According to Louise Perry in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution , sex has become "disenchanted," stripped of its special, sacred character. Sex is "no big deal. It's "just sex," after all. As Perry will argue, the disenchantment of sex has a relational and emotional price, a cost mostly paid by women. Perry making this argument:.
It is in their interest [the Hugh Hefners of the world, and playboys like him] to push a particularly radical idea about sex that has come out of the sexual revolution and has proved remarkably influential, despite its harms. This is the idea that sex is nothing more than a leisure activity, invested with meaning only if the participants choose to give it meaning. Proponents of this idea argue that sex has no intrinsic specialness, that it is not innately different from any other kind of social interaction, and that it can therefore be commodified without any trouble.
The sociologist Max Weber described the 'disenchantment' of the natural world that resulted from the Enlightenment, as the ascendence of rationality stripped away the sense of magic In much the same way, sex has been disenchanted in the posts West, leaving us with a society that ostensibly believes sex means nothing.
Sexual disenchantment is a natural consequence of the liberal privileging of freedom over all other values, because, if you want to be utterly free, you have to take aim at any kind of social restrictions that limit you, particularly the belief that sex has some unique, intangible value--some specialness that is difficult to rationalise But when we attempt to disenchant sex, and so pretend that this particular act is neither uniquely wonderful nor uniquely violating, then there is another kind of cost.
Why that cost falls disproportionately upon women, according to Perry, is something we will soon get to in this series. Today just a comment about the enchantment and disenchantment of sex.
