"So what does it actually look like to have a truly liberated sexual culture? This year has brought plenty of critiques of sex, notably in Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation and Nona Willis-Aronowitz’s Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution. Both books blend memoir, reporting, and feminist history to seek a better way, with starkly different conclusions. Lorna Bracewell’s Why We Lost the Sex Wars, published last year, reminds us that feminism has fought on this ground before, in the so-called sex wars of the 1980s. It seems intuitive that the anti-pornography feminists of that time lost culturally, politically, and legally — thanks in part to technology like Pornhub, OnlyFans, and hookup apps — but the inchoate dissatisfaction you can find almost anywhere you look suggests a more complicated answer. This conversation, originally hosted by the New York Historical Society, has been edited and condensed; you can view the whole thing here."