“We’re liberated, and we’re miserable.” That’s a title of a chapter in Chrisine Emba’s new book, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation – and one a lot of people can relate to. The Sexual Revolution held lots of promises of freedom and liberation, but in many ways it just hasn’t delivered. We’re in the midst of a sex recession, marriage is in decline, and a recent Pew survey found that nearly half of American adults say that dating has gotten harder for most people over the last 10 years. Women know this. Men know this, too. But many are not willing to talk about it publicly. Because to critique where the West has landed on sex and intimacy is to critique feminism, and to question the overreach of #MeToo. Add to that, to focus on relationships between men and women is to risk offending the progressive consensus – which sees the whole conversation as reinforcing heteronormative discourse. Christine Emba is an opinion columnist and editor at The Washington Post. She joins Tara today to talk about the mess between men and women, and how we might get out of it.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com