BAD SEX

A writer reflects on the breakdown of her young marriage and the history of feminism, sexuality, and pleasure.

At 32, Willis Aronowitz, the sex and love columnist for Teen Vogue, decided to end her marriage. One of her chief complaints with the union was the “bad sex” of the title. In the wake of her divorce, she embarked on a journey to discover what good sex would look like for her as a young, liberated feminist living in the 21st century. These circumstances led the author to the “broader question of what cultural forces interfere with our pleasure, desire, and relationship satisfaction.” She turned first to the work of her late mother, the “early radical pro-sex feminist” Ellen Willis. The author narrates her mother’s life engagingly: her escape from a stifling early marriage, questioning of monogamy, and later marriage, on very different terms, to the author’s father, a “husky hedonist” who “had a reputation as a bed hopper and had trouble managing his often concurrent love affairs.” Pre-divorce, Willis Aronowitz often “cringed” at the thought of her late mother knowing that her daughter remained in an “unsatisfying partnership” out of fear of “stepping off the heterosexual conveyer belt” at an age when many of her peers were settling down and starting families. Alongside her personal experiences, the author digs into the cultural history of marriage and sexuality, mostly through the lens of feminism, with a focus on the developments of the 20th century. Near the end of the book, Willis Aronowitz describes a visit to an erotic massage therapist where she struggled to orgasm. At the time, she writes, she found it “impossible to parse out my own motivations from the din of characters in my head, ranging from girl bossy pep talks to radical feminist rallying cries.” While the author is skilled at synthesizing large swaths of social theory and her passion for the subject is clear, the historical sections are less compelling than the personal elements.

A courageously frank, sometimes uneven hybrid of memoir and social history.