What Women Want

Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, by Christine Emba, Sentinel, 224 pages, $27

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, by Amia Srinivasan, Farar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $28

The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession, by Kelsy Burke, Bloomsbury Publishing, 352 pages, $29.99

Lost Americans understand today that sex without consent is a no-go, both morally and legally. Sex without consent is rape.

But consent should be the floor, not the ceiling, for ethical sexual encounters, suggests Washington Post columnist Christine Emba in Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. “Things don’t have to be criminal to be profoundly bad,” she writes.

Consent is a “baseline norm,” but consent alone doesn’t make sex “ethical, or fair, or equally healthy for both participants,” argues Emba. Indeed, there are “many situations in which a partner might consent to sex—affirmatively, even enthusiastically—but having said sex would still be ethically wrong.”

Emba’s vision of good sexual stewardship would involve everyone having less sex with fewer people and caring about those partners more. “In general,” she declares, “willing the good of the other is most often realized in restraint—in inaction, rather than action.”

As it stands, Emba adds, “there is something unmistakably off in the way we’ve been going about sex and dating.” To back up that claim, she offers statements from a number of young and youngish ladies, in addition to drawing on her own experiences with dating as a millennial raised as an evangelical Christian.

Echoes of Emba’s qualms can be heard everywhere these days. Critics spanning the political spectrum, including feminists like University of Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan, seem worried about modern sexual mores. Compared to prior laments from social conservatives and feminists, today’s debate is less focused on purity and patriarchy. It is more concerned with women’s satisfaction and happiness. Yet despite that focus, the conversation too often fails to treat women as individuals with widely varying values, tastes, and preferences.

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The complaints Emba and her subjects have about modern romance vary in their particulars. But they coalesce around a common theme: discontent about sexual encounters with men. These men don’t care about their partner’s pleasure. They try things during sex—such as choking—that these women do not want. They pressure these women into sex. Or they don’t call afterward. Or they call only for hookups. Or they call for a while but ghost suddenly. Or they string women along with relationships that are OK but will not lead to marriage or kids.

Such complaints have been staples of sexual critique since sexual liberation started becoming a core American value. Promiscuity. Casual sex. Hookup culture. The labels assigned to the problem have shifted over time, as have the diagnoses of its origin. Feminism, porn, dating apps—all have taken some blame.

And not without reason. There’s no doubt that at least some feminists fought for women’s right to “have sex like men.” There’s no doubt that the internet and smartphone apps have made it much easier to hook up with larger numbers of people. And while pornography’s effect on off-screen sex is more debatable, there’s no doubt porn has become more ubiquitous and less taboo.

The net effect has been bad for women, argues Emba, whose book’s second chapter is titled “We’re Liberated, and We’re Miserable.” Women assume more risk in sexual encounters and reap fewer rewards, she says. They feel sex is expected when they date, and they often comply not out of authentic desire but because they think it is what’s normal or because saying yes is less hassle than saying no. Or they do it because they want someone to like them. They hope it will lead to relationships, but it often doesn’t (and meanwhile, their “biological clocks” are ticking). And even when they do want sex, they don’t want it like this—with the dirty talk, or kinky moves, or failure to provide emotional as well as physical fulfillment. They want more care in sexual encounters.

Yet “the broader culture,” Emba complains, would have us believe most men and women are happy with the “sexually liberated status quo.” She implicates the usual villains: Hugh Hefner, Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the City. But for the references to apps like Tinder, this book could have been written decades ago. Indeed, much of it was written decades ago, in books like Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs (2005), which railed against “raunch culture” and women’s objectification (often at their own hands). The fear undergirding all of these jeremiads is that previous generations’ sexual revolution has forced today’s young women into a world for which they’re not equipped. These authors aren’t the moralistic scolds of yore, insisting that all premarital sex is bad or that only bad women like sex. They just want women’s sexual and ro