Jaclyn Friedman's Book "Unscrewed" Tackles Sexual Politics, Power, and Pleasure

Writer, speaker, and activist Jaclyn Friedman’s podcast “Unscrewed” lays out the inside baseball of contemporary sexual politics. Her guests run the gamut from actress Tatiana Maslany to game developer Zoe Quinn to less bold-faced — but no less compelling — names in grassroots organizing. I listen to it when I’m craving validation of my rage at the sorry state of reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+ discrimination, and slut persecution in our society. In other words, I listen to it all the damn time.

Unscrewed, the book — subtitled “Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All” — has given me the same validation and a whole lot more. Out November 14, Friedman's newest book profiles the people who are fighting to unscrew everything that’s wrong with our sexual culture. With exhaustive research, Friedman casts a wide intersectional net to show the relationship between comprehensive sex education, homeless queer youth, online trolls, media representation, medical professionals, toxic masculinity, sex work, economics, and more.

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“I wrote Unscrewed because I don't accept the sexual status quo,” she told me on a recent visit to NYC — Friedman is based in Boston — where we rode the ferry up the East River on a sunny autumn day. Her curls, dyed black and red, whipped in the wind. “I hope that, once we throw off all the shame and insecurity that comes with thinking our sexual troubles are somehow our personal failings, we'll feel energized to work together to build a sexual culture that works for everyone.”

Friedman has been in the fight for a healthier sexual culture for years. She’s the founder and former executive director of Women, Action and the Media (called WAM! for short), a nonprofit that advocates for gender justice in the media. Unscrewed is her third book, after What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl's Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety — an accessible guide to healthy sexuality — and Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, an essay compilation Friedman co-edited with Jessica Valenti. Friedman has also helped popularize “yes means yes” as a replacement for “no means no,” repositioning consent as unambiguous and affirmative rather than merely based on the absence of dissent.

For a book that discusses some pretty upsetting realities, Unscrewed displays Friedman’s impeccable instinct for when to add a dash of levity or infusion of hope. As the book examines the ways women are led to believe they have sexual power they don’t possess, it offers solid advice on tackling sexual power dynamics in your own life. I spoke with Friedman about those dynamics and how to prioritize pleasure while addressing injustice.

In Unscrewed, you coin a phrase: “fauxpowerment.” If you only had an elevator ride to explain this concept, what would you say?

Fauxpowerment is my word for the many ways we're encouraged to substitute symbols of individual sexual "empowerment" for actual sexual power. It may feel genuinely great to do a boudoir photo shoot, for example, but until we live in a world where, if a partner shares those photos with the world nonconsensually, it’s the partner who will be shamed and not us, that’s not yet real power. There's nothing wrong with doing things that make you feel good and strong and sexual! But those feelings by themselves aren't full sexual freedom.

There's nothing wrong with doing things that make you feel good and strong and sexual! But those feelings by themselves aren't full sexual freedom.

Fauxpowerment is...selling "body positivity" while telling women they should feel bad enough about their cellulite or their armpits to buy whatever miracle fix is being sold. Fauxpowerment is how we can have "pornstar chic" while ignoring the fact that most women who work in the sex industry face overwhelming stigma, subpar labor conditions, and sometimes criminalization and physical violence. Fauxpowerment is the wild popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, a story that's sold as celebrating female sexual awakening but actually shows a woman being stalked and abused into fulfilling a rich man's desires. Fauxpowerment is a culture where breasts are used to sell everything, everywhere at all times, but breastfeeding is still taboo.

What’s the connection between pleasurable, satisfying sex lives and the fight to end toxic masculinity?

Toxic masculinity is a performance, one that men do to win the approval (or avoid the violent punishment) of other men. When men fuck from that place, they're not really focusing on the experience — they're focusing on the accomplishment of having sex, of dominating a partner. That's not really going to give the man pleasure, let alone his partner. Mutually pleasurable sex is only possible for men when they can A, be vulnerable enough to actually get in touch with and ask for what they really desire, and B see their female partners as fully co-equal human beings who have their own, separate desires.

Toxic masculinity is a performance, one that men do to win the approval (or avoid the violent punishment) of other men

And of course, for women, growing up around toxic masculinity teaches us not only to fear men’s desire, but also that sex isn’t really for us, at all. That at best, we’re competing to be props in men’s plays about sex, for whom the audience is really other men. That keeps us also alienated from our own desires and needs and boundaries, and it teaches us to accept crappy, sometimes abusive sex lives, because we don’t know that a better way is possible, or we don’t know how to get there.

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I kept putting Unscrewed down and saying to anyone around me, “I knew it was all connected!” This was especially true as I read the chapter about the political rise of the religious right.

Yeah, the religious right is a huge problem specifically because they have so much control of our federal and state governments, and they direct your and my tax dollars to trick, lie to, and shame women out of having abortions; push their girl-shaming, scientifically disproven abstinence agenda in public schools; discriminate against LGBT folks and anyone who has sex in ways they don't approve of; and run anti-porn campaigns. Can you imagine a publicly-funded campaign against all novels, or sitcoms, or video games? It's perfectly valid to ask why the overall quality of porn isn't better, or to critique certain examples of it. But to campaign against an entire medium? It's positively Victorian.

Combating the religious right is tricky because their tentacles are tightly wrapped around so many of our government institutions. We should be able to fight that by voting and running for office, but voter suppression tactics like gerrymandering and voter ID laws are part of what keep these men — and they are almost all men — in power. So if we want to loosen the grip of the religious right on what's supposed to be our democracy, we have to push back hard against voter suppression.

If you're Christian, you can also push back by studying the Bible with folks like Cherisse Scott of Sister Reach, who I profile in Unscrewed. They're training clergy and whomever else is interested what the Bible actually says about abortion, sex, queerness, and other favorite targets of the religious right — and, spoiler, it's not at all what you've been led to believe. We can't let these hypocritical yahoos — who played a big role in making a twice-divorced modelizer who's [an alleged serial] sexual predator president of the United States — stand in for all Christians. They don't.

Non-Christians can also get in on the action by standing up for our own religious freedom, whether that's our right to practice in non-Christian faiths or just our freedom to not have the religious right's beliefs forced on us by our government. We aren't supposed to be a theocracy here in the United States.

How can we join the resistance from our bedrooms?

When our so-called leaders draw their power from stoking fear and division, investing in pleasure and connection is, in itself, an act of resistance. So how do we best do that?

The first thing is to recognize that the most important sexual relationship you'll ever have is the one with yourself. Get to know what gives you pleasure, what you desire, what your boundaries are. Shift away from thinking of partnered sex as an accomplishment or an acquisition, and toward seeing it as a creative collaboration, which can only be improved by deepening your understanding of yourself.

Interrogate your attractions, too: Are you going after sex partners who seem cool, or have a lot of social status? Are you passing up folks who might be great for you because of cultural stigma? It's hard to resist those pressures, but the things you can discover when you do are pretty delicious.

Are you going after sex partners who seem cool, or have a lot of social status? Are you passing up folks who might be great for you because of cultural stigma?

Obviously, I hope people won't restrict their resistance to the bedroom. We need to resist in the sheets and in the streets. But we're in a marathon, not a sprint, and making sure to prioritize our pleasure and satisfaction and our connections with others is also so life-sustaining. Good sex feeds not just the body but the soul, making us stronger and more grounded and better prepared to face the struggles in front of us — and the ones to come.

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