Divorce, hook-ups and violent porn – have women been harmed by the sexual revolution?

The “sexual script” that’s part of our culture is “aggressive and loveless”, encouraging hook-ups, unhappy one-night stands — in which, she claims, 90% of women don’t experience orgasm — and a promiscuity which involves, for many women, hurtful rejection and lower self-worth. Instead of sending “selfies”, young girls are asked to send “belfries” (screenshots of their bottom) in response to young males sending “d***” shots of their penis.

This, says Perry, is the metaphor of seeing the sexual person as just a piece of meat.

Each generation re-invents the wheel, it seems: and Ms Perry (30) has concluded that monogamous marriage (which is at its lowest point ever recorded in the UK) is the best route to a fulfilled sexual relationship, and a happy family life.

Marriage can be tough, but it involves commitment, which is, deep down, what most women want. Easy divorce and casual cohabitation erodes that commitment from the start, because expectations are altered.

Perry isn’t religious, or a full-on social conservative: she supports abortion rights, although she adds that “abortion is not a good experience”.

She cheered the sexual revolution as a younger woman. But after graduating, she worked in a rape crisis centre, and that opened her eyes about the way that sexual freedom has given certain men the green light to use and abuse women.

If porn and “go for it” is all around, why not?

Having lived through this sexual revolution myself, I get what Perry is saying, and it’s significant that she pinpoints the contraceptive pill as the trigger point that changed everything. For the entire history of the human race, sexual activity has carried the risk of pregnancy, and the transmission of disease.

In the 1960s, both these risks seemed to have been eliminated — the pill removed the consequence of pregnancy, and antibiotics could quickly cure sexually-transmitted disease.

While serious and responsible people debated good parenthood, planned families, and relieving overburdened mothers, many of us just thought: “Whee! No more rules!”

In the wake of the pill, some of us went a bit wild, if I recall (although I’d rather not recall at all). The fetters which had chained women, and penalised them if they fell from grace, had melted away.

Who cared about fuddy-duddy restrictions which had inhibited our freedoms?

And the sexual revolution did liberate people from fear of sexual experience, from needless inhibitions, from fear of repeated pregnancies, indeed, and, as divorce became more acceptable, from unhappy marriages.

Yet Perry claims that the permissive British Divorce Act of 1969 — which would be copied in many other countries, including, later, in the Republic — may have freed some individuals from miserable unions, but it did a much wider damage to collective society, by undermining wedlock as a lifelong commitment.

The rise of single parenting, she writes, is not a good outcome for society. Surprisingly, she even suggests that the stigma against unmarried mothers existed for a reason — to deter women from taking on this monumental task of raising children on their own, and to incentivise men to take responsibility for their offspring.

The unravelling of marriage has led to more “deadbeat dads”, as well as struggling single parents with casual partners — not in the best interest of children.

Perry insists she is not the “new Mary Whitehouse”; but she does praise Whitehouse for her early campaigns against paedophilia.

While the BBC was mocking Mrs Whitehouse for her prudery, it was employing and promoting Jimmy Savile.

Social movements are often a corrective to a previous excess. I see the rise of the #MeToo movement as such a corrective against a sexual liberation which often did exploit women. “Consent” is an effort to try to restore the boundaries that existed before the sexual revolution, although Perry thinks it has a limited scope set against the power of the porn industry and its influence.

There have always been cads and bounders, just as there have always been vamps and nymphos. Bohemians, and an upper class, sometimes got away with breaking the rules — Maud Gonne was an unmarried mother, but her position was socially respected. But Perry is surely correct in one respect: rules of some kind there must be.

Without boundaries there can be a lot of emotional, and sometimes actual, hurt.