Receive Re-Making Love: The Feminization Of Sex Executed By Barbara Ehrenreich Available As Volume

found it interesting reading about the psychology of women's love lives, A great read, though dated withyears of subsequent radical sexual change read: the rise of misogynist internet porn and the hypersexualization of women and girls.
I loved the historical reading of the American sexual revolution from a womancentered point of view, but I found myself hungry for an update form the authors that takes into account the stunning and largely, stunningly negative changes of recent years.
or how history is rewritten to serve the masters of the writer, So there was a ”revolution”, A TV show for the white women, not including brown women, not including trans women, And the show was a distraction from the Civil Rights Movement, And now it the 'splaining to make the TV show real, Written at height of AIDs scare in defense of the sexual revolution, this study draws a perfectly neat arc from its inception to reception, a trajectory that is telling if not teleological in the conclusions it draws about its legacy.
Unfortunately, the authors seem to fall into the same whitewashed, heterosexist trap that made the radical feminist stance on sex particularly repellant to Third Wavers.
Particularly in the section on the reclamation of female sexual pleasure, this is mostly discussed in the context of monogamous, heterosexual marriage.
The authors pay lipservice to the increased "awareness" of gay and lesbian sexual practices that infiltrated the new literature of sex manuals in thes and here and there, they note that the sexual revolution expanded erotic possibility to all women "gay or straight.
" Frustratingly, though, they have almost nothing to say about where lesbians or the concurrent gay rights movement fits into the sexual revolution.
It is clear that by defining the sexual revolution as a "women's" revolution the authors mean white, heterosexual, middleclass women.
In the final chapter, they even proclaim that women must claim their ownership of the sexual revolution, lest it becomes the victory of "members of sexual 'minority groups'" as opposed to "the female majority.
"As if the interests of feminists are somehow distinct from, even threatened by, the accomplishments of the gay liberation movement! If this reflects the biases of the conservatives they so vehemently attack, it does so in so far as they characteristically marginalize other voices to protect the place of their particular brand of feminism in the mainstream.


Nevertheless, this book contains many telling insights into how science operated as a mechanism of power and moral enforcement throughout the twentieth century.
Despite

the monopolistic grasp of medicine and psychoanalysis on sex for most of the century, it proved unable to contain women's changing experience of sex and increasing dissatisfaction with monogamous heterosexuality in the postwar period.
We owe the expansion of women's sexual freedom not to technological innovations like the birth control pill or the sexological studies of Kinsey and Masters and Johnson who "rediscovered" the clitoris, but to social forces that truly made the sexual revolution a women's movement.
Science in both cases was merely a supplement to social change, giving validity to an altogether new view of sex.
If science collapsed clitoral orgasm into the end goal of sex, feminists opened it up again as a new symbol of sexual autonomy.
The new stress on reciprocal pleasure provoked a number of longlasting social effects, A new industry of sex that brought the market for women's sexual needs into the mainstream, penetrating even to the heart of fundamentalist Christian attempts to domesticate the sexualized housewife.


Implicitly, however, where science works to the advantage of women's liberation, it can also reverse the gains that have been made.
In their final chapter, the authors discuss how the AIDs panic was used to justify a preexisting moral backlash against the sexual revolution in the mainstream media.
Simultaneously, new scientific arguments affirmed the old social dictum that women "naturally" wanted love and marriage, and sought to recenter vaginal intercourse over clitoral stimulation through the discovery of yet another hotly disputed piece of female anatomy, the "Gspot.
" Nevertheless, the sexual revolution solidified the notion that women have an equal right to pleasure and enjoyment in sex, Even where in other areas a double standard persists, this constituted a radical redefinition of heterosexuality and thus power relations between men and women generally.
For this reason, the authors sound their rallying cry to a feminist revolution that will again claim ownership of the sexual revolution and assert this pleasure for its own sake as a central political right.

This provocative book reveals how the real sexual  revolution was initiated by women not men   and how it transformed both our behavior and our  understanding of what sex means in our lives.
Great book about the sexual revolution that began in the lates/earlys and the role feminism and gay rights play in the creation and understanding of that revolution.
A lot of excellent history here, as the authors take us through the decades to the mids concerning America's changing viewpoints on sex.
I read this book because I love Barbara Ehrenreich's work I think she is absolutely brilliant, In a Nutshell: An exploration of women's liberation and sexual revolution as a separate and unique experience,

Thoughts:
The sexual double standards are infuriating! Men, if you don't want women having sex outside of marriage, STOP HAVING SEX WITH ANYONE WHO IS NOT YOUR WIFE.
Problem solved. Or if you can't bring yourself to do that, then let women do their thing and quit complaining, IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU. I am so glad I finally read this classic, It's quick, easy, and satisfying so if you have been procrastinating just go ahead and pick it up, Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobswriting amids antifeminist backlash and sexual conservatismargue forcefully that women were both the agents and beneficiaries of the most truly revolutionary aspects of the sexual revolution of thes ands.
Beyond the Playboy and free love images of the sexual revolution, women redefined both the practice and meaning of heterosexuality and in the process undermined the patriarchal, phallocentric medical model of sexuality popularized by psychologists.


The early chapters of this book are great as historythe sexually charged energy undergirding teenage girls' Beatlemania, urban single working women in thes and the birth of the singles' scene, feminist sexology that insisted on women's pleasure and the depathologization of clitoral sexuality.
The last chapters and conclusion on sexuality within the evangelical Right and the consumerization of sex are best read as great contemporary social criticism and as primary historical sources themselves.
The very existence of the book speaks volumes about and could be great to teach about the rightwing backlash on one hand and the feminist "sex wars" on the other hand, both of which were in full swing inwhen this book was published.


Favorite tidbit of trivia from the book: TGIFridays was originally one of the first singles' bars in New York City! Barbara Ehrenreich was an American journalist and the bestselling author of sixteen previous books, including the bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch.
A frequent contributor to Harpers and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time Magazine.
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