By Leslie Price
Nona Willis Aronowitz is a writer, editor, and author. In addition to her new book, Bad Sex, she writes a sex and love column for Teen Vogue. We spoke by phone this week about marriage, sexual fulfillment, and the problems with heterosexuality.
You open Bad Sex with a story about your marriage and subsequent divorce. How do you feel about marriage – specifically, monogamous heterosexual marriage – now?
In terms of state-recognized marriage, I’m still pretty down on it. I don’t see the reason why you should get state-sanctioned benefits for having a traditional relationship. This is also an employer problem, but it’s messed up that people can’t get health insurance unless they’re on their spouse’s. [There are also the] tax breaks and all of the weird societal benefits that are more intangible. There should be no reason why you have a higher status in society if you’re partnered, and there should be more societal acceptance for single people.
It’s a wonderful thing to have a committed relationship that fulfills you. It’s a huge source of support, and it can be a profound experience. I have absolutely no problem with the concept of finding somebody to commit to for the long haul, whether that means forever or that means you’re going to have kids with them. I have a committed partner. We are not married. I think that we might get married if something like the health insurance situation comes up. In fact, we just had a baby and we were going to put her on my partner’s health insurance, but then he got laid off.
In terms of monogamy and heterosexuality, they’re both fine as long as they’re consciously chosen. One of my main epiphanies from writing this book is that even if your desires happen to line up with what’s societally sanctioned (monogamy and marriage), you should spend some time thinking about whether that’s truly your desire, or whether you are trying to adhere to societal expectations.
I still find the fact that monogamy is the default to be a problem. I don’t see any reason why that should be the case. People are very judgy and defensive when it comes to non-monogamy – in fact, that’s the weirdest and strongest reaction I’ve gotten so far about the book. People zero in on the non-monogamy chapter. And the same with heterosexuality. If you do consider yourself heterosexual, but you haven’t really explored that – whether it’s physical exploration or even just mental and emotional exploration – then it’s hard to know whether you’re actually heterosexual and why. That’s a long answer to what I think about marriage, monogamy, and heterosexuality, which are intertwined, of course, but they’re all kind of different.
I want you to talk about the social clout that comes with marriage, and why that makes it hard to leave.
People used to be assholes to single women very overtly up until [about] the nineties. Now it’s more insidious and covert. When you become part of a partnership, you have access to a whole other world of social acceptance. It’s hard to explain. You get invites you wouldn’t normally get. Elders treat you differently. A lot of parents will stop bothering you about whether you’re going to settle down. You make couple friends. It’s really a club. Even though we are supposedly beyond the era where women must get married, there’s still a huge amount of incentive to do so.
One of the underlying themes in the book was this push-pull of, and tension around, being a feminist seeking a hetero relationship. You are trying to understand your heterosexuality while being let down by men. On one hand, you’re right: A lot of people don’t fully examine this societal norm. On the other hand, I do think feminists openly talk about the challenges in heterosexual relationships. Consider all of the conversations happening right now around emotional labor and domestic labor within the household. When it comes to heterosexuality being “underevolved” in these regards and others, what needs to happen?
You actually have to like and respect people that you purport to love and want to be in relationships with. That’s most obvious with men, because the concept of misogyny is women-hating. And if you have a man who is anywhere from dismissive to abusive towards women, I feel like we should question his heterosexuality. We should redefine heterosexuality as: Do you like this group of people? And do you fundamentally see them as whole humans?
I also think that it applies to women. A lot of women are reflectively like, “oh, men are trash. I wish I was a lesbian.” And it’s like, okay, well, why don’t you just be a lesbian then? “Well, but I’m heterosexual.” But why? Really start to think about your desires. Not that you can choose your desires, but you can claim your desires. This was a real aha moment for me.
In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward, she [discusses] spending time thinking about why you like being straight and what you specifically like about the opposite sex. It’s an interesting and individual exercise. This is a bit off base from your question – because not everyone’s going to do this – but normalizing articulations of heterosexual desire rather than just making them the default would go a long way towards explaining why men and women want to be with each other, despite all of the toxicity, difficulty, and heartbreak.
There’s a lot of eye-rolling and a “boys will be boys” vibe. I notice this especially [now] as a new mom in a committed relationship. Like, “Ugh, what do you expect from men?” I think the most basic thing we have to do to improve heterosexuality is to raise the standards of behavior. I don’t understand that posture of, “well, I can’t really expect much from my husband. I’m just going to write him off as a dummy.” It’s so retrograde, but we still see that depicted in pop culture – the hapless husband who can’t quite get it together. It makes my skin crawl.
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I wasn’t going to ask you about this, but now that I know you have a baby, one of the things I kept thinking about while I was reading the book is, “this person does not have children.” Because when you have children, you are in a sort of survival mode, especially for the first few years.
I have a lot of friends who are child-free for different reasons and are able to really think a lot about their identity. You’ve read so much feminist theory and it’s clear you’ve spent time and thought excavating yourself. I don’t want to discount that – I think it’s important. But when you have kids, your own personal development can fall by the wayside.
A big part of the book is your search for a better heterosexual partnership. That means one thing when you’re partnered, but don’t have children. And it becomes harder when you do have children. There is even more of a social emphasis on the gendering of your relationship and the household labor when you have children.
First of all, you’re absolutely right. I was writing from a very consciously childless perspective. I mean, I have an abortion in the book. I was childless very much by choice, until I wasn’t. I thought about tackling some of these issues, but decided it was outside of the scope of the book. I now totally understand what you’re saying about survival mode. It’s not like I don’t have a sexuality right now, but it’s really on the back burner. I can’t imagine when I’m going to have so much time for self-exploration.
I’m 38. A lot of my friends have older children, and I see them coming back to these questions now – reevaluating their relationships [and] asking for what they want.
So I don’t think the book is for a newborn mom, but I don’t think it’s only for childless people.
It appears that you come out of a cloud of the first few years and you go back to asking yourself these questions. I also see Boomers reevaluating these questions as empty nesters. I’ve gotten a lot of emails from older people. Maybe it’s because they feel inclined to write formal letters, whereas millennials don’t.
Yes, it’s about digging into your identity. If you have children, there is an intense period where you don’t have the time, but then you do go back to it. And this idea of a “midlife crisis” is probably a lot of women waking up from the fog of that and realizing they’re not happy. I also bet that the book’s title, Bad Sex, is relatable to a lot of women.
It’s not that your relationship is automatically doomed if you’re having bad sex. I do regret not hammering this point home a little more in the book. For some people, it’s just not that important. And that’s legit. I’m not going to force sexual exploration on you if you’re like, “we don’t have much of a sexual connection, but there’s so much more to our relationship.” I did want it to be a huge part of my relationship and my life. I couldn’t articulate my desires and that was the problem, rather than the fact that we had bad sex or a weak sexual connection.
You reference Audre Lorde, who talks about sexual pleasure as an essential tool for fighting oppression. I do think that women have a right – especially middle-aged women – to feel good, to feel happy, and to have fulfilling sex lives. A lot of the messaging to women in this age group is, “oh, you’re just tired because you’re old, or you’re just incontinent now,” etc. It can feel like the message is: Settle for less. So I do think that there’s something important about women having a fulfilling sex life.
Absolutely. I have people writing me and DM’ing me about being in unfulfilling relationships and having the same gut-level, gnawing feeling that I describe [in the book].
Since I wrote this, there’s been a fucking pandemic, I have been pregnant (which was a whole mood), and now I have a baby and our relationship has not stayed the same by any means. There have been a lot of challenges. But it’s a completely different feeling than my marriage. I love this person so much and I want to figure it out. Whereas [in my marriage] I was like, I want to be free, but I can’t figure out how to do that. Those are two very different feelings. I don’t want to be all woo-woo and say that it’s pure intuition, but it’s at least partly intuition. I haven’t felt that gnawing feeling since. And it’s a very specific feeling.
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