A book of essays exploring modern sexuality focusing on Internet dating, Internet pornography, polyamory, and avant-garde sexual subcultures as sites of possibility for the author.
...these gorgeously written essays, linked by tone, style, and a singular, ambitious purpose, are brimming with intellect and infused with a caustic, compelling humor that marks our most astute and entertaining cultural critics ... Witt is as fine a literary stylist as Joan Didion, with the same cool, dispassionate gaze that also manages to avoid disinterest. As an essayist she is as rhetorically powerful as Rebecca Solnit.
What is most distinctive in her writing is its tone, a sweetly ironic, melancholy deadpan that makes you feel she’s looking straight at the things she describes, not quite wide-eyed and not quite world-weary ... One of Witt’s great strengths as a reporter is the steadiness of her gaze: She looks long enough to notice both what is valuable in the seemingly comical or bizarre and what’s ludicrous in the ostensibly normal ... At times, Witt’s tone makes it hard to know how to interpret the material she presents ... it can’t be that there’s nothing between a depressing status quo and a 1960s wet dream—and the in-between is where Witt’s subtle gifts come into their own.
...[a] thoughtful and deeply personal exploration ... If Witt struggles at times as a memoirist, she succeeds as a meandering journalistic voyeur, one with a deeply empathetic and nuanced appreciation of sexual renegades and outcasts. Though Future Sex isn’t as much about the future as its title suggests, it is a smart, funny, beautifully written account of contemporary women trying to understand their sexual desires — and fashion physically and emotionally safe ways to express them.
