Future Sex Author, Emily Witt, on Female Sexuality in a Post-Internet World

Julia Felsenthal in Vanity Fair:

At the beginning of Future Sex, Emily Witt’s probing investigation into 21st-century female sexuality, the author is single, 30, and not thrilled about it. She occasionally has sex with men she knows, friends, and friends of friends, casual entanglements that she dismisses as distractions. She and her partners are “souls flitting through limbo, piling up against one another like dried leaves, awaiting the brass trumpets and wedding bells of the eschaton.” Witt feels keenly that she’s missing out on the kind of committed monogamous partnership that had always seemed part and parcel of adulthood, reward for a life of rules followed. “I nurtured my idea of the future,” she writes, “which I thought of as the default denouement of my sexuality, and a destiny rather than a choice. The vision remained suspended, jewel-like in my mind, impervious to the storms of actual experience, a crystalline point of arrival.”

By the book’s end, Witt is several years older and in a different headspace. “I now understood the fabrication of my sexuality,” she writes, “I saw the seams of its construction and the arbitrary nature of its myth.” Her circumstances aren’t markedly changed; the evolution is psychic and semantic. “I knew,” she writes, “that naming sexual freedom as an ideal put the story I told myself about my life in greater alignment with the choices I had already made. It offered continuity between my past and the future. It gave value to experiences that I had viewed with frustration or regret.”

It’s a subtle shift, but the experiences that catalyze it are not so subtle. Future Sex, as the title suggests, takes Witt to the furthest extremes of the erotic vanguard on a quest to establish the contours of her own sexuality, and of female sexuality more generally, in an age of Internet dating and abundant, diverse pornography, of delayed reproduction and more open relationships.

More here.