The full title is: Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape, Edited by Jaclyn Friedman & Jessica Valenti.
This was a very interesting book, with a wide variety of authors and essays. The loose theme was describing a world running right, with a wide variety of interpretations and depths. Some describe small tweaks required to get us to an acceptable tomorrow, some leap forward and describe the end result, and many walk the line between the two and describe both– or the path from here, to better, to best.
Several essays were solid but didn’t grab me beyond the intellectual level; most of these were expanding the idea of good sex in various directions and breaking down preconceptions. There was a lot of intersectional analysis in these essays, where the social constraints of being female are amplified by being fat, black, disabled, transitioning, and so on. These were good at keeping me grounded and reminding me that there are a lot of moving parts within feminism and desire. I particularly appreciated how many articles emphasized the internalization of norms, where very smart people intellectually knew that they deserved love, but advertising and culture kept knocking them down, telling them that any form of happy ending wasn’t destined for these splinters.
Several articles had me deeply interested; I was very tempted to write a post detailing my own experiences after reading a couple of essays (particularly about nice versus “nice” guys), the vision of “what do we imagine as a good first experience” and detailing the ways the stereotypical “good” was still short. The most persuasive, most useful, and deeply necessary discussion throughout revolved around the concept of enthusiastic consent. Getting that one thing right would help knock down the low standards of “no means no” and seeking a mere absence of resistance, and encourage sex to be an almost uniformly positive thing. It’s easy to get right once you begin with that as the expectation– so we have a job ahead of us, redefining what sex, pressure, and relationships should look like. An article on a very similar topic diagnoses much of the problem as our predator/prey descriptions and expectations for sex– sounds like a good place to start.
