The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution

by Katherine Rowland

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Author: Katherine Rowland

Publisher: Seal Press

Hardcover:
ISBN 10: 1580058361
ISBN 13: 978-1580058360

It's time to take inequality in the bedroom as seriously as we take it in the boardroom.

Tens of millions of American women are dissatisfied with their sex lives. In her provocative and meticulously researched new book, The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution, Katherine Rowland, a public health researcher and journalist explores our culture's troubled relationship with women's sexuality and the many complex factors that have thrust us into an epidemic of low desire, guilt, and experiencing sex as a form of labor rather than an act of lust.

Drawing on interviews with more than 120 women and dozens of sexual health professionals, Rowland considers how factors like education, bias in scientific research, social messaging, long-term monogamy, and sexual and gendered violence contribute to women's sexual malaise. She finds no silver bullet to close the pleasure gap, but her wide-ranging foray into women's sexuality makes it very clear that the epidemic of sexual dissatisfaction is about more than a few missing orgasms. It's about the complex interaction between culture, biology, capitalism, history, and our shifting ideas about what is right and good and natural. It's symptomatic of an unfinished revolution--and nobody should settle for it.

Review

"In The Pleasure Gap, Katharine Rowland takes on a feminist issue that has not received the attention it deserves: the inequality between women and men in the fraught and intimate area of sexual pleasure. Well-written and deeply researched, this book illuminates a topic that has profound implications for women's personal happiness and well-being."―Elaine Tyler May, author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation

"A joy to read, and an important conversation about our right to pleasure: how we fake and perform, instead of value our actual sensations, cutting ourselves off from our own sexual enjoyment, which is our birthright. No one should deny themselves pleasure, nor the pleasure of this book, and its inevitable aftermath in their lives."―Julie Holland, author of Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, the Sleep You're Missing, the Sex You're Not Having, and What's Really Making You Crazy

"In The Pleasure Gap, Katherine Rowland takes a candid and unflinching look at the factors that drive sexual desire deficits for cis, heterosexual women. Sweeping away the cobwebs of dusty explanations for women's 'loss of sexual drive.' ... She closes the deal with the reader by offering frank insights into ways to close the gap, with a welcome focus on how we can mute the voices of our society and listen to our own bodies and minds."―Emily Willingham, coauthor of The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource for Your Child's First Four Years

"If I could force everyone to read this book, I would. All of us, especially men who are confused about their partners' sexual response, need it, and need it now."―Eric Berkowitz, author of Sex and Punishment: Four Hundred Years of Judging Desire

"Tasteful and open-minded . . . Rowland skillfully synthesizes many different ideas and approaches, and encourages women to embrace a broader understanding of their own sexual desire as an ongoing process of self-discovery and self-assertion."―Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Katherine Rowland was previously the publisher and executive director of Guernica. She holds a masters in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research fellow in medical anthropology. She has contributed to Nature, the Financial Times, Green Futures, the Guardian, the Independent, Aeon, Psychology Today, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution