She is un-self-conscious in her descriptions, recounting length of orgasms, positions tried and the precise tools used to achieve them ... It’s a challenge to successfully chart one narrative in a book. Aronowitz attempts to weave together three, which can make the writing feel disjointed ... At the same time, this history is also critical, and fascinating, as a framework to interpret society’s views on love and sex in the present.

Aronowitz is exceedingly well-read, and her book is stuffed with wisdom gleaned from her elders ... she delves into the archives of obscure early advocates for female independence and free love. These historical sections are unfailingly illuminating; it’s Aronowitz’s analysis of her own life and desires that can feel more indeterminate. What I struggled to get past, reading her book, was how much sex seems to embody, for her, a political stance even more than a form of intimate exploration. So much of Aronowitz’s anxiety throughout Bad Sex seems to stem from how she thinks she’s being seen, whether by individual partners or by the world at large or even by herself ... It’s hard not to want more exploration of how an extroverted sex life, as the Washington Post opinion writer Christine Emba argues in her new book, Rethinking Sex, has become 'a sign and symbol of health and—especially for women—a political statement signifying personal power and our liberation as a class, gender, or generation.' But, somehow, we let the thoughtful and charged sex positivity espoused by Ellen Willis and her peers curdle into the practice of sex as conspicuous, often unsatisfying, consumption.

Willis's words and deeds are constant touchstones throughout this light-shedding investigation ... equally inward- and outward-looking effort to reconcile these two aspects of her life. To get there, she dives into the history of various rebukes to traditional sexual norms, including free love, homosexuality and celibacy. After exploring them personally, she shares--some readers will say overshares--her takeaways. By twining the threads of her sexual past (erotic awakening, open relationships and so on) with her mother's thoughts on the same experiences, Aronowitz creates a vivid, tapestry-like intergenerational feminist social history.

[Aronowitz] entwines her own experiences with a meticulous analysis of society and culture to explore the larger systems (white supremacy, capitalism, the patriarchy) and smaller trends (revenge porn, hookup apps, secretly misogynist activism) that encourage intimacy to fail. The result is an exquisitely researched, joyfully conversational take on sexual oppression and sexual revolutions throughout history, as well as a deeply heartfelt memoir. She references books, movies, and elections that changed sexual history—how they affected her personally and how they effected change in politics or culture. Aronowitz’s endearing commitment to journal keeping offers readers exactly what she was thinking and feeling while navigating nonmonogamy, hot affairs, divorce, casual sex, betrayal, grief, and existential disbelief, often all at once, over the last decade. This genuine and generous emotional offering is sure to make readers feel seen and heard, too.

The subtitle, though, is what takes the book from the personal to the polemical—the text delivers as much of the promised truth, pleasure, and revolution as it does depictions of what is bad about the current state of sex ... For some, Aronowitz’s prose style may feel too conversational. The danger of this is that it may also feel antiquated before the subjects she covers are socially addressed and no longer in need of a compendium like this ... Aronowitz’s chatty tone and corpuscular language explodes myths in ways that will help readers clearly recognize the lies they’ve been fed. Highly recommended.

The author narrates her mother’s life engagingly ... While the author is skilled at synthesizing large swaths of social theory and her passion for the subject is clear, the historical sections are less compelling than the personal elements ... A courageously frank, sometimes uneven hybrid of memoir and social history.