
The Dialectic of Sex
The Dialectic of Sex, Chapter One. Published by The Women's Press, 1979. Transcribed by MIA.

The Dialectic of Sex, Chapter One. Published by The Women's Press, 1979. Transcribed by MIA.

In her new book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel insists on a basic point: changing the kind of bad and damaging sex that women all too often have in a sexist society can’t fall solely on individual women.

Simone de Beauvoir’s reputation as a feminist pioneer is well-established, but the influence of Marxism on her thinking is too often overlooked. She wanted to build a socialist movement that would fight class and gender oppression at the same time.
The problem for reality TV is that real life is too dull to make compelling TV, but compelling TV is obviously contrived.

Sexual activity among Americans is in decline, prompting moralizing about the end of romance and traditional gender roles. But the real problem is that people lack the economic and personal freedom to pursue their desires.

The Supreme Court is a deeply conservative institution, stocked with conservative jurists. But this week’s Bostock decision was a win for LGBT justice — and it opens up new possibilities for emancipatory change.

Reading Andrea Dworkin today is still bracing. But her pessimistic, dystopian vision of a world dominated by male violence only gained currency when the utopian power of the feminist movement receded.

The latest work by renowned historian Diarmaid MacCulloch tackles Christian attitudes to sex over the centuries. Modern-day Christians who talk about traditional values usually don’t know how changeable their tradition has been.

The basic vision of the post-work left is one of fewer jobs and shorter hours.

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, is gorgeous, thought-provoking, and wonderfully acted. All it’s missing is some more weight behind its feminist spirit.

In keeping with the harsh realities of working-class life in America, filmmaker Sean Baker doesn’t deal in facile happy endings — not in his latest, Anora, nor in his other recent films. Living to fight another day is triumph enough.

Amia Srinivasan’s new essay collection, The Right to Sex, is less a manifesto than an attempt to think through the concerns of contemporary feminism. Where the book succeeds, it offers the intellectual heft to power a reinvigorated movement to transform the world.

The Second Sex is rightly celebrated as a classic work of feminist theory. But it’s often forgotten that Simone de Beauvoir saw it as a socialist text carefully anatomizing the relationship between gender and class oppression.

Socialists keep winning elections. The latest: Tiffany Cabán, who won the Queens, New York, district attorney race last night. She will soon have the opportunity to radically overhaul the criminal justice system by ending cash bail, halting prosecution of crimes of poverty, decriminalizing sex work, and more.

How can someone take a band as exciting, wild, and innovative as the Sex Pistols and make such a conventional, paint-by-numbers miniseries? With Pistol, Danny Boyle found a way.

Sex workers and their would-be saviors.

In Britain, punk is often seen as a reaction to national decline, coming up from the streets, while its roots in Situationist political pranking have been discredited. Maybe it’s time to look again at Malcolm McLaren and his ten-point plan.

Without radical change, disquiet finds other outlets. Dystopic visions have replaced Shulamith Firestone and Adrienne Rich’s utopian ones.

This century's LGBTQ liberation movement must be part of a broader project to redefine human freedom.