Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All by Jaclyn Friedman

Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All Reviews

• 
  Cami

  This book was such a sharp analysis of why individual solutions (women's empowerment/faux-powerment) fail to meaningfully address the systemic issues facing women/femmes/female-identifying folks and society at large today (gender violence, women's sexual disatisfaction, economic injustice and inequity etc.). The cultural analysis is deep, smart, historically accurate and thorough and the anecdotes are moving, compelling and diverse. As a Black progressive Christian feminist, I rarely feel like my specific perspective is being addressed; I have to do a lot of interpretive work and application work when I approach any text, but this book spoke to me in a way no other contemporary feminist text has.
• 
  Laura

  This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about sexual equality. Friedman makes important connections between the many ways in which women and other gender and sexual minorities lack power in our society and how this affects our ability to have sexual pleasure and freedom, and also profiles activists working to change each of these aspects of our culture.
  
  This book is the best mixture of broad and concrete - she talks about how overarching systems like capitalism and white supremacy impact women's sex lives, and then ties those larger systems in to specific, on-the-ground ways that people are working to change them. A few examples include a Native American activist working against sexual violence against Native women and girls; a drop-in shelter for homeless youth that provides sex education and a warm, welcoming space where the teens, many of whom are LGBTQ, are taken seriously and respected; and a group of men who teach a program to middle-school boys about consent and emotional literacy.
  
  The writing style is engaging, funny, and accessible--it's hard to put down! I really appreciate the focus on how people are changing our sexual culture, and how we, the readers, can find ways to plug in. It's easy to feel hopeless in the face of how toxic our society's ideas about sex are, how entrenched gendered power dynamics are in the systems that affect every aspect of our lives, and how much damage this has caused and continues to cause. This book is an antidote to that hopelessness, even as it details so many of the worst examples of that toxicity, because of its focus on real, everyday people who are changing their communities for the better.
  
  Friedman's epilogue ends with one of my favorite quotes ever, an ancient Jewish teaching: "It is not yours to complete the work, but neither is it yours to desist from it." This is how I try to live my life, and Unscrewed is a powerful example of how we can come together to make a difference. I highly recommend it!
• 
  Eilonwy

  This was interesting, but I'm just not in the right mood for it. After not picking it back up for three weeks, I don't think I'm finishing it. Sorry, book.
• 
  Miri

  I’m absolutely in love with this book (no surprise given that I loved Friedman’s previous two books). This is such a nuanced take on “sex positivity” that takes it way beyond the typical sex-is-awesome cheerleading. Friedman interviews a wide variety of people doing important work, including many women of color (including a Native activist and researcher), sex workers, men promoting healthy masculinity, and trans and queer folks.
  
  I would’ve loved to see more from/about people with disabilities, but overall this is so great.
• 
  Ashley Reid

  I agree completely that Sex-Ed classes should be required in every school, and there should be a full syllabus that informs students about different sexualities and how to explore them, practicing safe-sex, and the consequences that arise when not using contraceptives.
  
  The only Sex-Ed at my school was a 1 hour class where we had a few PowerPoint presentations about male and female genitals, underage pregnancy and abortions, and a very awkward presentation about some people who “prefer to have relations with their own kind” .
  
  Considering I “prefer the company of my own kind”, i think I would have had a lot less problems with accepting that my sexuality was acceptable if there had been a better class to teach us that we are who we are, and we love who we love, and all of that is acceptable.
• 
  Veronica

  Jaclyn will leave you inspired despite our dismal political climate. Just the book to get us through this kleptocracy. Disclaimer: Jaclyn is a friend.
• 
  Clare

  For the politics book club for March, we wanted to read something about #MeToo, but were stymied by the fact that the #MeToo movement is like two months old and so nobody has written a proper book about it yet. But it turns out there is indeed a recently published book that touches on a lot of the issues being looked at with #MeToo, and that I already had a copy of it, because back in December, Annie and I went to see
  Jaclyn Friedman talk at the Cambridge Public Library and had thus gotten signed copies of
  Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All.
  
  Friedman is a sex educator, not an academic or a theorist, but she takes a really holistic view of sex education that means she incorporates a lot of feminist and other kinds of theory into her educative mission, and she does a lot of reporting on what sex researchers and other social science researchers are up to. One result of this is that the book covers a lot of ground, including political movements like the rise of the Religious Right, economic issues like the cooptation of sexual liberation rhetoric by advertisers, the sorry state of scientific research on how women's sexuality "works," and labor issues surrounding sex work and the trafficking narrative. One unavoidable side effect of having such a large scope of topics is that the book was either going to breeze through a few things or be a thousand pages long; Friedman (probably quite sensibly) went for the first option. The book clocks in at around 250 pages plus notes, and there are plenty of other resources out there if you want a more in-depth history of, say, the Religious Right's adoption of abortion as a galvanizing issue when it stopped being politically feasible to mobilize around opposing interracial marriage, or on sexism within the various other '60s/'70s political movements.
  
  What this book really does is provide a framework for discussing issues within our sexual culture and learning how to demystify the bullshit that gets thrown around to keep us all in line and buying increasingly technically advanced underwear or whatever. I don't know if Friedman identifies as a socialist (although she's based in Boston so: Jaclyn, join the SocFem Working Group), but one of her main points is that the issues with our sexual culture are systemic, wrapped up not only in patriarchy but in interlocking systems of capitalism, white supremacy, etc., and that the constant message that if we're unhappy, it's all due to our own individual failures and we should individually find ways to be better, is the gaslighting propaganda these systems use to prevent us from taking collective action to demand and create a better culture. (She also identifies this "there's no such things as society; everything's on you personally" worldview as neoliberal ideology specifically.)
  
  One core concept that Friedman uses heavily in this book is the idea of fauxpowerment, which is a bit of a goofy-sounding neologism that I think nevertheless sums up a lot of what's wrong with our current sexual culture overall and many segments of the feminist movement's obsession with lifestyle policing and writing endless takes about whether individual bits of pop culture ephemera are empowering or not. In the fauxpowerment narrative, empowerment is personal, it is something you feel rather than something you objectively are or are not in relation to other power actors, and it must be performed so that everyone knows you feel sufficiently empowered and we can all feel good about how empowered we all are and nothing has to change. (This was always the most desire-to-stab-my-eyeballs-out-inducing part of the wonderful chaos that was the aughts-era ladyblogosphere, for me. Endless fucking thinkpieces about whether this sex act or that sex act or this movie or that pop star "is empowering." Do you know what felt empowering? Realizing I didn't have to give a shit and closing the browser tab on those thinkpieces.) In the fauxpowerment narrative, at its most pernicious, even things like threat of violence or actual violence are all about whether you have a "victim mindset" or "are letting fear control your actions" and blah blah blah and none of it's supposed to have any relation to, like, whether or not you actually are at risk of violence or have in fact been victimized. It ultimately ends up demanding that people not process or react to any input from their environments at all, which is just not how people work.
  
  Friedman says: To hell with all that, neither wearing pants nor not wearing pants is inherently objectively empowering or disempowering. The problem here is that we have all these cultural systems that let other people have way too many opinions about other people's pants-wearing (or lack thereof) and, most crucially, that some of those people have actual power over other people to punish them for doing pants wrong. It's not a brand-new insight; as long as there have been shitty hot takes by creepy gender study professors who later turned out to be not qualified and preying on their students (
  a-HEM) about how purifying jizz facials are or whatever, there have been people pointing out that this is stupid and not the point. But Friedman here provides tools for breaking down and talking about why it's stupid, which is very valuable, even if one of those tools is a silly portmanteau (but then, so was "mansplaining," and that was Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2014).
  
  The chapter titles are also fun. I realize this isn't particularly important, although I like how Friedman's casual, bloggy writing style works; it feels kind of like you're hanging out in a bar with her or possibly still in the wacky world of the feminist netroots. (Some of the stuff she talks about might also be more awkward if she tried to use a more formal writing style--it's a book about sex, after all. Go ahead and giggle.) But the chapters are titled things like "The Separation of Church and Sex" and "Our Internet, Ourselves," which I think beats being super dour all the time. Just because our sexual culture is garbage doesn't mean we can't poke fun.
  
  Unscrewed also profiles a bunch of activists who are currently doing work on de-upfucking fucking, with information about the kind of organizing they do and the things their organizations have accomplished. You know, just in case you're interested in getting involved. A brief epilogue, "How to Join the Resistance," gives a few starting points and bits of advice for newbie activists, much of which should be broadly applicable to any kind of social justice work. It's not quite the Revolution Inna Box that everyone seems to want to find at the end of books on social issues, but if anyone had figured out how to put a revolution inna box then things wouldn't still need so much fixing, would they?
  
  As someone who has opted out of American sexual culture about as much as she could figure out how to opt out, this book was an interesting read for me not necessarily because it challenged me to be a better ally to people who don't want to just nope out (I've been painstakingly educated on being less of a judgmental ass about that kind of thing over the past several years, so while it helped, it wasn't a new idea) but because it challenged me to try to imagine a culture I wouldn't want to opt out of. Over the years I've sort of identified as various places somewhere on the ace/grey/demi spectrum, but only in the past couple of years have gotten comfortable identifying as This Is Too Much Work And I Can't Be Arsed--and I've gotten very, very comfortable identifying that way! But what if it was less work? What if it didn't come with an omnipresent lurking threat of sexual violence and a side of imbalanced expectations for emotional labor? What if I'd never felt pettily constrained by the desire to not prove Those Assholes right about anything ever? It's oddly terrifying for me to try to imagine what my sex life would look like if it wasn't shaped by years of seething resentment at the expectation that I have one because that's what people do and what women are for. I might even have one. I have absolutely no way of knowing. Trying to think about it is pretty anxiety-inducing so I'm going to stop thinking about it and focus on political activism instead. (Note to self: Write state lawmakers about that horrendous cop rape loophole already.)
  
  Anyway. Discussion next week should be fun, especially as we're having a brunch book club so we'll be in a restaurant where there might be other people who can hear us. Scandalous!
  
  Originally posted at
  Sex ed and patriarchy-smashin'.
• 
  Alexandra

  This is a book that will help you understand the climate of today that still very badly needs new waves of feminism. That's all of us. There's not much about professional/ work environment but those books exist elsewhere. This is a very detailed account of the fallout of patriarchy and people finding ways to more through that and around it. Enjoyed. Both hopeful and despairing.
  
  "Intentions aren't magic. But they are important to understand if we want to shift the frame from fauxpowerment to power. Most fauxpowerment is perpetrated at the intersection of wish-fulfillment and failure of imagination."
  
  "Judging other women requires us to do no work or introspection of our own."
  
  "It's the organizing principle behind the surprisingly large pickup community which has made books like 'The Game' bestsellers and spends thousands possibly millions each year on workshops and programs that promise to teach eager male pupils to manipulate women into sleeping with them. Nameless, faceless women. Basically interchangeable input/output devices all of whom are expected to have the same source code and be vulnerable to the same hacks.
  All that snake oil takes its toll. Many of the young women I meet in my travels are so overwhelmed by so-called-experts and personalities telling them what women want that they're left confused and alienated from the possibilities of making their own discoveries about their individual styles and temperaments. When everyone else is telling you who you are it'd hard to hear your own voice above the din. Any project that has at its heart the question 'What do women want' has already failed. There is no valid answer because it is not a valid question."
  
  "As it is the most dominant model of sexuality in the US treats sex as a commodity exchange in which women 'give it up' and men 'get some'. In this 'sexual marketplace' - a term used in all sincerity by pickup artists and other assorted assholes - women's sexuality is the commodity which they must keep safe from theft and only trade for the best possible deal - ideally ideally a man offering marriage. ..it's used to delegitimize the trauma of rape by equating sexual violence with theft."
  
  "Market feminism convinces us these things are not just fun. They're activism. And except in certain very limited and rare contexts they're just not. Few things we can purchase make use feel sexually powerful in any sustained way. The effect always wears off and like any good job leaves us craving a stronger hit next time. Empowerment that can be purchased is always an individualistic solution, a day pass out of the fucked up structures that not everyone can afford. Sexual power is a structural issue."
  
  "A guy who doesn't place himself at the middle of his dating age range is a guy who's telling you he doesn't like women who have as much power and experience as he does."
• 
  Donald Powell

  A very important book which takes on rape, non-consensual sex and the full panoply of other cultural dysfunction around sexuality. She is well informed and has a consistent, logical theme. Books which challenge the culture for its prejudices, vices, incongruities and injustices are the anchors for hope and beacons for humanity. The book is definitely written from a woman's point of view. The author is a woman. The topics she takes on are genderless. Her ideas are sound and supportable, implementation will require some help from the male point of view. I am a male.
• 
  Deb

  Easy to read (although the subjects the book unpacks are not). Love the book. Love the podcast of the same name. Read. Listen. Learn.
• 
  Michael T Bradley

  I think my only quibble with this book is that it proposes that it's going to examine different people working in fields to move forward sex education/health/etc. in the US as of today, and it really mostly just winds up being essays that somewhat feature individuals along the way, but since the latter is more what I HOPED the book would be, I'm not TOO upset about his.
  
  Oh, that and the term "fauxpowerment" is, to use Friedman's own words, a "vomitrocious portmanteau." If it's faux empowerment for women ... fempowerment? Doesn't that seem the obvious way to go, and it rolls off the tongue a lot easier. Whatever.
  
  Alternately enlightening, disheartening, shocking, and charming, this book will anger and, hopefully, empower you. Basically, everything is broken, and especially now in the current political climate it's difficult to fix it. But it's possible, and being done, and you can be part of the move forward.
• 
  Caitlin Rose

  This book was the first book that I have read in a very long time that I felt was written for me and that I related to so deeply. I learned an enormous amount from this book. Jaclyn Friedman is a fantastic writer. Each chapter focused on issues that made me feel like I wanted to drop everything I was doing for "the cause". Decriminalizing sex work, challenging fauxpowerment, sex education/lack thereof, how little sex education most of us have... This book gave me a more fine tuned idea of what I want to focus my personal politics on. Jaclyn did a fantastic job of outlining what we can DO, not just theorize about.
  For anyone who has an interest in feminism, I recommend you this book. For anyone who has sex, I recommend this book. I honestly think everyone on this planet should read this book. Every single page I felt relieved to be reading things that I have been feeling but had never heard anyone else talk about before. Men and women alike need to read this book.
  
• 
  Tristy

  I so deeply wanted to love this book, but the title is not accurate. There is barely any guidance/ideas/suggestions on "how to stop letting the system screw us all." The majority of the book goes over in excruciating detail how women are being fooled into thinking they are "sex positive" when really they are still victims of the male gaze and not empowered at all. It's repetitive and exhausting. It's an important book and I'm sure to folks who are just starting to crack open their inner sexism and see the world that we are really living in, it is very mind-opening, but for those who have been in the feminist trenches a long time, there isn't much here, sadly.
• 
  Sarah

  Totally enjoyed this. I listen to Friedman’s podcast pretty faithfully and I like her combination of analysis and the optimism she seems to inscribe on the initiatives she describes in this book. It’s a delicate balance and she always gets it right. This book has lots of memorable passages and I love that she does first person journalism—she gets right into the programs and ideas that she sees as being transformative to the current culture as it pertains to sexual and reproductive freedoms—which she sees as barometers of overall quality of life. I’ll read anything she writes.
• 
  Emily

  First of all, I'd like to preface this by saying that I won this audio book in Jaclyn's Instagram giveaway, so: THANK YOU, JACLYN! This was a fabulous gift, and every second of it had me thinking.
  
  I'm a longtime listener of the Unscrewed podcast, so I already knew I'd be in for some well-researched, witty, and hard-hitting work when I started this book. However, I was absolutely floored by the extent of Friedman's analysis and a little unsettled by all the very sobering points she brought up that have always seemed to skate right by me without a second thought. That's what makes this book so very important! The sexual culture around us, while improving, has a long way to go, and so often we simply do not realize it. I loved Friedman's explanations of what's actually lying beneath the surface, and I greatly appreciated her suggestions for how to "unscrew" these norms that are so deeply ingrained.
  
  In short: this book packs a punch and, although its subject matter can be depressing in day to day life, you will reach the last page with a renewed sense of enthusiasm for effecting change. Can't recommend enough!
• 
  Lily

  This is a timely, intersectional exploration of the sexual conversation in this country. I specifically found interesting the analysis of sex-education and sex-science in relation to pleasure. Positive content, misogyny, and toxic masculinity are also covered in-depth. They way women are raised and media representations contribute to normalizing abuse. Basically, corporations control the discussion and dialogue about sex. Fauxpowerment and media representation are also put under suspicion and scrutiny for their role in neutralizing real change. There is a lot of profiling and interviewing of innovative, contemporary gender pioneers doing amazing and important work to help change the national culture around sex and gender. I learned a lot about Native women in this book, and many of the legal structures upholding rape and sexual assault, which were particularly disturbing. This book will certainly fill in holes for anyone thinking about these issues and so much is covered it'd be impossible to not learn something from it.
• 
  Andrew Langmead

  At first I got the audiobook of this, and then reread it as a print book because something seemed to be missing and I thought a different context might help. At first I was hearing anecdotes and revolving around disparate issues and kept missing the helpful information that I knew must be there.
  
  Then I read it, and understood it better. Many of the chapters have a pattern where describes an individual and the issues they've faced, then demonstrates how that fits into systemic issues of inequality, and then back to individuals working for solutions.
  
  At first I was relieved when I realized where they solutions were and where they fit into the narrative. Then it started to gnaw on me that the solutions were all individualized, and although the people implementing them are helping numbers of people that it would be hard to scale most of them compared to the size of the problems described. By the end she talks me down from that despair. That the work from everyone, in whatever way they are capable, is what eventually be what is necessary.
• 
  Melissa

  This book was a crucial read for the current political and cultural environment we’re living in today. Not only did I learn a lot, the book left me feeling incredibly hopeful and motivated to begin activism work RIGHT NOW. I treasure anything that can get me fired up to instill real change in a toxic climate that often leaves me feeling depressed and disengaged. The feeling of motivation alone made this book incredibly valuable to me. I’d recommend to all my friends of any gender who care about social justice.
• 
  Kali Williams

  Jaclyn Friedman is a longtime influential voice at the intersection of feminism and sexuality, two of my favorite topics. In Unscrewed, she does a stellar job of taking them on again. She takes you down an easy to read and understand the history of pivotal moments in feminism and speaks with an inclusive voice that keeps the most marginalized women in mind.
  
  From the first paragraph all the way through the conclusion, Jaclyn holds you in a firm grip with wit, facts, and flair that helps readers have a deeper understanding of this pivotal topic.
• 
  Vegan Viajo

  Although I disagree with the author on two topics #1 Prostitution should be legal and #2 Hook Up culture is a myth (I have studied and evidence to support my opposing opinion) she explains herself well. I adore how the author covered the trans and LGB community in and all inclusive respectful way. Even as a well educated woman working the field of human rights, I have to admit I walked away with valuable insight and that was refreshing.
• 
  Heidi Hesselberg

  I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It was a nonfiction work by the author of "Yes Means Yes" and has tackled similar feminist subject matter.
  
  Friedman uses studies and first person accounts to string together an argument for why women continue to be misrepresented in the media. How there still is no real "strong woman" on television and in pop culture. Very interesting and compelling read. Would recommend for feminists!
• 
  Kelli

  A must read. Clearly organised and explored discussion of "faux empowerment," consent and hate speech algorithms that see breast feeding and porn as the same thing. Big message: from educated professionals all the way to school-aged children, people need to be exposed to open communication about sex. The fact that it is still such a taboo subject MEANS that one-sided narratives about sex are still the norm, and clearly, damaging.
• 
  Lindsey A

  I should have read this five years ago; it likely would have given me the perspective boost and mindset shift I needed throughout Trump's presidency. Friedman's writing is to the point, educational while entertaining, and a rallying cry to anyone with feminist inclinations who has felt so overwhelmed by the world that they feel powerless to do anything. I couldn't put it down, and am recommending it to all my friends.
• 
  Amanda Hobson

  I cannot recommend Jaclyn's work enough. This book was precisely what I needed right now. As I work every day to try to end sexual violence and create a more healthy sexual culture, I found Unscrewed to be a profound and timely examination of the gender and sexuality dynamics that are causing all of us to be stifled and injured by such an unhealthy culture.
• 
  Chintushig Tumenbayar

  Sexual Politics гэдэг юм байнашт энэ сэдвүүдийг. Ойрын үед HBR ийн Woman at work, Microsoftiin Women in business & technology гэх мэтчилэн подкастууд цаг гарган сонсоод аулын байран дээрээ охид эмэгтэйчүүдтэй харилцах харилцаа, асуудлууд тулгардаг бэрхшээлүүдийг ойлгож мэдэрж эхлээд байгаа шүү. Энэ сэдвийн ном нэмж сонирхох.
• 
  Soraya Chemaly

  With this book, Jaclyn presciently addressed the core issues brought to light by the #MeToo: sex, power and institutional abuses that inhibit equality. With intellectual rigor, wonderful storytelling and a keen eye for absurdities we encounter, she methodically breaks down the social dynamics of sex and power and their personal and political impacts.
• 
  Amanda

  I can’t rave enough about this book. What really was the cherry on top for me was the ending. It’s so inspiring when books that pick apart our culture can also provide solutions. Even if the solutions aren’t a “quick fix,” like so many of us want, it gives me hope for future generations if we can only start the change today.
• 
  Sofia Tengku

  SUCH an excellent read! Insightful, critical and super elaborate but in the most accessible way. Jaclyn addressed issues I am already conscious and aware of but shed a different light or from a slanted angle on them and exposed parts of certain matters in ways I never thought or considered before.
  Seriously, such a brilliant book I DEEPLY recommend to feminists all round.