Book Review: Sexual Revolution - Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback
Laurie Penny’s latest Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback examines gender politics from all angles. Specifically, Penny takes an oft-repeated phrase like ‘the patriarchy’ and breaks it down. Penny says as much in their description of the book on its cover: “its a story about sex and power and trauma and resistance and persistence”. In their work, Penny gets to the crux of the matter–how gender-based power relations permeate society and our lives–and why we should care about the potentiality of a sexual revolution.
Penny–a British writer and journalist whose resume boasts by-lines in The Guardian and New York Times, as well as their long-running blog Penny Red– is no stranger to writing on feminism. While I’ve not read much of Penny’s work prior to Sexual Revolution, I would argue that their skill as a writer lies in the effortlessness of their argument. It is a Foucault-inspired concept: that our understanding of the world is shaped by the power structures and dynamics that shape it. For Penny, it is gender-based power relations that lie central to our experience as women and gender-diverse people. The personal is political, the political is personal, and gender and sex are both personal and political. Penny, however, is not merely pontificating about how hard-done we are by the patriarchy. They are positing that at that in this point in time, significant shifts are happening–we are at the dawn of a sexual revolution.
To demonstrate Penny’s thesis about the intersection between personal and political, take for instance the way that the author writes about romantic relationships. In the chapter Labours of Love, Penny’s sense is that sexism does not exist in a vacuum where our personal relationships are spared:
“I’m routinely surprised by the number of decent, progressive, empathetic men… who nonetheless seem to believe that the way they behave in intimate relationships with women exists in a magical sphere separate from politics” (p. 128).
The point here is less about overt sexism and more about intrinsic power. Where men are free to embrace their professional success–and pursue romantic partners much younger than them who may find this particularly attractive– women experience a different reality. Penny argues that women are often expected to dull their own shine in the pursuit of romantic relationships. Essentially, patriarchal gender roles inform us to the extent that we conform to them to secure a romantic relationship–under the patriarchy, we can’t have it all. This isn’t where Penny’s thought ends, though– they argue that more and more women are moving away from traditional roles in the pursuit of independence and personal success (see: falling marriage and birth rates). For Penny, this is one aspect of the incoming sexual revolution.
Similar small-scale revolutions can, and indeed are occurring, Penny argues. In Bad Sex, Penny details the ways in which our culture denigrates queer and female sexuality–pleasure simply matters less. The good news, however, is that “good sex is still possible, once you stop looking to white supremacy and to patriarchy to define its terms” (p. 87). The revolution is in moving beyond how our bodies and experiences are defined for us. In Without Our Consent, Penny invites us to continue to stress the importance of consent and bodily autonomy, and to not stop challenging institutional sexual violence and supporting survivors in their pursuit of truth.
Penny’s book is dense, in that it is an interrogation of the who, what, and why gender-violence is allowed to occur. But in some ways, their writing is uninhabited–which makes for an engaging read. At the same time, by virtue of the fact that this is a book about lived experience, evidence is often anecdotal, so some readers may find themselves vying for a bit more structure. All in all, though, Penny’s claim is a bold and important one: the consequences for misogyny are vast.
Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback is available to purchase from Bloomsbury Publishing now. For more info or to order now, click here.