Revolutionary Discontents

Perry is one of a squad of young women writers, many, like her, British, now fixing a cold eye on the sexual revolution, whose precepts saturated the culture they grew up in. They are far from the first to notice that women’s sexual liberation did not usher in the hoped-for free-love utopia. Already in the 1970s, sex radicals like Ellen Willis and Susan Brownmiller were voicing complaints about male ignorance of female anatomy and their misogynistic insensitivity to women’s pleasure.