TALK
NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ is the author, most recently, of Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution (Plume, 2022), a memoir about the end of the author’s marriage, as well as a work of social history that examines the enduring barriers to true sexual freedom. She co-authored Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism (Seal Press, 2009) and writes a sex and love column for Teen Vogue. The daughter of the late radical feminist and rock critic Ellen Willis, Nona edited two collections of her mother’s work, Out of the Vinyl Deeps (Minnesota University Press, 2011) and The Essential Ellen Willis (Minnesota University Press, 2014). In April 2022, a few months before the publication of Bad Sex, a thirty-five-weeks pregnant Nona spoke with Jennifer Baumgardner. They discussed the legacy and archives of Ellen Willis, Tinder, cunnilingus, love, and Nona’s sexual formation as the daughter of a pro-sex feminist coming of age in an era defined by “chill girls” and “super sluts.”
Jennifer
Bad Sex is part history of sexual politics, part memoir of your ongoing sexual education, and a deep dive into the intimate reaches of your mom’s literary archive. You write about how your mother was devoted to you, but was also quite shy and had great boundaries, so she remained a bit unknowable to you. Can you talk a bit about that?
Nona
I put those archives together less than a year after her death. I was twenty-three, I was not fully equipped to absorb it all. I knew all that material existed. With some of it, I even realized who these people were. I mean, I knew who Robert Christgau was, but I didn’t know how to put her archives in context when I was that young. When this book started to come together, I knew that I had to go back to the Radcliffe Institute and go through the archives, and I saw all those letters and all those diary entries with completely new eyes. I’d had so much more feminist history education, so I could put those sources in context historically. And I talked to Bob and Steve, another ex-boyfriend, about what my mother was going through as a young adult. I couldn’t understand my mother as a woman in her late-twenties and thirties going through the things she went through until I repeated her patterns myself.
In the years I spent putting together her archive and making this book, I got to know my dad [Stanley Aronowitz] a lot better. When my mother died, he became my only parent, and I was sort of his caretaker. I really got to know the type of person he is—very loving but very flawed, and some of the characterizations of my father in her diary entries, I recognized as a daughter, like the avoidant way he often dealt with relationships, which was painful. Even though he was such a warm and generous person in so many ways, and even though he was married to a radical feminist, he was influenced by the norms of his time. It was a slow burn, understanding what all that meant.
Jennifer
I think it’s wonderful that reading those documents was able to give you glimpses of your dad that, when you were five, you didn’t experience with the same consciousness. And at the same time, it affirmed the sense you had about limitations in your parents’ marriage.
Nona
I have yet to talk to his older children about that directly. My siblings have always been in my life, but only recently have we had real talk about what our dad was like and what it was like for them. I spoke to his ex-wife, which was interesting, but the one documentary source that was totally new to me was the letters to Bob from my mother. Bob was generous enough to let me see them, and it was kind of a dramatic, last-minute find of his. Like, it was during the pandemic, he had health problems, he didn’t know where they were, we went to his storage space and couldn’t find them, and then, at the very last minute, he found them. I brought them to the residency I did in August, when I was doing all the revisions. They’re not in there too much, but I think having her responses to his letters was so key and so new and precious to me.
One thing after another came up. A lot of people involved were writers and thinkers and artists, so they were very generous with their stories, and they understood the value of me having access to these things, rather than, I don’t know, prioritizing their privacy, for instance, which is understandable. Even [my ex-husband] told told me that I could do whatever I wanted, write whatever I wanted. I don’t think a lot of people would do that. But he and a bunch of other people in my life were like, “You know what? You don’t even have to show me. Tell your story, because I understand. I’m also a storyteller.”
Jennifer
How did you find the right balance between making things vivid for the reader and maintaining some sense of privacy for you and Aaron? I asked Aaron if he’d read the book . He said you’d offered, but he didn’t do it, and that you’d mentioned your editor said, “You need to make him sound less great.”
Nona
Yeah, I don’t love to talk shit about my ex who had been so supportive of me and was so loving and caring. I mean, Aaron is a very kind person. We were not meant to be together, and I was very unhappy for the last few years of our relationship, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to make him into a monster or a loser. Especially within feminist discourse, I think a lot of divorce narratives go to that place of “I don’t know what I was thinking. This guy was so not worth my time!” But that’s not actually what happened. I needed to focus on the external expectations I was grappling with that caused me to stay in a relationship too long. I mean, yeah, there were some serious things wrong with our relationship, but I don’t feel that I was put-upon or a victim. It was more about me not being honest with myself for many years, and that’s what frames the book: that self-honesty which is so hard to find. You have to pull back all those layers of politics and consciousness-raising and everybody’s expectations, including feminist expectations.
Like, it was true that I did care about keeping him healthy and safe, so we got married for health insurance. I cared for him and we fell in love, and I also didn’t really believe in marriage, but you really can’t control the situation once there’s this very loaded label on it. You say “husband” and people assign all kinds of assumptions to you. Sometimes, I really liked that, and sometimes, it was just annoying. Sometimes I used it for shock value, because I was so young, so nobody expected I’d be married.
Jennifer
I was intrigued by your references to ’90s and Third Wave “super slut” culture in Bad Sex. How old are you? Thirty-five?
Nona
I’m thirty-seven.
Jennifer
Okay, I’m fifty-one, so we’re fourteen years apart, which is significant, but I was trying to understand, what were the newish feminist messages writ-large you grew up with?
Nona
Maybe I should’ve made this clearer, but I consider Third Wave feminism and the “super slut” thing to be separate. I know a lot of people like to conflate them, but I’m pretty versed in feminist history, including ’90s history. I know that there were people like you and people like Riot Grrrls, people who were doing serious work.
But there were also these characters and personas—a few examples are like Foxy Brown, Lil Kim, Samantha from Sex in the City, the Girls Gone Wild culture that Ariel Levy talks about—which weren’t necessary feminist to me, but they were connected to sex positivity. This is an interesting thing that I had to grapple with in the book: When am I talking about the sexual revolution and its iterations, and when am I talking about feminism and its iterations? I think they overlap, but not always. “Super slut” is my term, but growing up, I saw a lot of those women in pop culture and thought they were really cool and that that was the vibe I should be emulating. They were, I think, a distortion of sex positivity, which is a feminist invention, but not super-related to Third Wave feminism.
Jennifer
You’re right—there are era-specific things like the sexual revolution or ’90s pop culture, and then there are consciously feminist things, and they’re different.
Nona
Yeah, even in the ’90s, there were sex-positive feminists that kept the spirit of its original intent and had nuance and would never be Samantha from Sex in the City, like Susie Bright and Candida Royalle. Even when it came to sex, there was some thoughtful work going on. But I didn’t know any of those people at the time. I was fourteen. I was, like, watching TV and listening to music on MTV. That was another thing—MTV, like, Jenny McCarthy and all these cool, hang-with-the-dudes bimbos, you know? They were so cool and so not neurotic and just up for anything. I don’t think those people would necessarily call themselves feminists.
Jennifer
Another framing for me that I can’t believe I somehow didn’t really grasp before your book: “chill” versus “a lot.” As a person, as a woman, trying to have relationships, you know that being “chill” is more appealing. It’s a warping of the feminist idea that you are someone, even without a man, and you can tap into your sex drive and be as intense as you want. That idea gets distorted into this kind of self-protective schtick, which I guess is being “chill” and also scapegoating the intense parts of the self.
Nona
Yeah, absolutely. I had these very Teflon, super-slut role models growing up. They would never get upset about a guy not calling them back or not wanting to be their boyfriend because they had a lot of stuff going on, and they were in control of their own sexuality. In high school, I was more willing to indulge my feelings and tell a guy that I really liked him, and I had one pretty-healthy relationship, but I think, by the time I got to college, the pain that resulted from being vulnerable was too scary to me. And it is scary! That’s the thing.
I just read Rethinking Sex by Christine Emba, and she summarizes some of the backlash against sex positivity that’s happening recently, which happens perennially, but now it’s happening not so much among conservatives as women who would call themselves feminists and who are progressive but just see the whole landscape as being “too chill” or too devoid of feeling. She was asking the right questions, but she didn’t sufficiently lay out the stakes of being vulnerable. It’s not only physical, and it’s not only gendered. It’s just the way that it is if you put yourself out there and make yourself permeable to others. It is scary, and it can be really overwhelming, and heartbreak can really take over your life. It’s not rocket science. I feel like, once I got a taste of heartbreak in high school, I was like, “Oh, God, I can’t risk that again.”
Meanwhile, there was this model that I found feminist—men are there to have fun with and have sex with, but don’t get too close. It only sort of worked in college. I mean, virtually, all the people I hooked up with in college meant absolutely nothing to me, or they meant something to me and I felt like I didn’t have the space to tell them that. That’s partly why, when Aaron came along and I felt that connection and the strength to speak up and take that risk, and the risk paid off, it was so hard to let that relationship go. I mean, it did feel good, and there were so many cultural messages that were applauding that. Even at the height of the messaging about being an impervious, slutty, empowered woman, there were also messages about having somebody deem you “relationship material.” That was always around, too.
Jennifer
And that echoes what your mother wrote about marriage, how it puts a blue ribbon on you, even if it’s a terrible relationship. You’re worth choosing.
Nona
Well, it helps your confidence. It’s interesting—once you’ve decided that you’re not going to put yourself out there and tell the guys that you like them, they don’t think of you that way, either. They pick up on that vibe, too, and they think, “Okay, she’s not really willing to get in the muck with me.” I think it was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Although, again, as I say in the book, it’s hard to say what I wanted, because I didn’t really want one of these traditional relationships. I saw very early how gender roles played out in serious relationships, and it kind of grossed me out. I didn’t want that, but I did want my relationships to be meaningful, and it was hard to A) explain that to people that I “liked” and had feelings for, and B) put out the correct vibe. People, for a long time, were like, “Oh, Nona is not interested in that. She’s interested in more casual things, and I’ll be her friend, and maybe then sometimes we’ll have sex, and that’s it.” And I don’t really think it was the dudes’ fault.
For people who really have a lot going for them in their relationship, but the sex doesn’t happen to be that good, having an open relationship and finding it elsewhere can really work.
Jennifer
That still sort of happens. There’s that desire for meaningful exploration, without trafficking in all the gender roles that, despite your parentage, you soaked up through the culture. I guess that’s the project. That’s the challenge.
Nona
Rethinking Sex argues that most women want a relationship but feel that they can’t say that. I do think that that’s true, but what I tried to say in my book was that, on one hand, there are all these problems with casual sex and dating, but, on the other hand, there are all these problems with relationships, too. Once you get into a relationship, everything’s fine. To the contrary, it can be much more difficult to extricate yourself because there are so many cultural wars to being a couple. I think we need to talk about the problems with casual sex and online dating and the filtration of online porn into sex, but in tandem with the lingering problems of long-term—especially hetero—relationships. We’re still bogged down with so many awful expectations and entrenched gender roles, isolation, loneliness, inertia.
With relationships sometimes, you get a different thing than you bargained for. Like, I was so happy to be in a long-term relationship. When it wasn’t exactly what I’d wanted, I didn’t know how to get out of it.
Jennifer
I was a single parent until my older child was four. There was stress that is particular to that experience, primarily financial, but I also felt very happy—and free. I never had to run anything by anyone. I had the responsibility and the decision-making power. I didn’t have to worry about another adult’s needs or opinions on childrearing. Then Michael and I had a kid and made a little family of four, which was joyous and something I’d wanted, but I was unprepared for life in a nuclear family. Paradoxically, it is lonely and not that much easier. I had to relearn how to parent within that conventional container. Basically, two-parent homes create a later of admin for the mother.
Nona
I’ve watched a lot of my friends struggle with the dynamic of a nuclear family and the lingering expectation that women do the vast majority of childcare and the cognitive/administrative load of the household and all of that stuff. That’s not mentioned in the dating books! What I want to do with this book is show that it’s hard to know what you genuinely want. If you genuinely feel like you want a relationship, and then you get a relationship that’s still so soaked in patriarchy and other people’s assumptions, what have you really won? I agree that “sexual liberation” has been warped to this kind of cold, shitty dating culture in a lot of places, but a huge amount of people do get into relationships, and then what?
My book illustrates how once you are in a committed relationship, it’s kind of awkward to talk about the bad parts because it’s deemed a stable, long-term relationship, so you don’t hear about all the ins and outs.
Jennifer
Because it’s boring to talk about?
Nona
No, just because it’s embarrassing. For me, it was embarrassing to admit that, here was this thing I’d really wanted, here was this thing that I’d achieved, this was the era of not having to settle for things you don’t like, and still I have all these problems? That’s embarrassing. I don’t want to admit that.
Have you been following the reaction to Heather Havrilesky’s book Foreverland? She just came out with a book about her monogamous marriage and, in general, the wonderful slog that is marriage. She talks a lot about the negative parts, even though she has no intention of leaving her husband, and people have had really pearl-clutchy reactions to it. Like, “Ugh! God, if she doesn’t like her husband, why doesn’t she just leave him?” or “I can’t believe she’s talking shit about her partner like that.” Those are the kinds of reactions I was worried about when I was having doubts about marriage.
Jennifer
You’re right. There isn’t much space—outside of religious spaces—to explore “something’s wrong, but the answer for me is not to kick him to the curb.”
Nona
In my case, the answer was to break up, but I didn’t necessarily know that at the time. I wanted to talk it out, but I was kind of embarrassed. Especially because a lot of it had to do with our sexual connection, and I feel like that’s embarrassing to talk about once you’re in a relationship. Like, why have you decided to be in a relationship with someone that you don’t have a good sexual connection with?
Jennifer
Do you feel like it was later—after marriage—that you realized that the sexual connection wasn’t right? Or do you feel like you were always sort of setting it aside?
Nona
We went through a honeymoon period. This is true for everybody; you have a period where you’re so fascinated by the person that you’re just trying to drink them up. We did have some early sexual stumbles, but that was overtaken by the fresh desire to learn about this new person. I asked for an open relationship in 2010, like two-and-a-half years after we started dating, and then I knew. I started having sex with other people and desiring other people in a way that felt really different, not supplementary, but filling in for the dearth of connection in my marriage.
My divorce doesn’t mean that polyamory doesn’t work. I tried it later and it has been a really different experience with somebody that I do feel a very strong connection with. For people who really have a lot going for them in their relationship, but the sex doesn’t happen to be that good, having an open relationship and finding it elsewhere can really work. The rest of our connection was not strong enough for that. We weren’t, for instance, raising kids together or putting together a household. At 25, I was not mature enough to realize any of this. It took me ten years to really figure out what was going on.
Jennifer
In your book, you quote a letter you found where your mom writes: “My commitment to heterosexual sex is very basic. I want and need love and companionship.” It made me want to know more about your grandparents, your mother’s relationship with her parents, and maybe, even in particular, her father.
Nona
When I first read that, I thought, “That’s lazy, Mom. What are you talking about?” She was always so committed to excavating why we desire the things we desire. I set two goals for myself in that chapter: first, to find out what I desire, and then to try to figure out why. And I feel like, once you consciously try to figure out what you desire and then really affirm it, the “why” is less important, and that’s maybe what she was saying. I could maybe explain why I was physically attracted to cis men, but it was harder to explain why I felt romantic towards them and not towards other genders, and I just really, really, really tried to figure it out, and then I was like, “I don’t know.” It’s very basic, like my mom said. I thought it was lazy of her, but, by the end of the chapter, I get it.
Anyway, her parents: In the 1930s, my grandfather lost his football scholarship at Marquette [in Milwaukee]. It was the Depression. He joined the Communist Party and hopped boxcars for two years, trying to find work. He got off at Ellenville, New York, where he met my grandmother, Miriam, who was from a pretty conventional family in upstate New York. They fell in love and became a very conventional family. He was like, “Well, I’m marrying this woman, I have to have a stable job,” so he quit the Communist Party and became a cop. He was always more liberal than the cops around him but still decided to have this conventional life.
My mom grew up in Bayside, which is basically the suburbs of New York, even though it’s technically Queens, with two siblings, and a homemaker mom. She did find that life kind of repressive and oppressive and didn’t want to end up like her mother.
Jennifer
This is a common thing for radical Second Wave feminists. She identified a lot with her dad’s life and less so with her mom’s.
Nona
Oh, yes. Well, she does say that, when she was younger, she thought her mom was intruding on her intellectual life by asking her to dry the dishes, while her dad was the one who was showing her cool science experiments, helping her with her history homework, having adventures. So, yes, I think she was much more of a daddy’s girl in that way. She didn’t understand then that you don’t have to disavow womanhood in order to be a different type of woman.
Jennifer
It sounds like your mom was able to give you that kind of adventure space that her father had given her.
Nona
Well, yeah. Both of my parents did. They were not authoritarian parents at all. But I also really do wish I’d gotten more of her wisdom and guidance earlier in life. She just never sat me down and talked about these things, and I just wish she would’ve. It might’ve been the boundaries thing. It honestly might’ve been her shyness. I don’t know, but that’s not really my personality. Even if my daughter’s a little embarrassed, I think I am going to talk more explicitly about some of these things so she feels supported and she feels like there’s somebody who understands, even if I’m, like, her dorky mom.
Jennifer
Yeah, that’s fascinating, because the idea of never being judged by a mom, that’s unique, but there was also no intervening in your life unless you asked for it.
Nona
I talk in the book about a missed opportunity where I needed the morning-after pill, I needed Plan B. I was, like, fifteen, and I think that was the first time my mom realized I was having sex. I was trying to do it another way, talking to my friend’s mom, doing Internet research, which was very hard in 1999. Finally, she overheard or understood that I was distressed and asked, “What’s going on? I can help,” and I explained, and she just called her gyno and got me what I needed but didn’t talk to me about it. And I kind of wish she would have. “So, who are you having sex with? How’s it going? Do you need anything?” Something like that. She didn’t say that. I’m sure she had a whole internal dialogue about it, what the best move was, if she was invading my privacy if she asked more questions, and, honestly, maybe times have changed, but my answer to that is no. I’m a sex and love advice columnist for Teen Vogue now, and I always advise people, if they have any sort of functional relationship with their parents, they should try to clue them in to what’s going on, especially if they’re having an issue. And the fact that I didn’t go right to her—I don’t want that to be true for my daughter.
Jennifer
You’ve had all these experiences, and you can share them with your child not to gross her out, but with the goal of making it clear that you’re not an unsafe person to talk to about sex and relationships. There’s nothing that would shock you or make you not want to support her.
One thing that’s very different about your era and mine, I think, is app dating, which I’ve never experienced at all. Your experiences with apps are not that relatable to me—not that they need to be, but I was intrigued by just how easy it was to pick up somebody. I don’t even really have a question; I just realized that, for me, that was almost like we’re from different planets.
Nona
I didn’t have as bleak a time on the apps as most people I know. For me, who felt so sexually repressed and thirsty for years, they came at the exact right time. Once we had an open relationship, it was the way to meet somebody and be kind of up-front about what was going on. You could even put it in your profile. I would go on business trips, work trips, reporting trips often and have a very quick turnaround. I guess it’s similar to meeting people in bars, but you have more people to draw from, and you’re like, “Here for three days! Want to show me around town?” When Aaron and I broke up, I had this feeling of wanting to fuck everybody that moves. I’m sure that kind of response existed before the apps. It’s just a lot easier to do on the apps, and, I don’t know, I had a knack for it. I had a lot of lovely experiences on apps. I’m a verbal person, and I like right-out flirtations, and for various reasons, the apps have not been a total hellscape for me.
That said, I know what people are talking about. There are some moments where you’re so disgusted by all the creeps on there, and as a woman, all the unwanted attention you get, and the dumbass dudes who don’t know how to act. I get all of it, but I think I did have this intuition for finding the diamonds in the rough, but they weren’t all total diamonds.
My partner that I’m with now—our original date was through an app, too.
Jennifer
In the book, you have this line that seems significant to your personality: “If I wasn’t the woman who had lots of sex, who, then, was I?” This is when you decided to take a break.
Nona
At some point in my early twenties or in college, I became associated with a bold, unapologetic sexuality. It happened in tandem with the “chill” persona that I crafted. You know, if you’re not going to be the woman looking for a romantic relationship, you might be very sex-forward. I was very sex-forward, which I found to be genuinely fun, and it felt authentic. I was always very candid about sex. I wanted to talk about sex. I wanted to have a lot of sex. I wanted to understand myself through sex. I wanted to get validation through sex and have adventures through sex, and I used sex as a conduit for a lot of life experiences. So, it became a huge part of my identity.
Sometimes it was part of my journalistic beat, sometimes not. I’ve always off-and-on written about it, and, honestly, this is ironic, but I think being in a romantic relationship with the disappointing sexual aspect put me in a state of perma-horniness. If you’re constantly desiring and not getting, or once-in-a-while getting, then you’re like, “I need more.”
In the chapter about taking a break, there are two different periods that I talk about. One is the millions of people I had sex with after Aaron and I broke up. The second is right after the pandemic, which I don’t reveal until later, but I was with my current partner the whole time and they were very different. During the second period I was like, “I’m writing a stupid book about sex and I don’t even care about sex, like, ugh!” No longer being in that state of wanting and deprivation definitely contributed to my [break].
Even in the ’90s, there were sex-positive feminists that kept the spirit of its original intent and had nuance and would never be Samantha from Sex in the City, like Susie Bright and Candida Royalle. But I didn’t know any of those people at the time. I was fourteen.
Jennifer
At the almost very end, you give a little thumbnail sketch of your sexual self: “My penchant for blowjobs, my agnosticism toward orgasms, and my possibly my heterosexuality itself—these prefaces don’t mean that I’m a failed feminist, but they do mean something.” Can you say a little bit more?
Nona
This debate has become more explicit in the past year or so, as more people who are writing about sex question whether we should be totally nonjudgmental about desire—whether we can say that some desires are bad and some desires are good. Christine Emba and Amia Srinivasan [The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, 2021] both frame this critique of sex-positivity or unthinking-sex-positivity.
I’m still of the belief that we can’t really judge desire. We can judge behavior, of course. If you’re pushing your desires on someone who isn’t into them, that’s obviously a problem, but your actual desires in your head? I’m not going to judge them morally, and I’m not going to judge myself for having progressive desires. That almost reminds me of conversion therapy. Don’t put yourself in conversion therapy. Keeping in mind the dynamics, why we have our desires, that’s not a fruitless exercise. Take adrienne maree brown: she’s written how after all this therapy, she still wants forbidden sex, sex predicated on a lie, or whatever, and she accepts this. It’s important to think about why you have those desires, but you can’t really change them.
Jennifer
That’s a rich idea. I do think there’s maybe a little bit of an orthodoxy around sex with feminism, like, “Obviously, if you didn’t have an orgasm, he should be in the stockade and you are selling yourself short.”
Nona
Exactly!
Jennifer
And then, also, “Blowjob shmojob! Cunnilingus for hours!” I’m not somebody for whom cunnilingus is my go-to desire. Sometimes, it really takes me out of things, but there has been, perhaps, an overcorrection from the days when it wasn’t on the menu.
Nona
Exactly. I feel like that chapter’s about what has been deemed feminist to want. I’m just kind of like, isn’t fulfilling your own desires the most feminist thing of all, rather than trying to fit your desires into some ideal, whether a feminist ideal or a traditional feminine ideal?
Jennifer
Right, it’s sort of like [Anne Koedt’s 1968 article] “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm”—but now it’s as if there’s only one kind of sex that’s woman-friendly.
Nona
Right, and I don’t know why I really like penetrative sex even though it doesn’t necessarily, like, give me an orgasm, but I do. It’s great. Just because it’s tied to Freudian ideas about what’s a better way to have sex doesn’t mean I still don’t want to have penetrative sex. I like to think that Anne Koedt piece is somewhat facetious. I don’t think she was saying that you shouldn’t have penetrative sex because it’s not giving you pleasure. She’s just saying that, if we consider only the anatomy, this is where the orgasm comes from. And if she had a more sophisticated piece, she’d be like, “Yeah, the clitoris is a huge organ, and it’s stimulated by penetrative sex also.” That’s kind of a revelation I didn’t fully explain in this chapter because it’s, honestly, irrelevant for the point that I was making.
I feel like if you only consider the anatomy, going down on somebody with a vagina might seem more pleasurable to them than giving you pleasure, but that’s not how pleasure works. It happens in the brain, and it happens with all other kinds of hormones that flood your brain, and you don’t always know what’s going to trigger those hormones. That’s kind of the point of that chapter. If you really are attuned to what you desire, you can’t put it on some kind of feminist rubric, or else you’ll make yourself miserable.
Jennifer
You ended Bad Sex in love. Why?
Nona
Sex isn’t always about love, and love isn’t always about sex, but it isn’t easy to talk about one without the other. I was learning what love meant at the same time I was learning about my sexual desires.
I want this book to be sex-positive without denying that love is part of that. People put on a chill facade, but if you scratch the surface at all, men and women will tell you that they desire love and intimacy. I don’t know why we create these straw-men who won’t admit that. They will admit it. Even during the peak of my chill days, I would admit I wanted love to my friends, I would admit it to my diary, I would probably admit it to a man who was telling me he liked me. If you make space for it, people will often reciprocate.
