I'm learning more and more that memoirs (or quasi-memoirs) about feminist women leaving behind monogamy for the totes enlightened world of casual hookups and polyamory just to be (equally?) unhappy with those things too really annoy me. I think it's the casual, though explicit, dismissal of the works of sex-negative feminists while seemingly coming to the conclusion that so many of them have written about, yet maintaining an air of superiority about it all 👀
There were moments in this book that made me cringe. For a book that at least on the face of it is relatively woke, there were moments of unexamined misogyny that the author put forth without any amount of irony or self-awareness. For example, when she and her partner decided to try polyamory and he was checking in with her after his first hookup (as per their agreement), she said she felt jealousy (sure, that's fine). She began second guessing herself, wondering if she was like 'all other women who just wanted to suck a man into monogamy'. How can you write a book like this and nearly end it with a "Oh, nooooo, am I like *gasp* other women? Ew." Get a grip.
"Many of [the female feminist activists] had caught a distinct sense of dismissal, even contempt, from the male activists for whom they were stuffing envelopes. They often struggled to gain political clout on the left especially if they declined to trade sexual favors...Women were treated like sexual garbage cans by activist men."
"The marriages she saw around her seethed with unattractive compromises, emotional repression, and sexual boredom. Most partnerships she knew of were predicated on a sexist détente - the husband had made it clear that he would not give up certain prerogatives and the wife pretended not to hate him for it."
"...a funny reversal of the importance of sexual purity - the pursuit of sex solely to show that I was rejecting traditional expectations thereby proving the resilience of those expectation's influence."
"Women recalled chronic patronizing, compulsive interrupting and classic sexism excused with self-awareness. 'I know this is super scummy of me, but...'...A supposedly feminist guy who tramples on one's boundaries in some uncanny unexpected way. The worse thing about this phenomena, women remarked, is that it's often a general feeling and not necessarily a momentous incident and that makes it feel less real....These guys usually seem nice, reasonable, the kind of man you'd feel comfortable confronting about the very behavior he claims to denounce."