Top Quotes: “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution” — Nona Willis Aronowitz

“I’m particularly concerned with a dilemma recognizable to many women who fuck men: sex has never been more normalized, feminism has never been more popular, romantic relationships have never been more malleable — yet we still haven’t transcended the binds that make sex and love go bad.

We have not, for instance, succeeded in avoiding dudes who don’t notice we’re having a bad time, or notice but don’t seem to care, or pretend to care but actually don’t. We continue to deal with guys who cross our boundaries in some way, transforming bad sex (or even good sex) into something shitty and murky and scary. We still often end up indulging men’s fantasies rather than our own. We’re told that being vulnerable is the key to love and lust, and yet it’s easier said than done.

Even the most sexually confident among us sometimes hesitate to talk about all this, because we don’t want to hurt our partners’ feelings or seem demanding, because we want to appear as horny as we initially advertised ourselves to be, because the length of time it takes us to orgasm will spoil the mood, because we’re physically or emotionally afraid, because too much is at stake, because we’re simply not sure what we want. We still seem to face unpleasant consequences, both blatant and insidious, when we do talk about certain things that, even in the most progressive circles, are still treated like TMI.”

“This movement was made up of Spiritualists, abolitionists, and nonconformists later labeled “sex radicals” by historians. Both “free love” and “sex radicals” sound lustier than they are. Their philosophy had little to do with promiscuity — in fact, many of these thinkers were disapproving of no-strings-attached sex. Rather, the free lovers believed in the idea that a legal agreement like marriage corrupts an untamed, transcendent force like love. Both women and men, they argued, should be free to conduct their love lives any way they chose without interference from the state.

At that point, the link between love and matrimony was relatively new. For thousands of years, marriage was an unsentimental contract that divided up a household’s workload, which, before washing machines and supermarkets, required a truly mind-boggling amount of labor. It consolidated families and, in the elites’ case, their wealth and power. Up until a few hundred years ago (and then only in the Western world), marriage was widely considered to be irrelevant to and in some cases expressly incompatible with romance. At best, love between two spouses was a nice bonus to an economically and politically beneficial union; at worst, love was an unpredictable, disruptive force that belonged in the domain of adultery or idolatry.

In the decades following the American Revolution, the script changed. The idea of the “love match” spread from Europe to the States; newly minted Americans extended the “pursuit of happiness” to romance too. People were now expected to freely choose their partners, marry for love, and stay monogamous. With this new type of marriage contract came the strict gender roles for which the Victorians are infamous. Middle- and upper-class women were now held up as bastions of morality, piety, and purity who tended to hearth and home — which meant that they were not to contaminate their holy souls by working or being in men’s spaces. Wives became even more dependent on their husbands, who now had the shiny new moniker of “breadwinners,” as labor was increasingly outsourced from the home to work sites starting in the 1830s. Of course, since women had very little earning power and no socially acceptable way to have sex outside wedlock, marriages of convenience continued apace. The difference was; now it was crass to acknowledge it.

This hypocrisy is precisely what inflamed the free lovers. While marriage masqueraded as the exclusive sphere of romantic affection and loyalty, the reality was that love’s uncontrollable nature made the promise of lifelong commitment a cynical, often futile enterprise. Still, abolishing marriage was a scary thought, especially for women. Practicing free love in a culture where marriage remained supreme could lead to a woman facing abandonment from her husband, the loss of her children (custody of whom, in the first half of the nineteenth century, would be granted to her husband), and desperate poverty — not to mention social condemnation for divorce or spinsterhood. Mainstream women’s rights reformers like Henry Blackwell worried that free lovers would “thrust their immoralities before the public in a Women’s Rights’ disguise.” Even though one of the free love movement’s central tenets was that marriage oppressed women, in the short term men stood to benefit from the eras rampant individualism a lot more than women did.

By 1871, suffragette and presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull would declare her “inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please.””

“Nowadays, young women ages eighteen to twenty-nine are actually more likely to have affairs than men.”

“After interviewing hundreds of women for her 1992 book, The Erotic Silence of the American Wife, journalist Dalma Heyn identifies one function of an affair for married mothers. It was a way to get away from “selflessness and obligations to fill others’ needs” and represented an opportunity to step into the role of a “sexually joyous and self-interested person.” Heyn’s argument recasts selfishness as a quality that can be positive or, at the very least, one that can combat deep-seated dissatisfaction. “Finding at home the kind of self-absorption that is essential to erotic pleasure proves a challenge,” sex and relationship therapist Esther Perel would write two years after my affair with Rob. “When you have an affair, you know for a fact that you’re not doing it to take care of anyone else.”

Seeing Rob became a way to assert the autonomy I didn’t consciously understand I wanted.”

“A foe of nuance, Dworkin argued again and again that yes, a woman’s physical and emotional rawness is necessary for good sex, but no, men cannot be trusted with it. Indeed, sexual violence is baked into sex between men and women. She wrote that all intercourse, while not literally rape, violates the integrity of a woman’s body; that men need to forgo their “precious erections” and “make love as women do together”; that women who enjoy penetration are “experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority.” Physical danger was a constant threat: “We are very close to death,” she said in a speech about rape. “All women are.” She called women who craved sexual freedom but contorted themselves into male models of sexiness “left-wing whores” and “collectivized cunts.” What women want, she argued, is “a more diffuse and tender sensuality” —a sexuality that simply isn’t compatible with male aggression.”

“The principle behind much of this activism, a clear precursor to #MeToo, was “yes means yes,” a concept popularized by a 2008 anthology edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti called Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape. In 2014, the California legislature passed SB 967 — the “yes means yes” law — which required all colleges and universities that receive state funding to adopt the standard of “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity” in their sexual assault policies. The context was preventing sexual assault, but to me the message was far-reaching: Consent was just the bare-minimum requirement for pleasurable sex. Going beyond that required communication and a true consideration of one’s desires.”

“Men who identify with the women’s movement have existed almost as long as the movement itself. A couple of years after my date with Max, while researching something completely different, I would stumble upon a minor but prescient men’s liberation movement that formed when the women’s movement had just burst on the national scene on the cusp of the seventies. A young leftist psychologist named Jack Sawyer published a 1970 article called “On Male Liberation” in Liberation, a New Left magazine founded by David Dellinger, of all people. “Male liberation calls for men to free themselves of the sex-role stereotypes that limit their ability to be human,” Sawyer wrote. A year later, Life magazine published a feature on men’s liberation — written, of course, by a dude, and nested between hilariously sexist ads (a wife preparing a picnic of Pepsi and crudités while the men relax by a badminton court; an ad for Puerto Rico featuring a woman in a white bikini).

“So many guys have it in the back of their minds that they have to be a jock, some kind of supermale, just to exist,” said Mike from Berkeley, who got into men’s liberation when being laid off gave him intense feelings of inadequacy. He’d placed an ad in the Berkeley Barb for an all-male consciousness-raising session. The men’s group he subsequently formed would eventually stage a protest at the Playboy Club in San Francisco (sample sign: SMASH COMPULSIVE MASCULINISM) and publish two issues of a men’s liberation newspaper called Brother. “Our enemy isn’t women, it’s the role we’re forced to play,” Mike told Life.

The reporter travels across the country, talking to men in these newly formed discussion groups. One group in Flint, Michigan — nine men, mostly autoworkers, who met weekly in church after Sunday services — weren’t as immersed in countercultural language as their West Coast hippie counterparts. But they were making headway too: “Give women economic equality and there will be more freedom for human beings to get what they want from each other,” a man was quoted as saying.

Once, the group showed their solidarity with a women’s picket line by bringing them sandwiches and drinks.”

“In Adrienne Rich’s essay on compulsory heterosexuality, she wishes straight people would acknowledge that for women, “heterosexuality may not be a ‘preference’ at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force.” Women, both straight and closeted, who fail to examine their true desires with clear eyes “share the pain of blocked options, broken connections, lost access to self-definition freely and powerfully assumed,” Rich writes.”

“Paradox: Compulsive monogamy is joyless. Monogamy that one asks for, demands, intimidates the other person into — monogamy inspired by duty, moralism, guilt, habit, lack of imagination, timidity, desire for peace at any point, of fear that the other person will do it if you do — isn’t worth having. But spontaneous, voluntary monogamy — monogamy based on an intensely focused passion such that sleeping with anyone else seems superfluous, an unneeded and unwanted distraction — is entirely different. Times when I’ve felt that way … have been times of great happiness for me — and great emotional freedom.”

“The New York State legislature started flirting with abortion reform in the sixties and, in the winter of 1969, the state announced that they would hold legislative hearings on abortion reform. Fourteen men and a nun had been se lected as expert witnesses.

Only ten months had passed since Ellen had taken the girl to Bellevue Hospital, but the political climate had changed considerably. The women’s movement was well underway in New York City by then, and abortion rights had emerged as a key issue for radical and liberal feminists alike. At that point, hundreds of women a year were dying of botched abortions; illegal abortion accounted for 17 percent of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth in 1965 — and those were just the official numbers. In some cities, there were entire hospital wards devoted to treating septic abortions. When news of the legislative hearing spread, several groups, including NOW, decided to go protest it.

Ellen and a group of five other liberationists went further than passive picketing: they resolved to loudly disrupt the hearing and submit their own testimony.”

“On the day of the hearing, Ellen showed up in a black sheath dress, dark hair pulled back and parted down the middle, arms full of leaflets and her own private notes. She was nervous; she still had a deeply internalized aversion to seeming angry or conspicuous. After one of the witnesses, a judge, suggested that abortion be legal for women who had “done their social duty” by having at least four children, one of the organizers interjected from the audience and said, “Now let’s hear from some real experts — the women.” Ellen started telling the story of her scared friend in the emergency room, and she’d “never felt less inhibited.” Another woman spoke: “We’ve waited and waited while you have held one hearing after another. Meanwhile, the baby I didn’t want is two years old.” And another: “Men don’t get pregnant. Men don’t rear children. They just make the laws.””

“Perhaps anticipating the hostile coverage, Ellen ignored journalistic scruples and reported the hearing herself in an unbylined “Talk of the Town” column in The New Yorker. She quoted the parting words of one woman (maybe herself?) who’d been at the hearing for more than seven hours: “Well, we’re probably the first women ever to talk about our abortions in public. That’s something, anyway.”

The group of women who’d stormed the hearing gave themselves a name: Redstockings. After the success of the protest, they figured that a speak-out was a logical next step, a way to recognize that the pain and humiliation of trying to get an abortion was a social problem and not a personal one. Ellen hoped it would be interpreted as “politics rather than soap opera.” Consciousness-raising groups were still new, and still beating back the condescending assumption that their discussions were just “group therapy.” She wanted the public to put these women’s private details in a larger political context.

The group managed to convince twelve women to talk about their abortions in front of three hundred people at a raucous event at Washington Square Methodist Church in late March. They made an audio recording of the event for posterity. At the speak-out, the “experts” told stories about times when a legal abortion wasn’t possible, when they put their lives in the hands of quacks as a result. “Without anesthetic it’s the most scary thing in the world,” one woman in the audience said. “You’re on the table and you feel the scraping and scraping.” Another woman had to go to eleven hospitals before she could get an abortion at age twenty; the tenth had threatened to sterilize her.

A charming woman, whose impressive dramatic chops would fit in nicely with the cast of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, described how you couldn’t just casually threaten suicide if you wanted a therapeutic abortion — you had to sound like you meant it. “You have to go and bring a razor, or whatever,” she said, in a thick, old-timey New York accent. “If you don’t tell me I’m going to have an abortion right now, I’m going to go out and jump off the Verrazzano Bridge!’”

The woman ended up seeing two psychiatrists, who, to her relief, deemed her suicide threats real enough to be granted the procedure. The crowd clapped and roared at the absurdity of it all, until the woman explained that after her abortion, she was stuck in the maternity ward to recover, right next to crying babies. The crowd wasn’t laughing anymore.”

“A few months after Steve told me about my mother’s 1974 abortion, a calm moment between two storms, I began to realize why she might not have been compelled to share her story with the world. It was a time when a woman could look up an abortion doctor in the phone book and visit a clinic without having to confront protesters blocking the entrance, wielding blown-up pictures of fetuses, or pointedly singing hymns. (Even in present-day New York, a version of this scene materializes regularly at the Planned Parenthood on Bleecker Street.) It was a time when abortion was so normalized that a feminist writer who’d helped organize the 1969 abortion speakout did not feel the need to write about her experience.”

“As Tracy Clark-Flory wrote in her memoir, Want Me, “There is no pre-cultural self to which we can return.””