"Future Sex" Explores Free Love Through Feminist Porn, Polyamory and Online Dating—Here Are the Book's Four Most Interesting Moments

Witt wryly explores a more open, honest, female-centric sex, assisted by New Age ideals and the tech industry through research and personal anecdotes.

As Donald Trump is elected with promises of retracting reproductive rights, Emily Witt has been charting the places sex has been heading in an age of relative freedom, collected in her new, oddly moving book Future Sex (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 210 pages, $25), which I now want to buy for everyone I know. We can only hope the new frontier of free love Witt wryly explores through research and personal anecdotes—more open, honest, female-centric sex, assisted by New Age ideals and the tech industry—can continue to exist. Here are four of the most interesting moments and insights from Future Sex.

1. There is something called orgasmic meditation, propelled by San Francisco company OneTaste, whose mission is to "bring female orgasm to the world." The woman lies on a towel while the man puts on gloves with a dollop of lube and rubs her clitoris for 15 minutes. The practice is meant to allow for an intimate connection but preserve an emotional distance: "Her partner needed only to know what he was doing and respect the boundaries. She did not have to love or even like him," Witt writes.

2. Match.com was created by a self-described "kind of loser" computer scientist, but had a sexist reputation because the early internet excluded women—so he hired a team of female marketers. They forbade sexually explicit content, included questions about relationships and children, banned the mention of biological clocks, and published content offering women safety advice. They gave the site its clean interface and heart-shaped logo. Now, it's the most-used dating site in the country.

3. A 1984 early feminist porn video shows a woman having unfulfilling sex with "an uncaring bodybuilder type" before asking him to leave. She sits alone underneath a Georgia O'Keefe-style painting before having sex with someone else "over animated backdrops of autumn leaves and lotus flowers." Climax is depicted by "an explosion of early-1980s computer effects with a roiling saxophone accompaniment." Today, there's a feminist porn video depicting "a woman being turned on by watching a man assemble IKEA furniture." Hot.

4. On a website called Chaturbate, Witt watched 19-year-old Edith who, for hours, "seduced her audience by dressing like an American Apparel model, revealing the depth of her existential despair," discussing Camus and talking about why she was celibate. "For more than 1,700 viewers, she sat on the floor naked next to a pair of ballet slippers with an unlit cigarette in her hand."

SEE IT: Emily Witt reads at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 503-228-4651, powells.com, on Thursday, Nov. 17. 7:30 pm. Free.

Willamette Week

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office. Support WW's journalism today.