Nona Willis Aronowitz’s Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution is important because it perfectly captures the essence of “sex positive feminism”, which is that it’s a bullshit story. It’s probably the definitive account, because NWA is Ellen Willis’ daughter, and “sex positivity” was her mom’s idea.
It’s embarrassing that after 2 generations of sex positivity, all we got are Tinder, OnlyFans, and Roe v Wade overturned. And the sex is still bad. Like The Right to Sex or Ace, Bad Sex reflects on some problems with liberal feminism and turns to some second wave writings for insights, but doesn’t have the courage to come out and draw the obvious conclusion: the wrong side won the Sex Wars.
Bad Sex is a memoir of NWA’s polyamory drama. We’re about the same age, and we got married and divorced around the same time, then read a bunch of feminist theory afterwards. She reminds me a lot of my ex, in a bad way. My ex had BPD and used the same belief system to avoid dealing with her issues and to justify cheating on me. As NWA herself notes later in the book, “a performance of emotional complexity is not the same thing as being truly honest.”
This is from the introduction:
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.
“Not being sure what they want” is the defining feature of liberalism, and sex positivity is just liberal feminism. You have some ideas about kindness and justice and the environment, but also you’re not willing to give up capitalism, consumerism, whiteness. She puts “revolution” in the title of her book and calls her mom a radical feminist, but sex positivity is all about getting off right now, before the revolution, when barely any men are on board. It’s not a coincidence that sex positivity writing always starts like, “So I was fucking this douchebag, and…”
In fact, the curious thing about liberal feminism is that being on the same team is considered a red flag and a turnoff. “Male feminists”, “male allies,” “softbois”…it’s all basically gaslighting. That’s mostly true, but it’s because liberal feminism is gaslighting all the way down. When they had to choose between feminism and Playboy, libfems are the ones who chose Playboy, so the men who agree with them…act like Playboy.
bell hooks said that if men were raised to value love over sex, there’d be a social revolution. I agree. Unlike NWA, my parents enjoyed a lifelong monogamous relationship. My mom is a patriarchal Jehovah’s Witness and believes in “wifely subjection”, but at the same time she openly resented my dad’s decisions. My dad would say sexist things, but he had the second wave feminism job at the Family Service Center. He was a child abuse/domestic violence social worker for the Navy, during Tailhook, so I always knew what abuse was, there were pamphlets about marital rape around the house, etc. And I’m autistic. It made socialization…different. In high school I read Gender Trouble and “gender abolition” was basically what I took from it. At the same time, I read anti-technology and anarchist stuff that connected patriarchy to agriculture. Debate exposed me to feminist anti-nuclear writings.
I read Dworkin after getting divorced, and then afterwards it took more therapy to figure out WTF why don’t women like Andrea Dworkin? Women on OkCupid are like…”I’m a social worker. #BLM. ACAB. Also I like football and want to date a big strong jock. Tie me up and hit me.” What actually got me reading Dworkin were the quotes in Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism. It turns out that feminism shipwrecked over how hard it actually is to honestly address masochism.
For me, though, bad sex was the gateway that revealed all kinds of other truths. It was the thing that eventually exposed the desires I was ignoring in favor of society’s expectations, which led to a break in the hum of my lief, which in turn forced the questions: What, exactly, do I want? And are my sexual and romantic desires even possible amid the horrors and bribes of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy?
This book is about the necessity, but also the complexity and absurdity, of answering those questions.
Just because you don’t like the answers doesn’t make them “complex and absurd.” Obviously, the goal of radically changing society can’t succeed without buy-in from men, who make up half the population. The role of liberal feminism is to call Playboy feminist, so that men understand nothing is being asked of us.
The first chapter starts by talking about a list of pros and cons of staying with her husband, written on a solo vacation to France. He finds the list while they’re dividing up their things, incredulous that she stayed with him for 3 more years after writing it.
There were some doubt seeds in the very beginning, when Aaron and I were twentysomething hedonists who had incoherent late-night fights, ones that involved shoving each other and slamming doors. There were some doubt seeds later when I made him move from his hometown of Chicago to my hometown of New York…And doubt seeds showered everywhere each time I craved an intellectual sparring partner but remembered here were huge chunks of my brain I knew he didn’t understand, and vice verse.
But the doubt seeds that turned into saplings, and then giant weeds, were the bad-sex seeds. I can now say with certainty that our sex was bad, and toward the end it got worse, metastasizing in a hideous way. It was bad in 2008, when it mostly took place drunk at six in the morning or hung over at noon. It was bad in 2010, at the tail end of the honeymoon period after moving in together, and a few years later when many of our attempts at fucking would snowball into an unclothed argument and end with him storming out of the bedroom, and with me curled into a fetal position. It was bad when I started to sleep with other people, at first adhering to but later breaking the rules of our already nonmonogamous relationship. It was bad up until the last time we fucked, August 19, 2016, two weeks before I moved out. It was bad!
Even when our sex was “good”–everyone’s body parts were doing what they should; if you saw a video of us doing it, you’d be like, “hot”–I wasn’t present, nor was I lost in bliss. Most of the time I was some putrid combination of bored, irritable, and dissociated. A couple of years in, when I requested an open relationship,I came up with all kinds of sexpert-approved reasons: because it creates and maintains healthy tension, because monogamy isn’t sustainable, because to hell with patriarchy and the marriage industrial complex. But I knew deep, deep, deep down that the main reason I wanted to fuck other people was because I no longer wanted to fuck him.
So what, exactly, was so bad about our sex? During our harrowing mid-coitus fights, I’d fixate on technique and positions, not acknowledging that we simply didn’t have that unlearnable spark, which could, of course, be enhanced with but not created by skills. I knew I’d had wonderful sexual encounters withother people where our chemistry transcended mechanics or traditional markers of success; one of my favorite sex partners, for instance, had never even witnessed me orgasm. I was also attracted to Aaron, and always had been. So it really boiled down to the fact that most of the time, sex with him felt physically, rhythmically, olfactorily wrong. And once in a while, when I was in the mood for self-honesty, I could see clearly that our “bad sex” was the symptom of a bigger problem–that I didn’t love or understand him in the way I needed to. That our connection, though real, wasn’t strong enough. I was scribbling out the one con that mattered most.
For a long time, I couldn’t admit any of this to anyone. This was me, who had a reputation among my friends for being candid, dishy, horny, and emotionally indulgent. Me, who had thought and written about sexual politics for years. Me, who grew up with a radical feminist mother who never settled for an unsatisfying relationship and had taught me, through her writing, to value passion and intellectual chemistry.
It was partially because Aaron’s good qualities routinely quelled these moments of misery. He was vibrating and alive, a well of empathy who wanted to absorb the world’s beauty and pain. Aaron was my ravenous partner in consuming pleasures–beaches and bike rides and cocktails and all kinds of food–and he was also down for a depressive cry while listening to Cat Power or Explosions in the Sky. His soul was stripped bare for me: no guile, no shade, no contempt for me ever. Not once did I catch him in a lie. I felt like a sinister double agent in comparison.
Notice how much bad faith and dishonesty are recurring themes here. Compare Andrea Dworkin’s writing:
Inside an unjust, embittering social universe where there are moral possibilities, however imperiled, of self-esteem and empathy, fucking is the universal event, the point of connection, where love is possible if self-knowledge is real; it is also the place where the price paid, both for ignorance and truth, is devastating, and no lie lessens or covers up the devastation…
…Yves’s fear, and Eric’s too, is not neurotic or psychological, nor is it personal, rooted in family history. It is a fear based on the recognition of life’s impermanence; fear of being known, being seen and known in all one’s awful trouble and shabby dignity, having a witness to what one is and why, then to lose that astonishing grace. Life does not tolerate stasis; and there is no way of protecting love. In fucking, the deepest emotions one has about life as a whole are expressed, even with a stranger, however random or impersonal the encounter. Rage, hatred, bitterness, joy, tenderness, even mercy, all have their home in this passion, in this act; and to accept truly another person within those bounds requires that one must live with, if not conquer, the fear of being abandoned, thrown back alone…
Radical feminism demands an honesty that doesn’t come naturally to NWA at all.
Deep down, she knows the sex is bad because the relationship is bad. She was being dishonest with him and had one foot out the door the entire time, just like my ex-wife. How can you form a secure attachment like that?
The things they had in common are so basic: they consumed things together.
Another Dworkin passage, for comparison:
In sex there is the suffering of those who can love, and the more terrifying despair of those who are loveless, empty, those who must “narcotize themselves before they can touch any human being at all.” These are the people who are the masters in a social and sexual master-slave hierarchy, and what characterizes them is that they “no longer have any way of knowing that any loveless touch is a violation, whether one is touching a woman or a man.”
In the United States, the cost of maintaining racism has been a loss of self-knowledge (and thus love) for those who refuse to know what they have because others suffer. What they have includes a sense of superiority that substitutes for a real identity. Maintaining racism has required an emotional numbness, a proud and fatal incapacity to feel, because that is the cost of purposely maintaining ignorance: one must block life out–the world around one and one’s own emotional possibilities.
For that reason, in this country there is “an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep” that most Amerikans lack “the most elementary and crucial connections.” Missing especially is any connection between sex and the complexity of identity; a vital connection without which the fuck is an exercise in futility, going from nowhere to nowhere, no one fucking nothing.
Even the youth seem “blighted,” “a parody of locomotion and manhood.” Despair and violation (each no less terrible for being unconscious) and narcotized touch predominate; and the young appear “to be at home with, accustomed to, brutality and indifference, and to be terrified of human affection.” This is the sexuality of those who risk nothing because they have nothing inside to risk. “Of rending and tearing there can never be any end,” thinks one character in Another Country about life in this country, “and God save the people for whom passion becomes impersonal.”
Passion becomes impersonal when there is no person inside, no complex human being who is willing to know and to feel. It is not knowledge of someone else that makes passion personal; it is knowledge of oneself. Self-knowledge creates the potential for knowing a lover in sex.
I don’t believe that Aaron could simultaneously not show contempt and also physically shove her around at the beginning. In these sex positive lamentations, men are presented like we expertly hide all these signs of douchebaggery, and then they come out once we’re in bed with somebody. More realistically, the women actively seek out the douchebaggery, because it’s manly of course, but they can’t admit that in a polemic about how men suck.
After all, her mom never settled for an unsatisfying relationship! That’s not even true, as we learn throughout the book.
There’s an account of an early consciousness-raising group:
Some women couldn’t enjoy sex unless they were in love; others resented the lingering expectation of marriage. Some felt sexually rejected by their partners; others felt harangued by them. Still others didn’t yet know what they wanted.
“I guess wer’e not going to get any conclusions from this session,” one woman remwarked in a small group meeting. “We’re all saying completely different things.”
“Beautiful!” another replied. “Maybe that’s what liberation really is.”
No, it isn’t. That’s something a liberal would say, and the end result is pointless: anything is feminist if a woman chooses it. God forbid we acknowledge the possibility of false consciousness.
Sometimes first impression are revealing. This was Ellen Willis’ first impression of Miss America protests:
In the fall of 1968, my then 26-year-old mother, Ellen Willis, was on her way to San Francisco with her boyfriend to visit their mutual friends, Fred and Jenny. She read about the Miss America protest in the newspaper and was dubious: “Won’t people think they’re just ugly, jealous women?” she wrote in a diaristic chronicle of the early women’s movement. Even so, she continued, “I remember what it’s like to be examined and compared at a party. And I’m proud that women are in the papers for fighting.”
When my mother arrived in California, Jenny gave her a copy of Notes from the First Year. “It disturbs me,” she wrote at the time. “All our problems aren’t caused by men–are they? The tone strikes me as frighteningly bitter, especially about sexual relationships. Either I’ve been remarkably lucky, or they’ve been unlucky…or maybe I let men who give me a hard time off the hook too easily.”
Her next relationship after was with a guy named Bob, “very cocky”, who later admitted that he was “looking for a scab”, i.e., a woman who could love her oppressors.
She dropped acid with some dude named Steve and fucked him, and then told Bob about it. That was also her MO for breaking up with her 1st husband. Bob flipped out:
…convinced that “ten months of feminist nagging” had forever altered their relationship. He’d always appreciated her high sex drive; now he resented her need to explore sexually on her own terms. “I no longer dig your lust because I have come to perceive it as destructive,” he wrote. At times, Bob diagnosed their breakup in terms of universal human betrayal: “I trusted you to be kind,” he wrote, and she broke that trust. But while he believed in the project of women’s liberation, he also thought himself a casualty of an incomplete, fledgling revolution. “The women’s movement clearly needs a new kind of consciousness, one that somehow encompasses struggle and love, but it sure ain’t found it yet,” he wrote. “I am the victim of cultural lag. How poetic.”
Bob was bitter and he was angry, but he wasn’t entirely wrong…Bob, caustic as ever, wondered if the reason she was leaving went beyond her faith in freedom and autonomy: “Maybe it has to do with some missing sense of yourself, some center that just isn’t there for you, and that you’re not going to find in a man, or work, or feminism, or a community, or chemicals.”
…”Part of it had to do with your determination to conquer my inhibition about being very matter of fact about sex, telling you exactly what I wanted, etc.,” she wrote. “Maybe it’s reactionary, but I am just not that way, and you were interfering with a very deep thing you’re just not qualified to interfere with.” The fact is, she felt bullied by him.
We have a whole sexual ethic built around consent…by people who don’t know what they want. Later we learn:
But in 2015, I learned she [Ellen Willis] subjected herself to mandates she would never dream of putting on others. That year, my mom’s ex-boyfriend, Bob, wrote a memoir about his early life as a downtown bohemian wherein my mother is prominently featured. The book revealed that after her first marriage to Henry, a relationship that left her feeling unloved and bottled up, my mom decided upon compulsory sex as the solution.”She proposed a rule we stuck by for three and a half years–that neither of us could ever deny sex to the other,” he wrote.
Bob put in that detail, I guess, to illustrate her voraciousness and/or her commitment to a transcendent sexual politics? but when I reread that sentence during my period of no sex, I winced. It sounded simplistic and immature, with more than a tinge of gym teacher voice. I thought, Wow, Mom, way to bury yourself under pressure!
Granted, my mother was in her mid-twenties and in the middle of a radical transformation coming out of an enormously repressive era. I’d be surprised if she stuck with this sex-no-matter-what rule after the flush of revolution wore off. In fact, in a letter she wrote while she and Bob were breaking up, she criticized his tendency toward “compulsive lovemaking when things are going wrong,” remarking, “There are times when what’s needed is a rest from sex.” Still, even the existence of such a policy seemed like an incredibly risky move in a relationship. I doubt it would have produced anything but resentment in me during a libido-less period like the one I was experiencing.
Feminists…enemy of marital rape…or something. She says candor between women about sex was “the norm” by the time she was a teenager.
We were also blunt in our assessments of people we were having sex with, especially when they disappointed us. This bluntness continued for years, even two months into my then situationship with Aaron: “When we got into bed he just started talking crazy,” reads a message I wrote to my friend Ruby in the spring of 2008. “Some things were mean and some things were just intensely romantic and some were just literally nonsense. Sometimes I think he’s like the darkest person I’ve ever met.”
So he was mean to her in bed from the beginning and at the same time never showed any contempt. Got it.
But an unsettling thing started to happen when people around me paired off in more serious relationships. Many of us who were coupled up defaulted toa hermetically sealed bubble of “things are hard but everything is cool.” My single friends still messaged me things like, “Finally got my brains fucked out by some neanderthal from Tinder, he bit my lip so hard I’m afraid it’s gonna swell.” Yet it suddenly felt inappropriate to complain about a person you’d already invested so much time in, whom you’d deemed different from those losers you dated when you were young and stupid…
I never said what I really felt, never truly detailed the magnitude of my loneliness and dissatisfaction and sexual frustration.
I yearned for a structured way to talk about it, not in a therapy way (though I should have done that too), but to compare notes with my peers. Did any else have similar doubt seeds, and if yes, did they nurture them or stamp them out? I couldn’t get it out of my head that I should be past the need for group feedback to put my problems in perspective. Modern women like us knew what we deserved, what we were looking for–which made it that much harder to admit when you were unhappy, especially if it was for a retrograde reason like no wanting to be single. The biggest shame of all was staying in a passionless partnership. If you knew you had a right to a fulfilling and stimulating relationship, intellectually and sexually, wouldn’t you rather be single than stuck? Besides, wasn’t it kind of pathetic to obsess over your relationship? What about your brain, your career, your friendships, your family?
For me, the result was the same as it had been for women in the pre-consciousness-raising days: a prevailing sense of isolation.
In other words, sex positivity didn’t get rid of repression at all. What it did instead was create what Zizek calls the “perverse super-ego.” The command is to enjoy, and there’s every bit as much pressure to conform to it. For Zizek, “the fundamental message of psychoanalysis today is that you’re allowed not to enjoy.”
The pressures keeping her silent came from her mother.
That was the first chapter. From there, the book has the following trajectory: she was too cool for marriage but got married anyway and the perks are nice. 6 months after tearfully demanding monogamy she demands to open up the marriage. Some kind of sexual awakening through BDSM in Audre Lorde’s name. The pressure to be “chill” in poly relationships. Black feminism…or something. The old men’s movement and why you can’t trust male feminists. Lesbian separatism. Taking a break from fucking for a while. The history of poly. Abortion. Having an unsatisfactory “erotic massage” experience.
There’s more to say about some of that, but the gist of it is that her parents’ relationship gave her attachment problems that she acts out by sleeping around instead of really dealing with them, and she knows it’s all bullshit but Team Chill 4 Life.
All this shit is well-reviewed and taken seriously. From a Salon.com interview about it:
I think one definition of a fuck boy is a man with whom you have a sex-forward relationship, but also a kind of nebulous emotional relationship. And he’s somewhat of an emotional vampire as in trying to garner emotional support from you, but neglects to do it himself. And he is capricious. He is allergic to commitment and open communication. He often isn’t willing to be exclusive with you, but also gets jealous if you hook up with other people. Some or all of those characteristics, I would ascribe to fuck boys. They’re all kind of very emotionally indulgent on their end, but bristle when a woman displays emotional depth of her own.
That has a Self-Aware Wolves quality. All of that applies just as much to her…which is why she’s drawn to it in men.
It’s forbidden to ask if sexually rewarding those men hurts the cause of feminism.