The Atlantic

How Early-2000s Pop Culture Changed Sex

Sophie Gilbert on intimacy, <em>Game of Thrones</em>, <em>American Pie</em>, and more
Source: Paramount Pictures / Newsmakers

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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.

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