The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution

by Katherine Rowland

Overview

American culture is more sexually liberal than ever. But compared to men, women's sexual pleasure has not grown: Up to 40 percent of American women experience the sexual malaise clinically known as low sexual desire. Between this low desire, muted pleasure, and experiencing sex in terms of labor rather than of lust, women by the millions are dissatisfied with their erotic lives.

For too long, this deficit has been explained in terms of women's biology, stress, and age. In The Pleasure Gap, Katherine Rowland rejects the idea that women should settle for diminished pleasure; instead, she argues women should take inequality in the bedroom as seriously as we take it in the workplace and understand its causes and effects. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred women and dozens of sexual health professionals, Rowland shows that the pleasure gap is neither medical malady nor psychological condition but rather a result of our culture's troubled relationship with women's sexual expression. This provocative exploration of modern sexuality makes a case for closing the gap for good.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781580058360
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	02/04/2020
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	365,639
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Katherine Rowland was previously the publisher and executive director of Guernica. She holds a masters in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research fellow in medical anthropology. She has contributed to Nature, the Financial Times, Green Futures, the Guardian, the Independent, Aeon, Psychology Today, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Table of Contents

A Note on How I Wrote This Book ix

Part 1 Sexuality in the Crosshairs of Culture

1 The Pleasure Gap 1

2 What's All the Fuss About? 15

3 Learning (Not) to Lust 32

4 What the Body Remembers 50

5 Tradition and its Discontents 69

Part 2 Closing the Gap

6 It's All in Your Head 93

7 You Can Change Your Mind 113

8 The Language of Language and the Language of Touch 131

9 Human Potential on the Open Market 153

10 Opening to Choice 169

11 Playing with Power 190

12 The Limits of Talk 210

Conclusion: Beyond the Physical 226

Editorial Reviews

12/16/2019

Former Guernica publisher Rowland argues that the sexual revolution and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s have “increased sexual quantity without improving sexual quality,” in her tasteful and open-minded debut. American culture treats female sexuality as complicated and mysterious, Rowland argues, without considering “the constellation of pressures and actual inequities” that often leave women feigning desire in order to maintain harmony in their relationships. She considers factors that constrain heterosexual cisgender women’s pursuit of pleasure, including a lack of definitive scientific knowledge about female sexuality; the physical and psychological effects of trauma; cultural messages that encourage women to embrace sex as a service to their partners; and the challenge of maintaining desire within long-term relationships. Exploring paths toward “sexual discovery, recovery, and healing,” Rowland delves into pharmacology and sex therapy as well as practices including BDSM, consensual nonmonogamy, and “sexological bodywork,” in which persistent sexual dysfunctions are treated with erotic massage. Though the book doesn’t offer a definitive path guaranteed to close the “pleasure gap,” Rowland skillfully synthesizes many different ideas and approaches, and encourages women to embrace a broader understanding of their own sexual desire as an ongoing process of self-discovery and self-assertion. Readers interested in feminism, women’s issues, and contemporary sexual mores will find this to be an edifying and comprehensive study. Agent: Rachel Vogel, Dunow & Carlson Literary Agency. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"In The Pleasure Gap, Katharine Rowland takes on a feminist issue that has not received the attention it deserves: the inequality between women and men in the fraught and intimate area of sexual pleasure. Well-written and deeply researched, this book illuminates a topic that has profound implications for women's personal happiness and well-being."—Elaine Tyler May, author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation


"A joy to read, and an important conversation about our right to pleasure: how we fake and perform, instead of value our actual sensations, cutting ourselves off from our own sexual enjoyment, which is our birthright. No one should deny themselves pleasure, nor the pleasure of this book, and its inevitable aftermath in their lives."—Julie Holland, author of Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, the Sleep You're Missing, the Sex You're Not Having, and What's Really Making You Crazy

"In The Pleasure Gap, Katherine Rowland takes a candid and unflinching look at the factors that drive sexual desire deficits for cis, heterosexual women. Sweeping away the cobwebs of dusty explanations for women's 'loss of sexual drive.' ... She closes the deal with the reader by offering frank insights into ways to close the gap, with a welcome focus on how we can mute the voices of our society and listen to our own bodies and minds."—Emily Willingham, coauthor of The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource for Your Child's First Four Years


"If I could force everyone to read this book, I would. All of us, especially men who are confused about their partners' sexual response, need it, and need it now."—Eric Berkowitz, author of Sex and Punishment: Four Hundred Years of Judging Desire


"Tasteful and open-minded . . . Rowland skillfully synthesizes many different ideas and approaches, and encourages women to embrace a broader understanding of their own sexual desire as an ongoing process of self-discovery and self-assertion."—Publishers Weekly, -

From the Publisher

2019-11-10
An exploration of why women have less satisfaction with their sexual lives than men.

Former Guernica publisher and executive director Rowland, who has contributed to Nature, Psychology Today, and other publications as a freelance writer and researcher, interviewed more than 100 women of all sexual orientations about how they experience feelings of arousal, pleasure, and desire as well as frustration and pain. Unfortunately, the comments she elicits are generally imprecise and uninformative. Besides these interviews with ordinary women, the author sought out and frequently cites the professional opinions of psychologists and sexologists and the practices of therapists and counselors. The sexual revolution, writes Rowland, has brought women improvements in some areas, such as education and health care, but not in sexual health. While the quantity may have increased, the quality has not improved. "For younger women, especially, the message these days is that you should want sex because sex is fun and physically exciting," writes the author. "There is so much pressure to be nonchalant about it, to not appear needy or emotionally invested, and that leaves little room for considering why it is that we should want sex in the first place." During the author's quest for answers, she spent time observing the leader of a group therapy clinic teaching the art of mindfulness, proposed as one solution to sexual dissatisfaction, and she reports on the thriving sex coaching business and the efforts of the pharmaceutical industry to formulate a drug treatment for women diagnosed as having hypoactive sexual desire disorder. Such approaches have their limits, and Rowland points to cultural issues as one of the main driving forces of the so-called pleasure gap. Consequently, sociologists may find some useful information, but many of the author's conclusions are too nebulous to benefit general readers.

A candidate for the supplemental reading list in a women's studies course.

Kirkus Reviews

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