When she was in her early twenties, the Argentine journalist Tamara Tenenbaum went to the apartment of a man she occasionally slept with. It was 10:00 PM and she had missed dinner, having arrived straight from university. Was there anything in the fridge, she asked? “‘I didn’t bring you here to eat,’ he answered, annoyed.” Once she realized he wasn’t joking, she recalls, “I simply smiled and lay on his bed.” After sex, he didn’t offer her so much as “a slice of cheese and some crackers,” and she left, still hungry.
He didn’t hit her or call her names, but the brutality of his response, his frank assertion that no bodily need of hers should stand in the way of his own sexual satisfaction, shocks me each time I read that passage. And yet Tenenbaum acknowledges that she readily accepted it. “In general, we had a good time,” she writes in The End of Love, one of a number of recent books arguing that we’re doing sex all wrong and that contemporary sexual culture neglects the needs of, or even harms, heterosexual women in particular.
Since the late nineteenth century, writers from a wide range of disciplines—including philosophy, social science, and psychology—have attempted to analyze and diagnose the sexual culture of their time. Several of these analyses, written or published during the hopeful interregnum of the Biden administration and in the wake of Me Too, seek to explain why, despite having been raised by feminist mothers or at least exposed to pop feminism from an early age, a generation of heterosexual women still experiences desire so unequally. Despite rising anti-feminist backlash, women today are “winning” in many areas of life—they form the majority of college graduates in the US and an increasing share of homebuyers—so why do they wield so little agency when it comes to sex? How did we wind up, in Tenenbaum’s piercing image, with “an entire sisterhood waiting torturously by the phone”?
One answer lies in the various ways that our intimate lives have taken on the worst features of the free market—inequality, precarity, impersonality. This is the argument made in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, an unpersuasive polemic by the British columnist, antirape campaigner, and self-described “reactionary feminist” Louise Perry. She writes that contemporary sexual culture, based on casual sex and hookups, fails women while benefiting men. She points to the outpouring of Me Too–era stories from women describing “sexual encounters that were technically consensual but nevertheless left them feeling terrible,” because, in Perry’s analysis, “they were being asked to treat as meaningless something that they felt to be meaningful.”
Like Christine Emba in Rethinking Sex—a short, essayistic “provocation” interwoven with anecdotes and interviews with straight, educated professionals, most of them women—Perry is at pains to expose the supposed “free market” of sexual exchange as a buyer’s market in which women are getting a raw deal. Both writers cite women’s preferences for monogamy and committed relationships, as well as survey data showing that men are more open to hookups and more likely to orgasm during a casual encounter. Perry, who worked at a rape crisis center earlier in her career, also believes that casual sex puts women at risk of sexual violence.
Perry argues that rape is not only about power, as Susan Brownmiller theorized and as Perry herself often repeated as a rape crisis worker; it is, actually, also about sex. After reading A Natural History of Rape (2000) by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, Perry comes to believe that rape is an evolutionary strategy, hardwired into men’s behavior, by which a minority of aggressive men spread their genetic material:
Hundreds of thousands of years of sexual violence—not only in our own species but also in many others—is not a consequence of some kind of misunderstanding, swiftly cleared up during a 45-minute workshop in which kids are told in words of one syllable not to rape one another.
This evolutionary account doesn’t go very far in explaining why and how consensual sexual encounters, even ones between steady partners, have taken a turn for the mediocre. In Rethinking Sex, Emba recounts how Kirsten, “a perfect stranger,” pulled her aside at a house party in Washington, D.C., and told her about her new boyfriend, who was funny, good-looking, smart, and gainfully employed. “But,” she continued, “he chokes me during sex?”
She didn’t really like the choking, Kirsten explained, but she really liked him. She wasn’t sure whether to say anything, or even if it could actually be considered a valid problem. After all, sex like this was something that she’d said yes to; and she had definitely said yes to him—it was the bargain one made in order to leap off the dating app carousel into the arms of an otherwise great guy. And anyway, this kind of thing had happened to her friends too—the norm for heterosexual hookups seemed to have changed. Vanilla was out, extremes were to be expected.
Why, I wondered, did Kirsten (and dozens of others like her in the book) seem unable to simply communicate with her boyfriend about her sexual preferences? What was stopping her from exercising what the scholars Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan would call her “sexual citizenship”? Did her boyfriend think she liked it, or did he not seem to care? How much could he be blamed individually, and how much could be ascribed to his upbringing, schooling, experience with previous girlfriends who accepted or even seemed to enjoy his proclivities, or simply to cues from film, video games, pornography, music, or any of the other social and cultural phenomena that shape our preferences without our necessarily knowing it?
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Both Emba and Perry use the metaphor of an unregulated marketplace to describe this anything-goes sexual culture where everyone operates as a free, unfettered agent; both also link this sexual culture to a broader capitalist ethos of choice, freedom, and transaction. For women especially, this freedom is an illusion. Tenenbaum offers a sociological theory, referencing work by scholars such as Eva Illouz and Chris Haywood to explain that men cultivate emotional detachment in order “to keep control of the relationship.” Emba and Perry both emphasize biology, pointing to women’s shorter fertile windows and, in Perry’s case, concepts from evolutionary psychology, such as parental investment theory, which claims that the asymmetrical physical consequences of sex motivate women to be more selective about their mates. (This argument is less convincing in an era of reliable contraception that, at the time of writing at least, is still readily accessible to the urban professionals Perry appears to be addressing.)
I’d offer another explanation, one more in line with a market analogy. Perhaps it is relevant that Washington, D.C., where Kirsten presumably lives, has one of the most lopsided ratios of educated straight women to educated straight men in the country, or that since the 1980s American women have been outstripping men in gaining bachelor’s degrees. As three sociologists studying assortative mating recently observed, “a college degree is the dividing line across which it is most difficult to intermarry.” Did Kirsten believe that if she upset her boyfriend by telling him she didn’t like to be choked during sex, he would leave her and she would struggle to find another, more suitable boyfriend? In Emba’s telling, Kirsten knows—by the numbers or simply in her gut—that the odds are not in her favor, and she has made a calculated decision to trade episodic sex for the daily companionship that so many people desire.
If Kirsten was scared to just walk away, her fears were not unfounded. A recent survey found that 45 percent of college-educated women say that not being able to find someone who meets their expectations is a major factor in why they are not dating, compared with 28 percent of women without a college education and 33 percent of college-educated men. And today’s straight singles are mismatched from a purely economic perspective too. A 2019 paper compared the existing supply of American single men to men whom educated women had already married, and found that the married men were more likely to be college-educated, employed, and higher-earning than those still up for grabs.
That study’s conclusion—that educated women in the US face “large deficits in the supply of potential male spouses”—would likely not surprise any of the women in Emba’s book or, to be honest, any woman who has tried dating in a major metropolis. In Motherhood on Ice (2023), the sociologist Marcia Inhorn found that 82 percent of the 150 college-educated, professional women she surveyed in the US cited a lack of a partner as the reason for freezing their eggs. (Inhorn also notes that while Silicon Valley has a high ratio of educated men to women, women in that city repeatedly told her that while “the odds are good…the goods are odd.”) But while egg freezing may help to compensate for some of the asymmetry in the reproductive periods of women and men, the most recent data, from 2022, shows that fewer than 30,000 women freeze their eggs every year, so it can’t address the broader demographic imbalance that is particularly acute in certain parts of the country, nor the disagreeable male behavior that appears to result. A thirty-four-year-old law student describes to Emba an endless run of “bullshit shenanigans” with men who lack “the initiative to be reliable partners, because sex is both so casual and so available.”
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Perry borrows from the economic historian R.H. Tawney, dividing the sexual marketplace’s participants into predatory pikes and vulnerable minnows. Inspired by labor rights and redistributive measures that protect the minnows from unbridled exploitation by the pikes, Perry calls for “a sophisticated system of sexual ethics.” She asks men, “as the stronger and hornier sex,” to “demonstrate even greater restraint than women when faced with temptation.” To extend her market analogy, this seems a bit like asking corporations to operate under stakeholder capitalism instead of shareholder capitalism, to certify as B-corps instead of ruthlessly (or rationally) maximizing their returns. It is an entreaty, not a solution.
In diagnosing the maladies of today’s sex and dating culture, neither Perry nor Emba dwells much on the liberatory possibilities of sex, or its potential for simple physical pleasure—for women as well as men. Nona Willis Aronowitz tackles both, without shying away from the pitfalls of seeking them through an activity that relies on another person’s goodwill. In Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution, she ties together several threads: the collapse of her marriage and her quest for self-discovery through a series of sexual relationships and one-offs; the published and unpublished musings of her mother, the sex-positive feminist writer and music critic Ellen Willis; and a nuanced historical account of how feminists going back more than a century sought to reconcile their ideas, feelings, and actions when it came to love, desire, and autonomy. “What, exactly, do I want?” she asks in the book’s early pages. “And are my sexual and romantic desires even possible amid the horrors and bribes of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy?” In the next sentence, she acknowledges “the complexity and absurdity” of answering those questions.
Her attempts to understand her own conflicting desires are thorough, earnest, and often illuminating. Because Perry and Emba take for granted certain generalizations about what straight women and men want—based on surveys, their own personal experience, and, in Emba’s case, a number of interviews—their arguments lead them naturally toward protecting women and helping them achieve their stated goal of a committed relationship. Willis Aronowitz, meanwhile, is more attuned to those on the margins, to individuals and movements seeking to carve out different paths, giving ample space to the experiences and ideas of earlier generations of feminists of color, free love advocates, and lesbian separatists who hoped to create a world dedicated to women’s needs and desires.
In exploring the concept of vulnerability, she observes how power, identity, and hierarchy shape sexuality and relationships in unexpected ways. The gendered inequality in her relationship with a Chilean lover who once criticized her lack of enthusiasm for blow jobs “while not acknowledging that he’d never once even seen my pussy” is tempered by the greater social and economic power she enjoys by virtue of being “a much richer white American woman,” although the tension between those two forms of power remains unexplored.
Recounting the debate that began in the 1970s between pro-sex feminists, including her mother, who envisioned a genuine sexual freedom that required a more egalitarian world, and antiporn activists who saw pornography as a dehumanizing product of a patriarchal society, she quotes the self-described “Chicana, Catholic-raised lesbian” Cherríe Moraga. In Moraga’s view both antiporn feminists and sexual libertarians overlooked a history of devaluation that already rendered Black and brown women’s bodies vulnerable to sexual violence, leaving them unable “to grasp why it might be harder for women of color to just proudly embrace sexual freedom,” Willis Aronowitz writes. She goes on to discuss Black feminist writers such as Joan Morgan, adrienne maree brown, and Audre Lorde, who have sought to reclaim erotic pleasure as a crucial liberatory aspect of Black female sexuality, which—when not pathologized in “the three paradigms of Jezebel, sexless mammy, and Sapphire”—has often been understood through stories of trauma and violation.
One of the most affecting sections of the book details the sexual exploration of her close friend Selah, which was complicated by the lessons Selah had absorbed from church and from her strict Black single mother. After a series of disappointing and occasionally violent encounters with men, Selah comes to embrace her queerness when she meets a “confident butch named Alexis” during a trip to Atlanta. Alexis breaks her heart, but not before guiding Selah toward self-discovery by taking her to a sex shop to buy a dildo. When Selah asks Alexis which toy she wants to use on her, Alexis turns it around: “Baby. What do you want?” It was a question no one had ever asked her before.
Willis Aronowitz narrates her own journey to unearth her desires with abundant candor. There are ecstatic highs (“He could fuck my mouth with authority and then moan with abandon when I fingered his ass and then suck my clit for a hundred years and then burrow his face in my breasts sweetly, lazily”) and undeserved lows (an encounter with a much younger man who, when she glances up mid-fellatio, turns out to have been filming her). Although Mr. Moan with Abandon reveals himself to be a melodramatic liar, “an unworthy recipient” of her “newfound openness,” Willis Aronowitz nevertheless insists on the value of slogging her way through this thicket of often unimpressive men, describing sex as the terrain on which she conducts her self-exploration. “I had just learned so much about myself through fucking,” she writes at one point. “I’d turned my whole life upside down largely because I’d determined that sexual pleasure was a gigantic priority of mine.”
She winds up in a long-term relationship again, with a man who shares her ideological and practical commitment to nonmonogamy. She admits that this is the path of greater resistance, a recipe for more insecurity, more “serious talks,” more “worry and despair.” Both she and her partner are often exhausted and on edge. Again, she concludes that the effort is worthwhile, leading her to a place of greater integrity: “The best truth I can offer is that while nonmonogamy is not at all relaxing, it also feels worthwhile to excavate the deepest wells of my own generosity and trust.”
I sometimes wondered if there wasn’t an easier, less excruciating way for Willis Aronowitz to discover herself. Why not take a pottery class or visit a museum? Clearly she and I are different people, and while pursuing encounters with whoever happens to be on Tinder that night strikes me as a circuitous route to finding one’s truest self, I worry more that the suggestions offered by Emba and Perry leave little room for someone whose “gigantic priority” is pleasure, or for the feminists of color for whom eroticism and a positive reclamation of sexuality are not only sources of pleasure but important forms of political resistance.
Take Perry’s solution to the problem of a too-liberal sexual culture that rewards men for behaving like cads:
In order to change the incentive structure, we would need a technology that discourages short-termism in male sexual behavior, protects the economic interests of mothers, and creates a stable environment for the raising of children. And we do already have such a technology, even if it is old, clunky and prone to periodic failure. It’s called monogamous marriage.
The passage arrives at the end of a book that depicts men as incorrigible creeps, a not-insignificant share (at least 10 percent in the US and the UK, in her estimation) of whom are inclined to rape, and that acknowledges that a “durable marriage is fast becoming a luxury of the upper classes.” Such a prescription strikes me as not just glib, smug, and unrealistic, but also utterly incoherent in light of everything she has argued in the preceding pages. Whom exactly are women supposed to marry, and why would men give up all the goodies currently available to them—and to which they are, in her telling, evolutionarily disposed—in exchange for matrimony?
Emba (a convert to Catholicism who writes that she opposed premarital sex in her personal life until, after “wrestling with [her] own faith,” she didn’t) guides the reader instead to the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas, and in particular to his admonition to love. His definition of love was “willing the good of the other,” a description not of romantic love per se or even of any form of action, but rather “an intention: to bear goodwill toward another for the sake of that person and not oneself.” Perry herself hopes for a sexual culture that “recognises other human beings as real people, invested with real value and dignity.” Willis Aronowitz writes that “most of the time, a hot one-night stand simply requires being a decent human.”
At the core of all these books is an implicit question: What is sex for? Clearly, just as there is no average sexual encounter, there is not a simple answer to this question. But failing to talk about it, or even to contemplate it, leaves us all poorly equipped to come to anything resembling a shared consensus. Emba concludes that sex with someone you know and care about is better than casual sex with someone you’ve just met, not least because it’s more likely that you’ll have their interests at heart—you’ll be more predisposed to will their good. Not all women, as Perry suggests, want or need sex to be “meaningful,” but sex—or even conversation, as anyone who has politely sat by as someone with high regard for their own ideas blathers on interminably—should be at least informed by a sense of mutuality that goes beyond mere consent.
I’m inclined to think that Willis Aronowitz’s endless “serious talks” with her partner about their open relationship suggest one way forward, whether in monogamous relationships or casual encounters. As I read about the many unpleasant or unsatisfying sexual scenarios depicted in these books, it often seemed the problem was not so much a lack of consent as a lack of communication. At one point, Emba proposes the dinner party as an analogy for an ideal sexual experience: it is governed by “a clear set of rules,” but still offers the chance of surprise, discovery, delight.
I would suggest that a successful dinner party, like an exhilarating sexual encounter, comes down less to the rules and boundaries that proscribe certain behaviors than to the attitudes or intentions with which participants approach it. Curiosity and respect are more likely to get you invited back to either event than ego and selfishness.
Indeed, the sex columnist and writer Dan Savage has pointed out that queer people beginning a flirtation often lead by asking, “What are you into?” Verbal communication that precedes a physical interaction offers a chance to think about and articulate one’s desires. It is also an opportunity to recognize the other person as an equal—someone with ideas, wants, and a voice of their own, instead of simply a body.
But there’s something terribly poignant and frustrating about reading books by sophisticated thinkers who all conclude, in various ways, that we just need to be nicer, in bed and out of it. I wondered whether the people who need to hear this rudimentary message most—straight men—are likely to pick up these books at all. More influential seems to be the discussion of sexual politics playing out online, in which male strength and female submission are celebrated by proudly misogynistic influencers such as Andrew Tate. The professional racist Nick Fuentes’s exultation on the night of Trump’s election—“Your body, my choice. Forever”—went viral. Sexual ethics in a post–Me Too era may not have been clear cut, but these books, for the most part, are attempts to forge a path forward, toward a sexual culture founded on mutual goodwill and respect. It no longer feels like “forward” is where we are headed.
