In Defence of Female Promiscuity

Women's freedom is a myth. Or so we're told. If there is one thing that right and left can agree on, it's that this is a very bad time to be female. Misogyny is everywhere and, as the right would have it, thanks to a big fat liberal lie known as the sexual revolution, it is worse than ever. The death of courtship, duty and marriage are nails in the coffin of female happiness.

The left has its own muddled ideas about sex, duty and marriage, but it knows this: girls' and women's bodies are an inventory of pain and suffering that needs to be outed, from period pain to menopause to endometriosis. Indeed, the narrative of female bodily disadvantage is so extreme that experts are beginning to admit it is at least partially responsible for the 5,000 per cent rise in girls reporting to gender clinics claiming to be boys.

Increasingly, in the schemes of both right and left, women's agency is vanishing. In both, they are fragile, eminently breakable, and constantly facing a risk of permanent damage. Fear is everywhere and yet we're at a moment and a place in which women have never ever had it so good.

This book is a call for women - and society - to get back in touch with the joy, freedom and power that Zoe and her female peers, evidently born in a lucky window (post-feminism, pre-Internet), saw opening up before them and, to some degree, have realised.

Dr Zoe Strimpel is a journalist, author, broadcaster, debater and academic historian. She has been a flagship columnist at the Telegraph since 2017, a columnist at the Jewish Chronicle since 2022, and has a regular slot on Radio Four's essay programme 'A Point of View'. She writes weekly for the Spectator, and has also written for the Guardian, TLS, FT, and New Statesman. She is the author of three previous books, including an academic monograph based on her doctoral work called Seeking Love in Modern Britain (Bloomsbury Academic). The Telegraph gave it five stars, describing it as 'like watching Love Island with Foucault'.

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