To more and more people, the promises of sex-positive liberal feminism feel empty. The sexual ideas that have dominated feminism in the last two decades — including that sexual liberation always serves women’s interests, that consent is the only relevant sexual ethic, and that consuming porn and buying sex are benign practices like any other — are beginning to ring hollow.

In this context, an emergent theoretical strand with the pointed, self-chosen name “reactionary feminism” has drawn considerable attention. It calls into question the liberal assertion that every form of sexual morality is anti-feminist — a view the Left has absorbed in recent decades. Although they work to maintain an appearance of ideological ambivalence, reactionary feminists are aligned with the post-liberal right, and they are finding success in attracting to that project women who are disenchanted with feminism’s wholesale embrace of sexual openness for its own sake. Their prescriptions are often at odds with what many feminists would consider emancipatory, but they are identifying real flaws in liberal feminism, and the Left should take notice.

At the forefront of this new conservative feminism are British authors Mary Harrington and Louise Perry. Both have written popular books on how postwar sexual liberation in the West has failed women.