Review
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“[A] thoughtful and deeply personal exploration . . .
Introspective and breathtakingly honest . . . [Witt has] a deeply
empathetic and nuanced appreciation of sexual renegades and
outcasts . . . [Future Sex] is a smart, funny, beautifully
written account of contemporary women trying to understand their
sexual desires―and fashion physically and emotionally safe ways
to express them.”
―Benoit Denizet-Lewis, The New York Times Book Review
“Emily Witt’s book examines how, for those who grew up in the era
of the sexual supermarket, the abundance of options can be less
an allure than a challenge . . . Witt is a sharp observer of the
behavior and the motivations of others, a wry, affectionate
portraitist of idealistic people and the increasingly surreal
place they belong to . . . Among other things, Future Sex offers
a superb account of the absurdities of San Francisco in the first
half of this decade, a bouncy castle of a city where the private
pleasures of the conquering tech class are construed (and
marketed) as social benefits for all.”
―Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
“Fascinating (and funny) . . . beautifully written. Brave.”
―Tara Henley, The Los Angeles Times
“These gorgeously written essays, linked by tone, style, and a
singular ambitious purpose, are brimming with intellect and
infused with a caustic, compelling humor that marks our most
astute and entertaining cultural critics. Future Sex explores
sexual predilections that you never thought you’d find
interesting . . . Witt is open and brave and remarkably
nonjudgmental . . . Witt is as fine a literary stylist as Joan
Didion . . . As an essayist she is as rhetorically powerful as
Rebecca Solnit.”
―Emily Rapp Black, The Boston Globe
“Emily Witt’s Future Sex irresistibly explores the mournfulness
and hopefulness of singledom today . . . What makes Future Sex so
compelling, and so fascinating, is the indeterminacy of its
author’s own position in relation to the world she’s writing
about. She’s usually more than just an observer, but she’s also
rarely an insider.”
―Mark O’Connell, Slate
“[Witt is] an intrepid journalist . . . A writer of many
registers, Witt conveys amusement, bemusement, disgust, and
sympathy all at once.”
―Judith Schwartz, The Atlantic
"A serious exploration of American sexual culture . . . [Emily
Witt] has in her own way reinvented the sex memoir."
―Jessica Cutler, The Washington Post
"In many [moments] in her genre-bending first book, Future Sex,
Emily Witt captures lonely, tender truths about human sexuality.
Seeking the future of sex in our culture, she shrewdly examines
the past . . . A riveting chronicle of twenty-first century
sexuality, told by a smart and talented writer."
―Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle
“In Future Sex, Witt has written a book that is actually about
loneliness, intimacy, and love’s elusiveness; capitalism,
Californian utopianism and feminism; family, memory and loss. Her
book expands the possibilities for women’s lives in the 21st
century, and for sex’s place within them.”
―Joanna Biggs, The Financial Times
"Emily Witt's first book is an honest and unapologetic narrative
of all things sex . . . Witt is poised, honest, and relevant."
―Madeleine L. Lapuerta, The Harvard Crimson
“[Emily Witt’s] deadpan delivery makes Future Sex a work of
social observation and, at times, even a kind of nonfiction
comedy of manners . . . Future Sex shines, offering not a
speculative preview of what’s to come, but an erudite exposition
on where we currently are.”
―J.C. Pan, The Nation
“[A] pioneering new book about finding love in the time of Tinder
. . . Emily Witt provides a refreshingly real account of what it
means to be single and sexually curious in 2016.”
―i-D
“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, which I now want to buy for
everyone I know.”
―Sophia June, Willamette Week
"Extraordinary . . . Emily Witt's perceptiveness makes her the
perfect guide . . . It also helps that she's extremely funny."
― Henri Lipton, Columbia Journal
“From polyamory to porn, the excellent Future Sex explores ‘free
love’ today . . . In her inful, generation-defining
collection of essays, Emily Witt explores what sexual freedom,
especially for women, means in contemporary Western society.”
―Laura Adamczyk, The A.V. Club
“Witt travels beyond her own psychic distress and into a
journalistic tour of twenty-first-century mating. The result
serves as a new economics of sex, or, equally, an economics of
new sex.”
―Miranda Purves, Bloomberg Businessweek
“Witt distinguishes herself in the nascent
young-single-urban-woman-Tinder-tell-all-memoir genre by
deploying admirable detachment and irony as she dabbles in
ormic meditation, experiments with online dating, and
navigates the disjuncture between sex and love.”
―O, The Oprah Magazine
“In Future Sex . . . Witt interrogates both our cultural myths
around feminine sexuality and the vanguards of sexual
experimentation seeking to dismantle them. Her serious, radical
book places her in a lineage that started with writers like the
late feminist critic Ellen Willis, and, yes, Joan Didion herself
. . . [A] wise, honest, and necessary book.”
―Hermione Hoby, Vice
“A thorough, fresh look at how romantic and sexual relationships
have changed in the past two decades.”
―Maddie Crum, The Huffington Post
“Witt’s voice has a clear-eyed restraint and a tough, ironic
sense of humor, especially when it comes to herself.”
―Fan Zhong, W magazine online
“Future Sex offers new in into how we search for sex, and
even love―and what that means for us in 2016.”
―Elizabeth Kiefer, Refinery29
“A probing investigation into 21st-century female sexuality . . .
Witt is as thoughtful as she is audacious, and Future Sex is
ultimately a carefully crafted literary and intellectual endeavor
. . . [She] enters each new milieu with an open mind and a
reporter’s ear for nuance and humor. There’s something Joan
Didion-esque about Future Sex, in Witt’s lovely writing and in
her skeptical authorial remove.”
―Julia Felsenthal, Vogue.com
“The first volume of [Foucault’s] History of Sexuality will turn
forty next month, and it seems fitting that the essence of its
inquiry has now been given a fresh and contemporary perspective
by journalist and critic Emily Witt. In Future Sex, an audacious
collection of essays on female sexual desire, Witt scrutinizes
ever-progressing notions of sexuality since the advent of the
internet.”
―Michael Barron, The Culture Trip
“In the spirit of exploration, Emily Witt boldly swipes right on
all the carnal pleasures technology has to offer―dating apps,
screwing apps, sexting, and easy access to kinky or progressive
subcultures. Her first book, Future Sex, is provocative to say
the least, but the journalist’s interest is more than just
skin-deep. With a sense of humor and an appreciation for the
weird beauty of it all, she takes a genuine look at our modern
pursuit of human connection, noting its potential to inspire a
newer, braver female sexuality.”
―Heather Baysa, The Village Voice
"[Emily Witt] is like a twenty-first-century gonzo journalist . .
. One of [her] greatest strengths as a reporter is the steadiness
of her gaze: She looks long enough to notice both what is
valuable in the seemingly comical or bizarre and what's ludicrous
in the ostensibly normal."
―Lidija Haas, Bookforum
“After Emily Witt’s vision of happily-ever-after is thrown
off-kilter, she decides to use herself as a test subject. Future
Sex is her exhaustive study of how we seek love and sex in the
digital age. Dating apps, porn, polyamory . . . she decodes all
the ways we get turned on―and off.”
―Cosmopolitan
“Writer Emily Witt always figured she’d get married. She dated on
and off, slept around, and planned to eventually settle down.
When she turned 30, however, Prince Charming had yet to appear...
Witt embarked on an investigation of contemporary dating culture,
from the mainstream (Internet dating) to the fringe (ormic
meditation).”
―Alina Cohen, Allure.com, 10 Title We Can’t Wait to Read
"Witt’s debut provides an illuminating, hilarious account of sex
and dating in the digital age, when hook-up culture and
technology have vastly altered the romantic landscape. . . . This
is a vital conflict at the center of many women’s lives, and Witt
explores it with remarkable nuance, intelligence, and an
admirable commitment to experimentation."
―Publishers Weekly
"The greatest ambition for a reported book is to offer a true
history of the present; Emily Witt has succeeded in an effort few
even attempt. Of the dozens of new books each year that try to
say something credible, useful, and revealing about the
contemporary sexual self-image, Witt has produced far and away
the one most likely to be read and reread over the coming long
interval of human experimentation. Witt is not only a committed
reporter, but a writer of rare range; her language is as
tough-minded, stark, and provocative as it is tender, careful,
and exposed. Future Sex glitters in its poignancy. It makes
itself felt far beyond the usual expectations."
―Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction
"Emily Witt is our perfectly ambivalent yet somehow smart and
hungry guide on this casually lurid tour of female driven porn,
idly pervy webcams, Burning Man, and polyamory. If you think of
those boring books that probably still send single straight women
off to Europe to meet a nice man, Future Sex looms even more
clearly into view as a hotter choice for actually almost anyone."
―Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls
"I highly enjoyed Future Sex―a moving, novelistic, exploratory,
wryly funny, darkly colorful, many-storied book about 21st
century romantic relationships, the rarity of love, the female
body, polyamory, birth control, childlessness, internet dating
and porn, and the search for more than mere contentment."
―Tao Lin, author of Taipei
"Emily Witt’s Future Sex is moody, dark, and powerful,
brilliantly gloomy and inspiringly funny. This is the best book
by far I’ve read on women’s sexuality in the new century, because
Witt is the finest writer. I don’t know if this is the future of
sex, but the future belongs to Emily Witt."
―Mark Greif, author of The Age of the Crisis of Man
"Emily Witt is a truly compelling writer and a trustworthy guide.
I read her book quickly and with interest, and with great
appreciation for her inful, original and sensitive mind."
―Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be
About the Author
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Emily Witt has written for The New Yorker, n+1, The
New York Times, and the London Review of Books. She studied at
Brown University, Columbia University, and the University of
Cambridge and was a Fulbright Scholar in Mozambique. She grew up
in Minneapolis and lives in Brooklyn.