Bad Sex Quotes

“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.”
― Nona Willis Aronowitz, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution

“We’ve got to learn to sleep with people because WE want them, not because THEY want us,” she said. “Not to prove anything to them, not to make them feel better about their masculinity, not out of weakness or inability to say no, but simply because we WANT to.”
― Nona Willis Aronowitz, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution

“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.”
― Nona Willis Aronowitz, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution

“Abortion laws are sexist laws, made by men to punish women.”
― Nona Willis Aronowitz, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution

“She remembered thinking at the time that “women who have abortions are more closeted than gay people.”
― Nona Willis Aronowitz, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution

“This kind of scene, a sapphic inversion of the classic “you know you want this” coercion, unfolds more than once in Rubyfruit Jungle.”
― Nona Willis Aronowitz, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution

“in the Life feature, for instance, the author called these groups an “embarrassing vanguard” and used paternity leave as an example of the world becoming “too sensitive.”
― Nona Willis Aronowitz, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution

“Patriarchy is unique in that heterosexual women are oppressed by the very people they want to love, live with, and have sex with.”
― Nona Willis Aronowitz, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution

“The way she saw it, “having our relationships sanctioned and regulated by the state is hardly something to celebrate.”
― Nona Willis Aronowitz, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution

“We’ve resisted marrying,” my mother wrote, “partly in symbolic protest against the relentless drumbeat for ‘family values,’ partly because we feel no need to get the state involved in our relationship, and no irresistible economic or social pressure to do so.”
― Nona Willis Aronowitz, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution