Three years ago, I published The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, a book full of advice on sexual relationships. This year, I published a new version of the book, intended for a teenage audience. There are dozens of pieces of advice in both books, on everything from alcohol to step-parents to BDSM. Nothing radical – the sort of things your grandmother would have regarded as common sense.

In interviews I’ve done about the books, one of the most common requests that I’ve had has been for just one piece of advice – a kind of meta rule. It’s a big ask. The answer I’ve usually come up with – more or less elegantly – is that we should pay more attention to our instincts.  

The book I’m thinking of when I speak about instinct is security consultant Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear, which made a big and deserved splash when it was published almost twenty years ago, spending months on The New York Times bestseller list and winning Oprah’s endorsement. In this highly practical book, de Becker relates the stories of dozens of women who felt that something was off about a particular man, or a particular situation, but repressed their feelings of fear because they didn’t want to seem impolite, and ended up being attacked as a consequence. The fear instinct is a gift, says de Becker. Use it.

But I concede that instinct, in general, can be a tricky thing. Sigmund Freud famously insisted that civilization is built upon “a renunciation of instinct.” Freud was thinking in particular of aggression and sexual desire, and he was right to point out that repressing these instincts – at least partially – is essential to becoming a properly socialised adult. And yet, said Freud, the process of repression is imperfect and painful. Sometimes instinct bubbles up, however hard you try.   

We train our children to resist this bubbling up, and so we should – at least some of the time. When I say “listen to your instincts” I don’t mean that any of us should be slaves to our basest desires, and nor am I advising my teenage readers to become violent hedonists (I don’t think many grandmothers would approve of that kind of advice).

But I do worry, not only that we’ve gone too far in our repression efforts, but also that we’ve been working on repressing entirely the wrong instincts. De Becker was writing for a readership – mostly female – who were so nice, and gentle, and easily embarrassed that they would put themselves in danger rather than appear rude. That was in the 1990s. Since then, an increasingly extreme form of progressive politics has layered on a brand new set of demands: that we should not only distrust instincts like fear and disgust, but that we should disbelieve our own eyes if they reveal something politically inconvenient.

Take the progressive insistence, against all the evidence, that men and women are psychologically identical, and that if a woman is ever reluctant to (as Sex and the City termed it) “have sex like a man”, that must be because of her own lamentable hang-ups. In their confusion, young women have coined a new term, ‘demisexual’, to describe a woman who doesn’t want to participate in hookup culture, i.e. a woman who has sexual instincts entirely typical of her sex.

It's not only young women who are confused by what they’re “supposed” to feel about sex. I‘m reminded of a friend of a friend who decided to experiment with polyamory and found himself, on the night of his wife’s first sexual encounter with another man, locked in the bathroom vomiting copiously on the floor. His negative response to the experience of being cuckolded was visceral, in the literal meaning of the word. His body communicated a truth to him that the polyamory community doesn’t like to talk about: that jealousy is instinctive.

The demands of the transgender movement are the most extreme manifestation of this aversion to instinct. State institutions in my home country of Britain so eagerly acceded to the demands of trans activists that we have seen absurd and disturbing abuses of state power, such as the 2020 prosecution of an autistic teenager who asked “is it a boy or a girl?” in the presence of a police officer who identified as trans. The human brain recognizes a person's sex in as little as 60-70 milliseconds of first seeing his or her face. It is hard to think of a more fundamental instinct, nor a more sinister form of state repression. 

An expansion of my attempt at a meta rule, then: not only should we pay more attention to our instincts, we should also pay a great deal more attention to any kind of activism that tells us to do the opposite.