Is hard data necessary to confirm what women already know about sex? Yep – as Emily Nagoski’s new book shows, we need all the allies we can get.

From the article :

“It’s 54 years since the arrival of the pill in Australia liberated women’s sexuality from reproduction. 45 years since Germaine Greer dared women to taste our own menstrual blood. And 42 years since sex-ed pioneer Betty Dodson encouraged women to confront their vulvas with a mirror. Yet too many women remain crippled with the medieval conviction that the sexuality of their body is an individual source of shame….

Even in our era, which enjoys historically unprecedented sexual acceptance and an ocean of accessible explicitness, vast new industries of sexual therapy, treatment, advice and surgery have re purposed sexual stigmas of the past into profitable anxieties of the present.

There’s money to be made from portraying women’s bits as freakish, their sexual performances deficient and their libidos somehow faulty. I salute those who can resist this mythology; even porn-star Jenna Jameson, whose vagina once enjoyed enviable popularity, eventually herself succumbed to an unnecessary cosmetic vaginoplasty. By the way, the surgery wrecked her career…

“You are normal!” doesn’t sound much like a battle cry, but in a world keen to sexually homogenize women from the gap of their thighs to the shape of their mons pubis, the sentiment lands like a bomb.”

Read more:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015