midwestern upbringing, Hefner launched Playboy in 1953 with Marilyn Monroe on its cover. With the zeal of a convert, he preached the gospel of sexual freedom, bedding an endless number of blond twenty-somethings along the way. (At the Playboy Mansion, an elderly Hefner would recline on his bed while being mounted by a succession of girls who encouraged him with chants of “Fuck her daddy!”) Playboy‘s advocacy for access to contraception and abortion rights seemed purposely designed to shield men from any consequences from their sexual profligacy.

Rejecting the plasticity of postmodern sexual identity, Perry speaks of the “hard limits imposed by biology.” Siding with nature over nurture, she argues that there are intrinsic differences between men and women which influence their sexual desires. Women, who prior to contraceptives risked pregnancy with any sexual encounter, prefer relationships that offer commitment and intimacy. (Women are much less likely to reach orgasm during casual sex and more prone to “catch feelings.”) Men, impelled by the biological imperative to spread their seed, can more easily disengage from their partners. Hookup culture, facilitated by apps like Tinder, rewards male promiscuity. (One male user brags, “You could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”)

Perry takes issue with “consent” as the only ethical criterion sexual liberals use to adjudicate the appropriateness of any sexual activity. She “prioritises virtue over desire.” Some desires are undesirable, and our moral intuition should play a role in evaluating them. Few sex-positive feminists, she contends, are “willing to draw the link between the culture of sexual hedonism they promote and anxieties over campus rape.” Indeed, the sexual milieu of young women in the early 21st century is presented as one of unrelieved misery, with patriarchal sexism tarted up as empowering sex-positivity. The revelations of the #MeToo movement bely the notion behind the old Virginia Slims slogan: “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby.” Perry bemoans the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon as female concession to male aggression. Pornography both reflects male sexual desire and refracts it. Porn depicts rough emotionless sex featuring acts (such as anal sex) that appeal to male aggression. In porn, Perry writes, “women are shown begging men for painful or degrading sex acts.” She’s not surprised when women acquiesce to such practices in their private lives.

Taking her cue from Max Weber, Perry writes of a “sexual disenchantment” born of the sexual revolution, which is the notion that “sex has no intrinsic specialness, that it is not innately different from any other kind of social interaction.” In late capitalism, sex is commodified. Prostitution is recast as “sex work.” In this barren wasteland, she seeks to establish a more substantial sexual ethic than that of mere consent: “We should aspire to love and mutuality in all of our sexual relationships.”

Although Perry’s perspective is entirely secular, her tropes resemble those I encountered coming of age in the purity culture. The predatory male libido threatens female virtue. Porn is inherently degrading. Sex is imbued with an intrinsic meaning that can’t be reduced to mere physicality and finds its true purpose within the context of a committed relationship (namely marriage). Her conservatism is shared by those “icky” religious fundamentalists she would otherwise not choose to associate with.

“A truly feminist project,” Perry writes “would demand that…it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual appetites.” If male sexual aggression is largely biologically determined, as she suggests elsewhere in her book, that may be a fool’s errand. Take the aggression depicted in porn. Its brutishness unleashes latent desires that sexual purity codes strove (with varying levels of success) to rein in or rechannel. “Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer,” wrote Camille Paglia. When I’m watching a rough porn scene, I’m stirred at a primal level. The “love and mutuality” Perry seeks is nowhere to be found. Speaking as a male who has furtively taken advantage of the opportunities afforded by the sexual revolution, I suspect there’s little appetite for a counterrevolution among men.