From polyamory to porn, the excellent Future Sex explores “free love” today
It’s a phrase that conjures images of blissed-out, long-haired women dancing in a field, of shirtless men in bell bottoms with fingers spread into peace signs in Haight-Ashbury: free love. Once a marker of rebellion against a society and government policing its citizens’ relationships, “free love”—the freedom to have sex without marriage or bearing children, to have sex with someone of the same gender—has at once become the norm and gone out of style. In her insightful, generation-defining collection of essays, Emily Witt explores what sexual freedom, especially for women, means in contemporary Western society. In San Francisco, that free-love locus of yore, Witt investigates the webcam economy; attends workshops for orgasmic meditation, in which a stranger strokes a woman’s genitals; and expands her mind with (or at least occasionally consumes) drugs. Future Sex is Joan Didion meets fetish porn.
Witt adopts a similar structure for many of the essays in Future Sex, her first full-length publication, a survey of some of the more extreme sexual options available, and a few traditional ones, too. She begins with her first-hand experience of a subculture or phenomenon then provides its historical context, giving a full, detailed view of each subject. In “Internet Porn,” for example, Witt attends a shoot for Kink.com—in which its female star is spit on, slapped, and fingered by a group of strangers—then discusses feminists’ shifting view of pornography throughout its history, finding the old question of whether one is for or against it unhelpful today. “‘If feminists define pornography, per se, as the enemy,’” she quotes Ellen Willis, “‘the result will be to make a lot of women ashamed of their sexual feelings and afraid to be honest about them.’” Witt herself remains conflicted, saying that “when you set porn free, the simulation of violence and ritual public humiliation of a woman was what you got,” though pockets of the industry are becoming more female-friendly. With Kink.com, she notes, consent is emphasized, and the filmmakers work so that its female stars achieve real orgasms.
