"Well-researched, candid, and at times painfully perceptive." —Stephanie Coontz, author of A Strange Stirring
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From Teen Vogue sex and love columnist Nona Willis Aronowitz, a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism that probes the meaning of desire and sexual freedom today.
At thirty-two years old, everything in Nona Willis Aronowitz’s life, and in America, was in disarray. Her marriage was falling apart. Her nuclear family was slipping away. Her heart and libido were both in overdrive. Embroiled in an era of fear, reckoning, and reimagining, her assumptions of what “sexual liberation” meant were suddenly up for debate.
In the thick of personal and political turmoil, Nona turned to the words of history’s sexual revolutionaries—including her late mother, early radical pro-sex feminist Ellen Willis. At a time when sex has never been more accepted and feminism has never been more mainstream, Nona asked herself: 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?
Nona’s attempt to find the answer places her search for authentic intimacy alongside her family history and other stories stretching back nearly two hundred years. Stories of ambivalent wives and unchill sluts, free lovers and radical lesbians, sensitive men and woke misogynists, women who risk everything for sex—who buy sex, reject sex, have bad sex and good sex. The result is a brave, bold, and vulnerable exploration of what sexual freedom can mean. Bad Sex is Nona’s own journey to sexual satisfaction and romantic happiness, which not only lays bare the triumphs and flaws of contemporary feminism but also shines a light on universal questions of desire.
Nona Willis Aronowitz is the sex and love columnist for Teen Vogue. Her reporting and essays have been published in the New York Times, The Cut, Elle, VICE, and Playboy, among many others. She is the co-author of Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism and the editor of two award-winning anthologies of her mother Ellen Willis’s work, Out of the Vinyl Deeps and The Essential Ellen Willis. She splits her time between Brooklyn and the Catskills.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay is a writer, editor, and speaker. She is the former Executive Editor of Teen Vogue. She is the co-editor of Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance and Revolution in Trump's America, the author of Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life and author of the forthcoming book, The Myth of Making It. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Vogue India, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Allure, Jezebel, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and The Nation.