Hello, hello, hello Meteor readers,

I’m sliding into your inbox this evening in a reflective mood for two very good reasons. The first being that I’m currently reading a book about breathing (recommend), and it’s really got me wondering if I’ve been doing it wrong the entire time.

The second is the Q&A in today’s newsletter, which has been like a perfectly cooked steak for my mind since I read the first draft; I just keep coming back to it. My wonderful and talented colleague Samhita Mukhopadhyay spoke to journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz about her latest book,  “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution.” It’s a conversation about the philosophical dilemma of being a heterosexual feminist, (which, yes, is possible).

But before all that exciting stuff, an amuse bouche of news.

Questioning everything,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

Say what ya need to say: Once again, Mike Pence is being given a chance to be more than a stain on history and is doing everything in his power to screw it up. Speaking at a college conference on Wednesday, Pence said that he would consider testifying before the January 6 committee if invited. But he stopped short of giving an absolute yes, despite admitting that “the American people deserve to know what happened.” We do, Mike! And this will I won’t I game you’re playing isn’t cute or noble or anything other than frustrating. If you want the good guy points, get in the chair and tell us the truth.

Bad brother: Embattled former New York governor Andrew Cuomo will be allowed to keep the $5 million he earned from his book about leading the state through season one of the pandemic. In case you can’t remember why this is a big deal: Cuomo used state resources to write the book, including having some of his staff work on it during office hours, an ethics committee ruled that the profit should be put back into state funds. And contrary to the account he gave in his masturbatory memoir, Cuomo was also found to have mismanaged the pandemic. Also, we’ve really given up on questioning him about that whole serial sexual harassment thing, huh?

Let’s never talk about this again: The NFL and NFLPA have come to a final settlement agreement with Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson. Originally, an arbitrator had ruled to suspend Watson for six games due to the 24 civil lawsuits filed against him alleging sexual misconduct (nearly all of which have been settled outside of court). After an appeal process initiated by commissioner Roger Goodell, Watson will now have to miss 11 games and be hit with a $5 million fine. As someone who perpetually holds out hope that all sports can be better, this is not enough. I understand the punishment is lenient because there were no criminal charges or arrests made but at some point, the NFLPA should draw a line in the sand (I repeat 24 civil lawsuits). It is disappointing they felt anything less than a full season suspension was adequate. Watson still maintains his innocence and claims that he “never assaulted or disrespected anyone.”

AND: 

• Liz Cheney is taking her primary loss on the chin and considering a run for an even bigger office.

• A 🏳️‍🌈Wisconsin 🏳️‍🌈 school 🏳️‍🌈 board 🏳️‍🌈 has 🏳️‍🌈 banned 🏳️‍🌈 teachers 🏳️‍🌈 from 🏳️‍🌈 displaying 🏳️‍🌈 the 🏳️‍🌈 pride 🏳️‍🌈 flag.

• Angelina Jolie is suing the FBI over their failure to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act she filed in 2016 pertaining to an incident of alleged child abuse carried out by Brad Pitt (that he denies).

• In a surprising display of solidarity, USA Gymnastics president Li Li Leung is saying there is “no question” that a state’s abortion laws will factor into whether it can be chosen to host major competitions.

• Book banning is still happening, and it’s getting weird. A school district in Texas has pulled 41 books, including all versions of the Bible, a graphic adaptation of “Anne Frank’s Diary,” and “The Bluest Eye.”  Parents and the local school board first challenged every book on the list last school year after state officials launched an investigation into the presence of sexually explicit books. All 41 pulled books are now undergoing a second review to see if they are safe enough to be returned to shelves. But I gather once the school board figures out the allegorical references made in the book of Psalms, the Bible won’t be making any reappearances.

• The Puerto Rico Status Act—a bill providing the framework for a vote on Puerto Rico’s independence or further annexation by the U.S.—is stalled due to so-called “outsiders.” One such outsider is Power 4 Puerto Rico, a group representing people from the island and the diaspora, has asked that the proceedings be discussed in public and made available in Spanish, so voters know what precisely is being offered in the act. Doesn’t sound like stalling, as much as asking for a fair process

LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX

When “Men Are Trash” Is Not Enough

According to Bad Sex, if you are going to date men and be a feminist about it, you should ask yourself why.

BY SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY

THE TRUE MAGIC OF BOOKS THAT MAKE YOU THINK. (PHOTO BY COURTESY OF NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ)

Feminists have generally been interested in—and for—women’s sexual freedom. But what happens when sexual liberation—understood as women’s freedom to choose how, when, why, and with whom she has sex—is not enough? That’s exactly what my good friend Nona Willis Aronowitz’s new book “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution” tackles. Part memoir, partly reported, part historiography, the book investigates a brutal truth: how can we sometimes be as free as can be and still unsatisfied in our sexual and love lives?

I talked to Nona last week at her book launch. This is a shortened version of our riveting (if I do say so myself!) conversation.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: At what point did you realize you wanted to write a book about s-e-x?

Nona Willis Aronowitz: I consider myself a journalist. I’ve written on a lot of different topics, but ultimately I kept coming back to gender and sexuality over and over again, especially around 2017 when my life was a total mess and also #metoo was happening, and there was this renewed conversation about sex and pleasure.

The book is a seamless combination of memoir and history. What was the process of piecing that together?

My journey is genuinely connected to reading about all this stuff at the same time things were happening to me. I was up in the library reading about Emma Goldman [and her nonmonogamy] just as I was grappling with nonmonogamy, and I was reading about Dana Densmore and the celibates [who believed the path to feminist liberation was to withhold sex from men] just as I was taking a break from sex. So it was actually an intellectual journey coupled with an emotional journey.

My mother, Ellen Willis, was a pro-sex feminist from the sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties, and her legacy was all over this topic. She died in 2006, and I’d been grappling with her work ever since, but this was sort of the deepest, most visceral way that I was grappling with it because finally, I was her age when she was writing, in my thirties and going through some of the same things that she [had been] going through. So I really felt like, for the first time, we were dialoguing rather than me as 22-year-old reading stuff from my mom.

CHEERS TO BESTIES WITH BOOK DEALS. (PHOTO COURTESY OF NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ)

I don’t think many people are in a situation where they report out a close relationship. Talk a little about that experience: emotionally and technically going into your mom’s archive, talking to her ex-boyfriends, etc. 

Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting because I’d known all my life the two ex-boyfriends I spoke to for this book. She was the type of person to keep exes in the mix as friends. I learned a lot of new stuff while technically interviewing them for this, but I knew both of these men.

What really was amazing and fascinating was talking to my dad’s ex-wife, Jane. She was very generous with her story. We don’t know each other very well, and she told me some painful things about a dad I didn’t even recognize. So I also did reporting on my dad’s life, my dad’s early life, which, I mean, both my parents grew up in the forties and fifties, respectively. So this is a long ass time ago. So the socialization was different, and they both had to reinvent themselves, and some of those early versions of them, I truly didn’t recognize.

I couldn’t help but wonder while reading the book, “God, it could have been so different for me if my parents didn’t put so much pressure on me to get married and so much shame on me about my sexuality.” You had the opposite experience. 

Yeah, although my parents didn’t apply the pressure. My mom gave me a lot of latitude when it came to being a teenage girl who made mistakes and did whatever I needed to do. She gave me the privacy that I think some teens really dream about.

So what I think happened was not shame around sexuality, but shame around not being this perfect sexual feminist because some of my earliest idols were Samantha from Sex in the City and Lil Kim and Foxy Brown and stuff, these very seemingly invulnerable, but obviously not truly invulnerable women who are just like, “I’m going to get that. I’m going to get my pussy ate,” or whatever. I wanted to be them. So I didn’t have shame around my desires, but I did have shame around just not living up to some sort of straw woman expectation of feminism [that casual sex was enough when it wasn’t always].

YOU KNOW A BOOK IS GOOD WHEN THE BACK COVER LOOKS LIKE THIS. (PHOTO COURTESY OF NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ)

In the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a lot of pushback on traditional ideas of marriage, and there was more cultural space to be like “I want to be nonmonogamous” or “I want to be casual” or whatever. But, I remember when my friends started to get married, they’d say to me, “I know I’m a really bad feminist, but” trying to make this historically sexist institution feminist in some way.

I mean, I thought that I could escape the binds, expectations, and privileges of marriage by just having this irreverent marriage for health insurance. I couldn’t. Marriage gives you status. Marriage gives you heft with old people. It gives you benefits. There are all kinds of crutches and ways in which marriage sort of bumps up your status that’s hard to let go of, even if you’re supposedly a leftist, radical, or free spirit.

So, the book is out in the world, and people are responding to it. And not everyone is going to understand it. Some people argue that if women want marriage and monogamy, feminists should be okay with that or that traditional ideas of courtship are actually more feminist than the lack of accountability that might come from casual sex, etc. You addressed some of this backlash to sex-positive feminism in a recent New York Times op-ed. Nona, what else do you have to say to your haters?

Well, I do agree that there’s something very wrong with what ‘sex positivity’ has turned into. The premise of the book is that not only the patriarchy but also a certain strain of [sex positive] “feminism” has put a lot of pressure on women. I just disagree about the solutions. Many people are saying there need to be more rules and boundaries. I’m saying there actually needs to be more freedom.

I’ll take monogamy as an example—or, let’s say, commitment. People say that a lot of women want commitment [from a partner], but they’re afraid to ask for it, they’re suppressing their true feelings, and their emotional needs are not met by hookup culture. It’s not like I would disagree with that—but I would also say, “Okay, you can’t just take desire at face value.” There are socially constructed reasons why you desire what you desire. That’s true for monogamy. There’s a lot of internalized messaging from a very young age that people aren’t respecting you unless they’re monogamous.

I’m not saying that non-monogamy is the real feminism or that monogamy is the real feminism. I’m saying interrogate your desires as much as you possibly can.

To me, the core of this book is exploring how to be heterosexual and a feminist…which for a lot of women is simply the default that “men are trash, but we love them anyway.” 

I don’t think the ‘men are trash’ paradigm is helpful. I think it can be cathartic: Anger towards men is legit; patriarchy sucks. But what does that mean for your life if you say men are trash and still endeavor to love and partner with them?

Actually, it’s interesting. Heterosexual women are the only marginalized or oppressed identity who are meant to partner with and fuck and love their oppressors. In most other contexts, you can be a separatist, and there were lesbian separatists, of course, but then it’s like, how do you continue society? We do need men. And, if you truly are heterosexual and you really do want to have loving relationships with men, it’s worth investigating why and how. So ultimately, fine. Have your ‘men are trash’ moment, but then push further—ask yourself why I am attracted to men and why do I want to be with them.

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