Levy interviews the feminist author Erica Jong, who introduced the idea of the "zipless fuck," in her 1973 novel Fear of Flying, a notion of consequence-free sex for a woman like a man might enjoy:

I had to create the zipless fuck to rebel against my fifties upbringing. I told my daughter the other day, "Your generation does it, my generation only talked about it." I look at my daughter and her friends in their twenties and they are reveling in their sexuality. They don't feel guilty, and why should they? Men never did. Right now they're young and beautiful and full of energy and they don't necessarily want to have a relationship, or even have a guy stay the whole night!

But I would be happier if my daughter and her friends were crashing through the glass ceiling instead of the sexual ceiling. Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don't love, or having "Sex and the City" on television, that is not liberation. If you start to think about women as if we're all Carrie on "Sex and the City," well, the problem is: You're not going to elect Carrie to the Senate or to run your company. Let's see the Senate fifty-percent female; let's see women in decision-making positions—that's power. Sexual freedom can be a smokescreen for how far we haven't come.

The answer to the conditions of women is not more or better sex. The only solution is political. Unfortunately for progressive feminists and the left, the Christian conservative backlash against the crass popular culture of drugs, violence and sex has led to victories for pro-market Republicans, who have dominated American politics for the last 30 years. And the anti-abortion and anti0sex education agenda of the far right is hurting women even more.

As Thomas Frank, author of One Market Under God and What's the Matter With Kansas?, argues in "Red-State America Against Itself," conservative backlash against the crass consumer culture has led to more victories for the populist right, even as the real political solutions to our coarsening culture are taken off the table by neo-liberal Democrats:

Behold the political alignment that Kansas is pioneering for us all. The corporate world—for reasons having a great deal to do with its corporateness—blankets the nation with a cultural style designed to offend and to pretend-subvert: sassy teens in Skechers flout the Man; hipsters dressed in T-shirts reading "FCUK" snicker at the suits who just don't get it. It's meant to be offensive, and Kansas is duly offended. The state watches impotently as its culture, beamed in from the coasts, becomes coarser and more offensive by the year. Kansas aches for revenge. Kansas gloats when celebrities say stupid things; it cheers when movie stars go to jail. And when two female rock stars exchange a lascivious kiss on national TV, Kansas goes haywire. Kansas screams for the heads of the liberal elite. Kansas comes running to the polling place. And Kansas cuts those rock stars' taxes.

page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4