Writer and campaigner Louise Perry will publish a book in 2022 that'll make you question everything you thought you knew about the sexual revolution and its gift to women.

In it, Perry mounts a counterfactual challenge to the story we often tell ourselves in the West about this epoch of the 20th century. We often assume that the social and cultural changes of the 1960s transformed women from a sexually repressed class into a class freed from biology, commitment and stigma. Moreover, we assume based on the prevailing progress narrative of our time that the more explicitly sexualised our culture has become, the more sexually liberated women have become also.

But there is ample evidence today suggesting the costs of the sexual revolution have been dear for women. Perry shows how, so often, the barriers that were removed to make way for women's sexual liberation were in fact guardrails that protected them from extortion, humiliation and acts of violence perpetrated by men.

She and Jack Aldane, the host and producer of The Booking Club, met at The Bingham Riverhouse in Richmond to discuss.

Perry writes a weekly column for the New Statesman and is also the Press Officer for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This, which documents cases in which UK women have been killed and defendants have claimed in court that they died as a result of ‘rough sex’.

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