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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
The feminist writer and activist Ellen Willis is best known for defining the idea of pro-sex feminism in the 1980s. But only a little while later, Willis noticed that women’s liberated sexuality had turned out to be, as she put it, “often depressingly shallow, exploitative, and joyless.”
The Atlantic culture writer Sophie Gilbert contemplated Willis’s legacy in her recent review of Bad Sex, a new book by the writer Nona Willis Aronowitz—who also happens to be Willis’s daughter. I called Sophie to chat about some of the bigger ideas her article touched on.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Cat owners can (almost) all agree on one thing. America’s fire sale: Get some free speech while you can. Meme stock’s big bet on Bed Bath & Beyond ‘This Colored Everything’Isabel: You write that “somehow, we let the thoughtful and charged sex positivity espoused by Ellen Willis and her peers curdle into the practice of sex as conspicuous, often unsatisfying, consumption.” What happened?
Sophie: In the ’60s and ’70s, Willis argued, the sexual revolution happened, but in the way of eliminating obstacles to sex. In 1973, Roe v. Wade was decided. Contraception for married couples was legalized during the ’60s and for unmarried people in 1972. The idea that women could have casual sex was becoming more socially acceptable than it had been at any point during the 20th century. For women, there weren’t as many obstacles to sex as there had been before, and there weren’t as many punishments for having sex as there had been.
But at the same time, what that meant for many women—and they talked about this in various consciousness-raising groups and feminist circles—was that there had become more pressure to have sex, and the sex they were having wasn’t necessarily good or pleasurable.
Isabel: It sounds like step one of the sexual revolution was to remove those obstacles and destigmatize sex for women, but then step two—how to have a sex life that is actually empowering and joyful and comfortable—got lost.
Sophie: One of the words I’ve been thinking about is intimacy. Intimacy doesn’t have to mean having sex only in a relationship, but concepts like intimacy, trust, and vulnerability, are, for lots of people, crucial components of a good sex life. I think they’re components that got lost along the way, because we were prioritizing things like quantity over quality, empowerment over slightly less buzzword-y terms.
Isabel: Something that has been called the “sexual counterrevolution” has popped up lately, particularly among Generation Z. Can you explain what that movement is?
Sophie: We’re seeing Gen Z come of age after Millennials dominated the culture, and they’re kind of disgusted by us. There’s a lot of talk about how cringe it is to just hook up with all these millions of guys and feel nothing and boast about it all over the internet. I find the tone of it really fascinating. But it makes complete sense that a generation reared among really ubiquitous and often really ugly online porn would want to place itself in opposition to that and explore other avenues.
Isabel: As a Millennial, what were the pop-culture forces that shaped how you thought about sex growing up?
Sophie: I’m such a clichéd old-lennial, because for me it was absolutely Sex and the City. I think we really saw it as a road map more than we should have, given that it was a show about women in their 30s not written by a woman. But it was this massively influential thing because it had this explanatory context. Here’s the anal-sex episode, here’s the having-sex-outside-of-a-relationship episode. Every chapter of it felt informative.
More generally, I think one of the most influential cultural products of that time was American Pie, which came out in 1999. A part of the plot is the hero hooking up with a woman who doesn’t know that she’s being taped, and the video of their encounter is being broadcast to the whole town. When you think about that now you’re like, Oh my God, this colored everything.
Isabel: Have you come across any positive pop-culture portrayals of sexual intimacy, either growing up or more recently?
Sophie: There are lots of sex-positive works on TV right now, and I think those are great. The show Sex Education on Netflix is not just sex positive, but relentlessly sex positive.
I do think that, as a culture, we are starved for explorations of intimacy. I’ve theorized that part of why the author Sally Rooney is so popular is how well she writes intimacy—the idea that you can have the most profound, intimate sexual interactions with someone else, and they don’t have to be within fixed parameters. That’s also why I found the TV adaptation of Rooney’s novel Normal People so compelling; you had this gorgeous, intimate scene of someone losing her virginity, and everything was a negotiation—Is this okay; is this okay?—but it wasn’t unsexy. If we’re talking about how you absorb road maps from culture of what your love and sex lives can and should look like, that was a really stunning one.
Isabel: Before we move on from pop culture, I have to ask about Game of Thrones and the new prequel series. How does Game of Thrones—an immensely popular series with troubling sexual dynamics—and its world fit in with what we’ve been talking about?
Sophie: This is a tricky one, because sex in Game of Thrones was always messily tangled up with other things, and in House of the Dragon it’s even more so. Without spoiling too much, House of the Dragon is a prequel that follows the Targaryen dynasty more than 150 years before the events of Game of Thrones. The Targaryens, notoriously, practiced incest as a royal prerogative to protect the “purity” of the bloodline. So although the series has been touting its moral superiority over GoT in the sense that you don’t have the same titillating or wanton portrayals of sexual violence, it’s impossible in House of the Dragon to separate sex from power. I don’t think intimacy gets much of a look-in, and vulnerability even less so.
Isabel: At one point in the piece you ask: “How do we even try to make bad sex better?” What do you see as a possible path forward?
Sophie: Whenever you engage in anything with other people, you have a basic human duty of care toward them. That’s partly what’s gotten lost. It doesn’t mean that care is marriage, or even dinner. That sounds really glib. But it’s care on an emotional, humane level. Let’s not mistreat people or take them for granted. Let’s absolutely not abuse or harass them. But let’s also think How is their experience with this? Is this pleasurable for them?
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(A 2019 story from the Atlantic archive)
At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old.
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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
As we’re fire-hosed by news of Donald Trump’s antics and stories of the GOP’s slide into antidemocratic madness, Americans must remember what’s at stake in an actual military confrontation between freedom and dictatorship in Europe.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Trump is back on the ballot. The pandemic’s soft closing How future generations will remember us The Long HaulThe war against democracy, as I’ve said many times, is being fought on multiple fronts around the world, and nowhere with more ferocity than in Ukraine. The former National Security Council staffer Alex Vindman is in Ukraine today, and as the conflict there drags on, he said this morning that he’s worried about the world developing Ukraine fatigue. Although I understand his concern, I don’t think that’s happening—at least not yet. But it’s time to remind ourselves what the stakes are in Ukraine for the United States and its allies.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine isn’t merely a “war” in which two sides have something in dispute and are using military force to get their way. The Prussian high priest of military thought, Carl von Clausewitz, described war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will,” but the Russian attack isn’t one of Clausewitz’s 19th-century conflicts. The attempt to destroy Ukraine is more like the Nazi campaigns of conquest in World War II—or, if you’d like a more futuristic analogy, it is like the war waged against Earth by aliens in the classic 1996 movie Independence Day. When the American president tries to surrender to the invaders and asks them what they want humans to do to secure a truce, they answer with one word: “Die.”
It’s not a perfect analogy. Vladimir Putin, in the first weeks of the war, would have accepted a tidy and rapid surrender. Indeed, his initial goals did not include obliterating Ukrainian cities and civilians, because he long ago convinced himself that Ukrainians are indistinguishable from Russians. He may have imagined that after a quick strike against Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would flee—or be killed by his own military—and that Ukrainian children would carpet the streets with flowers to welcome the conquering Russians.
Instead, Ukraine, with Western help, fought back and handed the Russian military one humiliating defeat after another. The Russian version of shock and awe turned into shock and dismay in Moscow, and Putin—whose vanity and ego are now deeply invested in this war—changed Russian war aims from quick conquest to a campaign of death and destruction as punishment for Ukrainian insolence.
So where do things on the battlefield stand now?
There are three things to bear in mind as you read the news from Ukraine:
The Russians are not interested in a settlement. The Russians are running out of men and material, and the war is getting closer to the lives of people in Russia who thought it would never touch them. The Ukrainians are taking terrible losses, but they could outlast the Russians with Western help.The first point, that the Russians are not interested in a settlement, is key to understanding why the U.S. and its Western partners have to commit to the war with money and material support for the long haul. Putin is about to turn 70, which is not young, especially by Russian standards, but this war will last as long as he draws breath. His aims, no matter what he says in public, will always remain the maximum goal of subjugating all of Ukraine.
Second, Putin thought he could pull off a quick victory while Russians, especially in big cities such as Moscow and Leningrad St. Petersburg, went about their lives. But the Russian military has proved to be far more fragile than Western experts predicted. (Among those getting it wrong: me.) After losing some of his best forces, Putin is now fighting the war with more kids from the glubinka, the Russian boondocks, many of them ethnic non-Russians.
There are even reports that Putin is trying to recruit in jails by offering Russian prisoners a commutation in exchange for fighting in Ukraine. The heinous acts–and likely war crimes–we’ve already seen in Ukraine will seem like a warm-up if the Russian high command lets a bunch of convicted criminals in army uniforms loose on the battlefield with rifles and grenades. But this, in a country that once prided itself on the might of its armed forces, is a sign of desperation.
Finally, the war is now a slog and will remain one. America and other nations have, for months, been carefully threading a needle, providing aid to Ukraine but resisting moves (such as no-fly zones) that could provoke a direct confrontation between Moscow and the West. This is a wise policy, and Joe Biden, in my view, has done a masterful job of helping Ukraine stay in the fight. We should continue to do so, with more and better weapons as fast as we can deliver them.
The long term favors the Ukrainians, 40 million people who are fighting for their existence as a nation. The Russians are heedlessly throwing bodies and weapons into the fight, making it “a foot race between Western patience on the Ukrainian side versus Putin’s terrible burn rate of killed-in-action and equipment,” as Admiral James Stavridis told me in an email earlier today. Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO, thinks time is on Kyiv’s side: “I would rather have Zelensky’s hand of cards than Putin’s.”
In the near future, however, the Russians can still bring crushing amounts of power to bear on Ukraine: They want to claim Ukrainian territory, even if they have to reduce cities to piles of rubble and corpses before they plant their boots on them.
This war is about freedom and democracy. Americans may become weary of the news and the depressing images, but we will never be as weary as the Ukrainians, who will need the West’s support for a long time to come.
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By James Parker
If you were a gentleman in Elizabethan London, a gentleman of more or less regular means and habits, your typical day went something like this: You rose at 4 a.m., you wrote 14 letters and a 30-page treatise on the nonexistence of purgatory, you fought a duel, you composed a sonnet, you went to watch a Jesuit get publicly disemboweled, you invented a scientific instrument, you composed another sonnet, you attended the premiere of As You Like It, you romanced someone else’s wife, and then you caught the bubonic plague and died.
They packed a lot in, the Elizabethans, is my point. Maybe posterity, considering our own age, will judge that we are packing a lot in, with the fascism and the COVID and the melting glaciers. Maybe. But there was a peculiar paradoxical ugly-beautiful density to life as the Elizabethans lived it.
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P.S.The Russian war in Ukraine is not only killing people and destroying cities; it is shattering friendships and tearing apart families in Ukraine and Russia. The Russian director Andrei Loshak has created a documentary you should watch titled Broken Ties, which shows discussions among friends and families about the war. Nothing penetrates the bubble around some Russians, not even the fear in the voices of their own children or the body bags coming back from the war zone.
If you think that the inability of millions of people to accept reality about the 2020 presidential election is a terrifying part of the political landscape in the United States, you will be shocked by the level of denial at work among ordinary Russians about a war that their own loved ones are experiencing in real time.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
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