What better way to celebrate the first few days of 2012 than with the latest installment in the annual Best Sex Writing anthology from Cleis Press? This one, selected and introduced by Susie Bright and edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, collects two dozen of the best non-fiction sex-on-the-brain think-pieces published in 2011.
Bright -- the author, most recently, of Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir -- sets out to strike a balance between extremes in writing about sex and imagines Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture as a time capsule: "Was our species trying to extinguish itself with puritanical wrath--or just squeeze out one last ecstatic pop shot? What a terrible struggle between the two."
The anthology, fittingly, features piece-by-piece takedowns of some of the former, including Amanda Marcotte's opening essay "Sluts, Walking," which dismantles allegedly feminist critiques of the anti-rape SlutWalk movement from the likes of anti-pornography activists Gail Dines and Wendy Murphy. Here's the crux of Marcotte's defense, presented as an example of the high bar for both thought and writing among Bright's selections for the anthology:
"It's an update on the Take Back the Night rallies. Back when those were formed, feminists were saying, 'Hey, we should be able to leave our homes after dark without getting raped.' Now we're adding to that list a few other things we should be able to do without some dude raping us and having people excuse it as if rapists were a kind of vigilante police force assigned to the task of keeping bitches in line: wear what we want, go to parties, have as many sexual partners as we like, drink alcohol. Eventually we plan to reach a point where women enjoy the freedom of men to do what they want without the inference that you have it coming if someone rapes you."
In fact, you can read between the lines in Best Sex Writing 2012 to piece together your own anthology of the Worst Sex Writing 2012:
Elsewhere in the collection, Roxanne Gay decimates "The Careless Language of Sexual Violence" in James McKinley, Jr.'s account of the gang rape of an eleven year-old girl, published in The New York Times, which focused more on "how the men's lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart" than on what would become of the victim herself, leaving Gay to conclude, as if it needed saying (and apparently it does): "It was an 11-year-old girl whose body was ripped apart, not a town. It was an 11-year-old girl whose life was ripped apart, not the lives of the men who raped her. It is difficult for me to make sense of how anyone could lose sight of that, and yet it isn't."
In "Men Who 'Buy Sex' Commit More Crimes: Newsweek, Trafficking, and the Lie of Fabricated Sex Studies", writer Thomas Roche picks apart the logical leaps -- and problematic survey data -- in Melissa Farley's much-talked about 2011 Newsweek feature railing against the dangers of sex work, broadly defined.
And Bright, in her lone contribution to the collection beyond the book's introduction, unpacks New York Times contributor Ross Douthat's op-ed "Why Monogamy Matters" in her response essay, "Why Lying About Monogamy Matters," taking issue, in particular, with his assertion that (in Bright's summary) "women with minimal or virginal sexual experience are the happiest women in the land":
"Sexual self-knowledge is a huge part -- perhaps the biggest part -- of growing up. Like taking your first steps, or speaking your first words, you gain enormous intelligence and independence every time you figure out another piece. You fall down and cry sometimes, but you can't wait to get back up. To learn that things are not black and white, to hold contradictions, ambiguity, and empathy in your body and mind at the same time: that's sexual maturity. You don't achieve it from cutting out paper dolls and keeping your knees crossed."
The opposite end of the spectrum gets a critical eye, too, as in "The Worship of Female Pleasure," Salon writer Tracy Clark-Flory's first-person assessment of Slow Sex author and OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone's Orgasmic Meditation workshops, which notes, "It's easy to see why some call her a cult leader" (my own interview with Daedone, published in June, was one of my most popular articles in 2011).
If you're looking for erotic writing, you'd do well to dig deeper into the back catalog at Cleis Press, better known for its erotica anthologies, or into previous works by both Bright and Bussel (though Lidia Yuknavitch's contribution "Love Grenade" did have me dreaming of a visit to the See Vue Inn, the lesbian love nest at the center of her personal memoir, and Joan Price's memoir "Grief, Resilience, and My 66th Birthday Gift" has me slightly less terrified of growing older). But for thoughtful writing about everything from political sex scandals (see Katherine Spillar's "Sex, Lies, and Hush Money") and religion (see "Atheists Do It Better: Why Leaving Religion Leads to Better Sex" by Greta Christina) to first-person reflections on sex work (see Tracy Quan's essay "Taking Liberties" and Amber Dawn's "To All the Butches I Loved Between 1995 and 2005: An Open Letter About Selling Sex, Selling Out, and Soldiering On") and BDSM (see Abby Tallmer's excellent ode "Losing the Meatpacking District: A Queer History of Leather Culture" and Bussel's essay "Penis Gagging, BDSM, and Rape Fantasy: The Truth About Kinky Sexting"), Best Sex Writing 2012 is as good as it gets, which is to say, you know... the Best.
Don't miss Sarah Estrella's other Sexy Books reviews and reporting! For the latest Sex & Relationships headlines please subscribe to this column (above) and follow @Sexaminer on Twitter.
Comments