Book Reviews

12 Days of Girly Juice 2022: 8 Brilliant Books

Kate Sloan

Ever walked into a really great bookstore and felt a chill go up your spine that was almost erotic? Yeah, me too.

Gosh, I love books. I don’t know if I agree with John Waters’ famous quote on books, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em,” because people consume the written word in so many different mediums now – but I know that I’d be hesitant to date someone who couldn’t at least converse with me about the books we each enjoyed.

Goodreads tells me that I read about 31 books this year, and as is tradition, I’ve picked 8 of my favorites to tell you about. Here they are, in the order that I read them:

 

Missing from the Village: The Story of Serial Killer Bruce McArthur, the Search for Justice, and the System that Failed Toronto’s Queer Community by Justin Ling

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I remember how it felt to be a member of Toronto’s queer community a few summers ago, when there were vague rumblings of a serial killer on the loose amongst us. Several people had disappeared mysteriously at gay bars and other areas in the Village, many of them queer men of color. The police didn’t seem to be doing anything about it, unsurprisingly. My queer friends and I would tell each other even more emphatically after nights out, “Text me when you get home safe, okay?” because we just didn’t know what was going on, and we were scared.

Through a series of events which are diligently described in this book, it was eventually discovered that the serial killer walking among us was a landscaper and former mall Santa who was targeting queer men of color, particularly those who were immigrants and whose far-away friends and family might not notice they’d gone missing. While the killer is in prison now, and will be until he’s at least 91 years old if he even lives that long, the damage he had done to our community, to his victims and to their friends and family was insurmountable and could never be taken back.

Justin Ling is a Canadian investigative journalist who took an interest in this story, and in this book he digs into what exactly happened, why police were so negligent in this case (hint: racism and homophobia were big factors, as you’d expect), and how the killer was identified and apprehended. It’s a fascinating and harrowing look into crimes that should never have been swept under the rug.

 

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard C. Schwartz

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I really can’t overstate how much Internal Family Systems therapy has helped me this last year. I had struggled for over a decade with managing the torrential emotions that would sweep over me whenever I got triggered, and IFS is the only modality that has given me tools which have actually helped with this problem. It has helped me learn to be more compassionate towards myself and others, and to comfort myself when I am upset in addition to asking for what I need from the people in my life.

Richard C. Schwartz is the inventor of Internal Family Systems. Trained in family therapy, he took his knowledge of dynamics amongst groups and couples and began using those same paradigms on the individual self, seeing each person as being made up of “parts” which have conflicting desires, fears, motivations and tactics. What all of these parts have in common, though, is that they all ultimately share the goal of keeping you safe and protecting you from difficult emotions – it’s just that they sometimes do this in ways that seem baffling or counterproductive. The “parts” inside a person who’s endured trauma, Schwartz says, are essentially just children, frozen in time at the point in your history when you experienced that trauma – so if you notice yourself feeling like a snivelling 6-year-old girl or a tantrum-throwing 8-year-old boy when you’re triggered, what is needed is the care and compassion you would show to an actual child of that age who was having that level of emotional response.

No Bad Parts is one of several books Schwartz has written about IFS, and it’s a good introduction to the model. I’d still recommend that beginners to IFS see a therapist trained in this modality if they’re at all able to, because it can be extremely helpful to have a calm, wise person steer the ship through your tumultuous emotions with you when you haven’t learned how to do so yourself yet. But even if you can’t access therapy, I still think this book could be transformational for many people. It certainly has been for me, by helping me understand better what my therapist is actually doing when they implement certain IFS techniques, and how I can implement those techniques myself when I’m alone.

 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I picked this up because several people I follow online had mentioned that they “couldn’t put it down” once they started reading it. I literally didn’t know anything about it going into it, and that’s probably the ideal way to consume this book.

So how do I explain why I loved it so much, without giving spoilers? All I can really say is that if you’re a fan of old Hollywood – the movies, the celebrity culture, the glamour of it all – and are a romantic, you’d probably enjoy this, especially if you’re queer.

It made me want to wear a green satin ballgown every day. It made me want to pursue the things I want, and the people I want. It made me want to be the loudest, boldest, bravest version of myself, if just in honor of the people who came before me who weren’t able to do that. I loved it and cried through most of it, which (coming from me) is a huge compliment.

 

You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For: Bringing Courageous Love to Intimate Relationships by Richard C. Schwartz

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I wasn’t sure whether to include another book I read by the Internal Family Systems founder about his therapeutic model, but honestly both of these books have changed my life so much that it would be weird not to mention them!

You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For is much more relationships-focused than No Bad Parts. In particular, a lot of it is about how trauma can make us more susceptible to viewing certain people as our “redeemer,” someone whose love will somehow “fix” us and make it so that we’re never sad or lonely or rejected ever again. This can be a highly damaging way to view your relationships, both for your loved ones and for yourself, and yet it’s how a lot of people think about love. It’s even how our culture encourages us to view love, if the many many media depictions of “romance = happily ever after” are to be believed.

This book discusses the ways that IFS techniques can be used to heal negative relationship patterns, like always trying to change a partner so they’ll be who you want them to be, or always trying to change yourself to fit what you think your partner wants. And although this book wasn’t written with polyamory or other forms of non-monogamy in mind, I think it dovetails nicely with a lot of resources on polyamory and trauma, because it can help you address the root causes of your strong reactions to jealousy, rejection, and the threat of abandonment.

 

Tampa by Alyssa Nutting

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

Someone described this book to me as “a gender-swapped Lolita” and I was intrigued. Lolita is one of my favorite novels, not just because the writing is beautifully lush and witty, and not just because it launched a thousand erotic tropes, but because of how skilfully it makes powerful statements about consent and control via its unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert. While often interpreted by critics as a defense of pedophiles and their crimes, I see Lolita far more as a warning to the world about what can happen when we trust “unreliable narrators” just because they’re male/white/well-to-do/[insert other markers of systemic power and privilege here]. Much like Missing from the Village, Lolita points out the ineptitudes of authority figures whose unexamined biases lead them to ignore, dismiss and belittle the disempowered people most in need of their help.

Tampa is indeed, in many ways, a gender-swapped Lolita. It’s a novel about an adult woman who is sexually fixated on young boys, and the lengths to which she will go to scratch her pedophilic itch. Like Lolita, it forces the reader to grapple with their own notions of consent, control, agency, desire, and justice. And also like Lolita, it encourages us to understand the problem of pedophilia from a more humanizing angle, without letting abusers off the hook for the terrible things they do.

While obviously quite disturbing, Tampa was a compelling read. I especially found it interesting to note the ways that women who abuse their power can so often be viewed as less of a threat than men who do the same, for obvious reasons, even though they can behave just as horribly and can be every bit as morally bankrupt as their male counterparts.

 

Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

Since I enjoyed her previous book The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo so much, I decided to check out Taylor Jenkins Reid’s newer novel, Carrie Soto is Back. It’s about the comeback tour of a fictional female pro tennis player – why she decides to return to the game after some time away, and what happens when she does.

I’m not a sporty person at all, but some of my few forays into the land of athleticism have been into racquet sports, including tennis, badminton, and volleyball. So, while I found the athletic aspects of this book mildly interesting, mainly what pulled me in was the relationships between the characters, and the way that Carrie is so driven by her desire to be the best that she often ends up pushing people away and hurting herself in the process.

I think this story is instructive for anyone who measures their value by their professional success. I’ve certainly been there, and it was affirming to see those struggles reflected in these pages, even though Carrie is a world-famous tennis star who tours the world, and I am a freelance writer who reviews dildos from my bedroom. (One thing we have in common, at least, is that we both know a thing or two about balls.)

 

On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

Oliver Sacks is one of my all-time favorite writers. He was a neurologist, and rose to fame for his gorgeously-written case studies compiled in many books, which examined the relationship between neurology and the human condition. I loved, for example, his book on how music affects the brain and vice-versa, Musicophilia, and his tales of visual and ocular disturbances in The Mind’s Eye.

On the Move is quite different, though: it’s one of his memoirs. It was published the year that he died, and shows him reflecting back on his life and the wisdom he’s accrued from it. In particular, this is one of the few Sacks books where he discusses in detail the fact of him being gay, and the ways that homophobia shaped the course of his life. But there are also lots of fun stories in here, tales of zooming across the country on a motorbike, playing chess on LSD, and falling in love for the first time. It’s a beautiful book, written by a beautiful man, and is one of the most intimate glimpses available into one of the great minds of the 20th century.

 

Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price, Ph.D.

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I haven’t even actually finished reading this yet, but it’s already changed my life, so I feel compelled to mention it.

The provocative title of this book is indeed its central thesis. Laziness does not exist. Read that slowly, word by word, and notice the resistances and arguments that start coming up immediately in your mind. Do they sound like you? Or do they sound like your dad, your 4th-grade teacher, your first boss, or the disembodied booming voice of capitalism itself? More than likely, those voices aren’t coming from you – and more than likely, those voices are wrong.

In this book, social psychology professor Devon Price makes an incredibly persuasive argument for the idea that “lazy” people always have their reasons for being lazy, whether those are related to depression, anxiety, chronic illness, neurodivergence, trauma, burnout, or some combination thereof. But this book isn’t just theory – it’s packed with advice on how to materially change the circumstances of your life so that you will have more energy and take more initiative in the areas that actually matter, while also forgiving yourself for needing rest and making sure you get enough of it.

 

What were your favorite books you read this year?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2021: 8 Brilliant Books

Kate Sloan

At time of writing, I’ve read 44 books this year – yay! Reading has given me so much pleasure during the pandemic, with its ability to sweep me away into worlds that aren’t wracked by quick-spreading illness and quicker-spreading fascism. (Well, sometimes I do read books where those things are happening, but not typically ones set in our world.) It’s been a much-needed respite from the grind of life.

Here are 8 of the books I loved best this year. You can check out the full list of books I read in 2021 here. Would love to hear from you in the comments if you’ve read any of these, or if you have others to recommend!

 

Torrey Peters – Detransition, Baby

She decides for the ten thousandth time that heterosexual cis people, while willfully ignoring it, have staked their whole sexuality on a bet that each other’s genders are real. If only cis heterosexuals would realize that, like trans women, the activity in which they are indulging is a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood, they’d be free to indulge in a whole new flexible suite of hot ways to lie to each other.

This book absolutely exploded this year. It became a national bestseller. The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly called it one of the best books of the year. It got longlisted for the Women’s Prize (to the chagrin of transphobic bigots). And the praise is well-deserved, if you ask me.

Trans writer Torrey Peters’ debut novel is a witty, dishy tale of three people with vastly different relationships to womanhood, who ultimately discover their similarities and find some common ground. Reese is a brassy, world-hardened trans woman who desperately yearns to be a mother; Reese’s morose ex Ames was once a trans woman, but has since detransitioned for reasons that become clear later in the book; and Katrina is a no-nonsense cis woman who Ames accidentally gets pregnant, which is the catalyst that kickstarts the events of the story.

It’s a blazingly funny novel about womanhood, motherhood, the absurdity of gender, the mutability of family, and so much more. I loved it.

 

Leigh Cowart – Hurts So Good: The Science & Culture of Pain on Purpose

I have come to think of my experiences with masochism as a kind of biohacking: a way to use the electrochemistry of my body in a deliberate way for the purpose of curating a specific experience. Something about my response to pain is different, be it inborn or learned (or both, I suspect). It’s something that allows me to craft a little pocket of joy for myself, an engineered release, be it through running a few miles uphill, getting a tattoo, or getting slapped in the face for fun until I cry.

I’ve read a fair number of books that explore sadomasochism through various sexual and romantic lenses, but Hurts So Good is a different kind of book. It investigates a much broader range of masochisms, from kinksters getting whipped in dungeons, to ultramarathon runners exhausting their bodies for the fun of it, to competitive hot pepper eaters scorching their mouths to get an endorphin rush. This is a book about “pain on purpose,” in all the various ways humans seek it out.

I’ve been more and more interested in reading about pain since it became an everyday part of my life due to fibromyalgia, and there’s a fair bit of nerdy pain science in here that scratched that itch for me. But it’s also so much deeper than just brain imaging and neurotransmitters: Cowart examines the psychological, social, and even spiritual reasons that humans have pursued pain through the ages. It’s a fascinating read, whether sadomasochism is a part of your sex life or just a topic you find intriguing.

 

Hanne Blank – Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality

Historically, what heterosexuality “is” has been a synonym for “sexually normal.” Early in the history of the term, it was even used interchangeably with the term “normal-sexual.” And there, as they say, is the rub. “Normal” is not a mode of eternal truth; it’s a way to describe commonness and conformity with expectations. But what is most common and expected, in terms of our sexual lives or any other aspect of the human condition, does not always remain the same. Sexual expectations and behaviors, like all other social expectations and behaviors, change over time.

It’s always good to re-examine the things you think you know, to figure out whether they are actually true. More often than not, you’ll realize you’ve gotten it at least partially wrong all along.

Astute scholar Hanne Blank examines heterosexuality that way in her excellent book Straight. Our current society takes for granted that straightness has always existed, because it is the natural order of the species and a procreative imperative, blah blah blah – but has straightness always existed? Blank argues, quite convincingly, that it is a relatively new construct we created for ourselves, and that sexuality is now and has always been much more fluid and vague than the strict category of “heterosexual” would lead us to believe.

If you’re scoffing as you read this (“How could that possibly be true?! Straightness is real! Science says so!”) then I think you are the type of person who mosts needs to read this book. It is my view that some of our most significant growth as humans happens when we’re able to soften our rigidities, blur the boundaries we’ve drawn, and apply a lens of nuance to the world – and this book is a challenge to do exactly that.

 

Kai Cheng Thom – Fierce Femmes & Notorious Liars

I wanted to protect you, but I’m starting to think that the best thing you can do for people is teach them how to protect themselves. Every girl needs to be at least a little dangerous.

Kai Cheng Thom is a transcendently brilliant writer, whose work I first read in her advice column for Xtra. This book is a bit of a departure from her typical style: it’s a surrealist novel and a “biomythography” of Thom’s life, meaning that it draws elements from her own life story but is vastly more magical and absurd.

It’s the tale of a young trans girl coming out, moving across the country, finding community, and fighting back against the transphobic powers that be. It has a lot to say about how we grow and change as people, the transformative power of good friendships, and the beauty of stepping into your true self.

 

Allison Moon – Getting It: A Guide to Hot, Healthy Hookups & Shame-Free Sex

What makes casual sex casual? What makes sex sex? It’s a fraught subject, raising issues of morality, pleasure, risk, trauma, and choice. My job is not to convince you one way or another, but rather to give you good information to use to make up your own mind. I promise I won’t shame you for your choices, and I hope you don’t shame other people for theirs.

Gift this book to any young person you know who is interested in, or is pursuing, casual sex for the first time. Gift it to your recently divorced friend who hasn’t dated since the pre-Tinder era. Gift it to anyone whose relationship to casual sex seems tricky, confused, or painful. I really think it’ll help.

Everything that sex educator Allison Moon writes is delightful, but this book is really indispensable. It’s a guide to just about everything you need to know to have satisfying and healthy casual sex, from figuring out what you want, to finding dates, to setting boundaries, to navigating consent, to dealing with tricky feelings that come up. It’s a blueprint for the best sex of your life, whether casual or not.

I deeply wish I’d had this book when I was 22; I could have spared myself a lot of bad sex and broken hearts. But at least it’s out in the world now, and can help a whole new generation of sex-positive cuties.

 

Casey McQuiston – One Last Stop

The first time August met Jane, she fell in love with her for a few minutes, and then stepped off the train. That’s the way it happens on the subway—you lock eyes with someone, you imagine a life from one stop to the next, and you go back to your day as if the person you loved in between doesn’t exist anywhere but on that train. As if they never could be anywhere else.

Wanna read a quirky butch/femme romance novel that takes place primarily on a subway train, weaves in true queer history, features time travel as a prominent plot point, depicts rich and realistic queer friendships, and contains countless LOL-worthy jokes? This is the one.

I got somewhat obsessed with Casey McQuiston’s writing this year, devouring this novel and their other one, and starting to read an advance copy of their next one (being a member of the press has its perks sometimes!). Their work is sharp, full of heart, and shot through with a deep reverence for queerness and queer communities. I laughed and cried my way through this novel and almost wish I could erase it from my memory just so I could experience it for the first time again. It’s a beautiful love story for the ages.

 

Aubrey Gordon – What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat

I describe mine as work for fat justice. Body positivity has shown me that our work for liberation must explicitly name fatness as its battleground—because when we don’t, each of us are likely to fall back on our deep-seated, faulty cultural beliefs about fatness and fat people, claiming to stand for “all bodies” while we implicitly and explicitly exclude the fattest among us. I yearn for more than neutrality, acceptance, and tolerance—all of which strike me as meek pleas to simply stop harming us, rather than asking for help in healing that harm or requesting that each of us unearth and examine our existing biases against fat people.

As a massive fan of Aubrey Gordon’s podcast with Michael Hobbes, Maintenance Phase, I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to reading her book, but I’m very glad I finally did. It’s a thorough skewering of our society’s rampant anti-fat bias and all the various ways it manifests. It’s compelling and impeccably well-researched, and it should be a required text for anyone studying to become a doctor, therapist, social worker, or policymaker.

Fatphobia and diet culture are horrendously potent forces in our world right now, affecting how fat people are treated on both macro and micro levels every day. What this book points out, using evidence collected from a staggering amount of different reputable sources, is that anti-fat bias is largely predicated on the false notion that significant, sustained weight loss is possible for the majority of people. In reality, being fat isn’t all that different from being tall, in terms of how genetics create that condition and what can be done about it – but the discrimination and harassment fat people face is obviously far worse. If you’ve ever fat-shamed anyone for any reason, you should read this. If you’ve ever stayed silent while someone else was being fat-shamed in your presence, you should read this. If you’re feeling resistant to reading this because you disagree with its argument, you should read this.

It’s 2021. There’s no excuse whatsoever for being a bigot anymore, and that includes being a fatphobic bigot.

 

Jeremy O. Harris – Slave Play

For almost a decade I’ve given myself over to someone who doesn’t dignify me who acts like he’s the prize and I’m the lucky recipient. No motherfucker I’m the prize. Always have been, always will be. Somehow I forgot that. Or I never knew that. How could I? Got so wrapped in you so wrapped up in your presentation. That I forgot myself because when someone presents themselves as a prize you receive them as one.

I was lucky enough to see this play twice on Broadway, and also decided to read the script so I could absorb the words more deeply. It is a truly unique piece of theatre.

At the centre of this story is “race play,” an edgy and controversial kink in which racial differences and/or tropes are eroticized. I first learned about this style of play from Mollena Williams-Haas, a submissive Black woman who identifies as a slave in her D/s dynamic with her partner. (She has a new podcast, by the way – it’s amazing.)

Accomplished playwright Jeremy O. Harris (who also produced the terrific virtual theatre put on by Fake Friends during the pandemic) has weaved a story wherein race play becomes an element of a radical new therapy, aimed at helping the Black partners in interracial relationships experience more comfort, pleasure, and safety with their non-Black partners. It’s a raw exploration of race, class, kink, consent, privilege, power, and so much more. In my mind, the primary message of this play is that self-awareness, and awareness of one’s ancestral history, is crucial if we are to move through the world in ethical and progressive ways. This is a deliberately challenging play – the stage directions on the opening pages counsel the director and performers to avoid any attempt to make the audience feel more comfortable with what they are seeing – and it feels very needed at this time in history. I very much look forward to seeing whatever Jeremy O. Harris does next.

12 Days of Girly Juice 2020: 8 Brilliant Books

Kate Sloan
This is the closest thing I have to a bookstore pic from 2020 since everything has been closed for so much of the year 😭

One minor silver lining of this hellish year: not being able to go to places I’d normally go, or do things I’d normally do, left me with a lot of extra time. Some of that time was funnelled into video games (look, Tom Nook needed my help, okay?!), and some of it went into reading books instead. I spent many an hour this year stretched out in a hot bath, candles lit and Kindle in hand.

So far in 2020, I’ve read 31 books – here’s the full list, if you’re interested – but these 8 really stand out as my faves of the year. Thanks to my Kindle’s highlights functionality, I’ve also been able to pull a favorite quote from each, to give you a little taste. Read on and read up, bookworms!

 

The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks

I had heard stories of people living in rain forests so dense that their far point was only six or seven feet away. If they were taken out of the forest, it was said, they might have so little idea or perception of space and distance beyond a few feet that they would try to touch distant mountaintops with their outstretched hands.

I went through a major Oliver Sacks phase in the early part of this year. Mr. Sacks, if you don’t know, was a British neurologist who also happened to be a magnificent and evocative writer. Typically, his books are filled with eloquent case studies about actual people he’s helped, usually gathered around a particular theme. The Mind’s Eye is themed around all things visual, and profiles people with various disturbances in the visual sectors of their brain, like face-blindness and neurologically-rooted color-blindness.

In the latter sections of the book, Sacks also tells the story of his own loss of stereoscopic vision when a tumor deprived him of the use of one eye. His books are always fascinating to me as someone who is nerdy about oddities of the brain, and this was one of my favorites I’ve read.

 

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

“Has anyone been informed? Who do we call?” “I should call his lawyer,” the producer said. This solution was inarguable, but so depressing that the group drank for several minutes in silence before anyone could bring themselves to speak. “His lawyer,” the bartender said finally. “Christ, what a thing. You die, and they call your lawyer.”

Soon after the coronavirus became an international news story, I started looking into books about pandemics, because sometimes wading right into your fears and worries is the best way to cathartically slough them off. One of the most-recommended pandemic novels on Twitter back in March was Station Eleven, a thrilling story that starts in a Toronto theatre on the opening night of a Shakespeare play, and ends many years later, by which time the world’s population has been decimated and society entirely restructured.

This book felt healing and reassuring to read, because so much of it is about the ways that art, music, theatre, and literature create opportunities for hope, optimism, and connection, even in irrefutably terrible times. It was also just a genuinely fun read, full of unexpected twists, memorable imagery, and well-drawn characters.

 

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

By conceptualizing the problem of policing as one of inadequate training and professionalization, reformers fail to directly address how the very nature of policing and the legal system served to maintain and exacerbate racial inequality. By calling for colorblind “law and order” they strengthen a system that puts people of color at a structural disadvantage and contributes to their deep social and legal estrangement. At root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo.

I reviewed this book just after reading it, so I won’t restate myself too much here. I’ll just say that this book lays out argument after argument for defunding the police in a way that is clear, cogent, and persuasive. If you’re on the fence about this issue – or even if you still think the police are an upstanding institution, despite so much evidence to the contrary – I think this book would be particularly informative and helpful for you.

 

Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour

Reader: Wally Cat is many things, but a fool he is not. What he told me that day was a sales lesson in disguise. The quality of an answer is determined by the quality of the question. Quote that and pay me my royalties.

This brilliant debut novel follows a young Black man as he gets plucked from a low-paying job and hired as a salesman at an almost entirely white startup. It touches on racism, and confidence, and capitalism, and the scarcity of opportunity.

It’s also one of the funniest books I read all year, easy. The voice Mr. Askaripour crafted for his protagonist is sharp and witty, friendly yet dark, goofy but sincere. This was a pleasure to read from start to finish.

 

Girl on the Net: How a Bad Girl Fell in Love by Girl on the Net

It’s a bit hard to put sex to one side when I’m talking about romance: to me romance has usually been a route to sex, like a Valentine’s card with surprise dick joke inside. A love story that doesn’t involve the odd knee-trembling grope or sticky-lubed handjob feels as incomplete as breakfast without coffee.

The sex blogger known as Girl on the Net is a legend – easily one of the best writers in my genre, always smart and often hilarious. This book tells the story of one of her long-term relationships, with a man who luckily happened to be pretty chill about the whole “sex blogger” thing. (Trust me, this is a surprisingly difficult quality to find in a man.)

It’s equal parts romantic and sexy, stuffed with life lessons that’ll help you both in and out of the bedroom. And it’s all written with GotN’s signature wit. If I’d been able to take public transit this year, I’m sure I would have turned some heads by laughing too hard on the subway while reading this.

 

Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy by Jessica Fern

I will not lie: the work to heal our personal traumas and attachment wounds and the effort needed to build polysecure relationships are not easy. It takes courage, devotion and perseverance, but please trust me in knowing that it is worth it. As we heal our past, we open up new possibilities for our future.

This year I became increasingly aware of the ways my trauma history impacts the way I feel and behave in my present-day relationships. I took Clementine Morrigan’s online class on trauma-informed polyamory, and I read this book, and between those two things + getting a savvy new therapist, I feel that I’m firmly on the path to healing, though there is likely still a long way to go.

In this book, psychotherapist Jessica Fern (who is totally charming – she guested on a Dildorks episode) lays out the ways that attachment wounds can complicate non-monogamy, and what can be done about it. This is absolutely a must-read for anyone who wants to be non-monogamous but finds themselves continually triggered or re-traumatized by their forays into that relationship style.

 

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen

I understood for the first time that it is possible to lack the experience of sexual attraction without being repulsed by sex, just like it is possible to neither physically crave nor be disgusted by a food like crackers but still enjoy eating them as part of a cherished social ritual. Being repulsed by sex is a fairly obvious indication of the lack of sexual attraction, but a lack of sexual attraction can also be hidden by social performativity or wanting (and having) sex for emotional reasons—and because the different types of desire are bound together so tightly, it can be difficult to untangle the various strands.

I cannot say enough good things about this book. It is a vitally important contribution to the existing body of work on asexuality. In her clear, incisive prose, Angela Chen explains asexuality and its various facets and forms, discusses some of the biggest issues facing the asexual community today, and hypothesizes on useful lessons non-asexuals can learn from their ace peers.

Even though I’ve identified as being on the ace spectrum for a while now, there’s a lot in this book that I had never really thought about before, or at least hadn’t thought about with as much clarity as Ms. Chen brings to the table. It’s really a must-read for anyone who is interested in asexuality, from any angle.

 

Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House by Eleanor Herman

There appears to be little difference between the thrills of seeking public power, with crowds of adoring fans, to seeking pubic power, with an adoring audience of one. The same compulsions that send a man hurtling toward the White House can also send him into a foolhardy tryst with a woman. High political office and dangerous sex are, in fact, all about hubris and power.

I just finished this the other day, and it was an absolute delight. Ms. Herman – who has previously written books on the sex lives of queens, kings, and Vatican bigwigs – has amassed a veritable treasure trove of absurd stories about salacious presidential misadventures. I know more about Lyndon Johnson’s penis and John F. Kennedy’s favorite sexual position now than I ever dreamed I’d learn.

Although she’s not too heavy-handed about it, Ms. Herman makes it clear throughout the book that systemic sexism – and often, men being outright cruel to women they claim to love – has played a huge role in presidential sex scandals. It’s hard to even grasp the number of powerful men who have cheated on their wives, fucked over their mistresses, abandoned their children, lied to the nation, etc. etc. etc. This is mainly a book about shitty men, but it’s also a book about strong women who deserved way better treatment than they ever got.

 

What books did you love this year?

Book Review: Brothel’s Kitchen

Kate Sloan

Sex work is such a normalized field in my sex-positive, feminist communities that sometimes I sort of forget just how stigmatized it is in the world at large – even among people who claim to be “liberal” and “progressive.”

Narratives persist about how all sex work is nonconsensual and exploitative, despite sex workers screaming on social media for years that they’ve chosen their career path and don’t want or need to be “rescued.” Many people still use phrases like “selling your body” to talk about what is actually just the sale of your time and your body-based services, just like what happens in many other fields like massage, modeling, and professional sports. Far too many well-intentioned people try to argue that sex work is bad because it’s “disempowering,” as if the slog of earning a living is held to the same standard of “empowerment” in any other field. It’s perplexing and enraging – especially since so many of these folks think they’re being helpful by parroting their bullshit opinions that are (you guessed it) actively disempowering to sex workers.

I think a lot of this misinformation has to do with sex work’s representation (or lack thereof) in mainstream media, from the evening news to procedural dramas to blockbuster movies. For decades, if not longer, it’s been framed over and over as something one would only do under the direst of financial circumstances, or to get access to drugs, or to quench a psychological craving based in “daddy issues” or other trauma. While obviously there is poverty, addiction, and trauma in the sex work community (just as those things exist in pretty much every other community too), these narratives usually leave out the ways in which sex work can be incredibly positive and enriching for workers and their clients. And hey, newsflash: a job doesn’t have to be 100% peachy all the time to be a valid job worthy of respect and protections. We live under capitalism! Work sucks! Let people choose work that they like to do and feel able to do, since we all have to work anyway!

All this to say, I think positive portrayals of sex work are invaluable in shifting public perception of this misunderstood field. So I was pleased to be asked to review Phillipa Zosime’s new memoir, Brothel’s Kitchen: Flavours of Women.

The book follows Phillipa’s induction into the sex work industry in Austria. It opens with a series of scenes set at a massive orgy held by one of the brothels she works for, at which she’s expected to fuck and fellate clients for 7 hours (with breaks to shower, hydrate, eat, and rest). After she enjoys herself and gets paid, there’s a classic “You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation…” flashback and we turn back time to when she first entered the sex work world. Once an archaeology student and political intern, she decided instead to follow her fascination with sex and start having it professionally.

One very interesting aspect of this book to me is the details about Austria’s legal and regulated sex work industry. Regular STI tests are required, workers are considered self-employed contractors for the brothels they frequent, and meticulous paperwork is kept to make sure everything is legit. Many sex workers I know in Canada and the U.S. advocate for decriminalization rather than legalization/regulation, since (among other reasons) legislative bodies don’t tend to know very much about what sex workers and their clients actually need and want – but nonetheless, it was intriguing to hear about how brothels are apparently run over in Austria. The book goes into detail about how profits are split up between workers, madams, and house owners, as well as how much they pay in taxes and what kind of legal due diligence they’re expected to keep up with on a regular basis. These procedural minutiae ought to captivate anyone who’s curious about sex work law around the world.

Another fascinating detail from Philippa’s story is that she had only had one sexual partner before becoming a sex worker. It hadn’t been the most satisfying relationship, and she ended up having her first-ever orgasm with a client at the brothel (which became a point of pride for him and a running joke between them!). This was the point in the book when I started to get excited: it’s a really uncommonly positive depiction of what a career in sex work can be like. If there were more stories like this out there – stories that showcase the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful parts of sex work – I think far fewer people would hold shitty misconceptions about the industry.

Yes, there are scary and sad parts of Phillipa’s story. Her friend dies; clients blow up in anger on occasion; women get into snippy arguments; someone’s money gets stolen from her safety deposit box at the brothel. But all of these details just felt really real to me. Writing a fully rosy sex work memoir would, I imagine, be just as absurd as making any other career sound 100% fun 100% of the time. Life has its ups and downs, and so do our jobs, no matter what field we work in.

In addition to heartwarming sex-work friendships and heart-pounding sex-work problems, this book also contains quite a few funny stories that had me literally LOLing. There’s one in particular about one girl accidentally spitting cum onto another girl’s face that I don’t think I will ever be able to forget…

I gotta say, I liked Brothel’s Kitchen even more than I was expecting to. It’s charming, and cute, and fast-paced, and full of strange and illuminating details. There’s a disclaimer at the beginning that explains that “the events and conversations in this book have been set down to the best of the author’s ability,” and that “the author’s recollection of the past occurrences may deviate from those of others,” but there are so many parts of this book that seem like you couldn’t possibly have made them up. That realness is the heart and soul of Phillipa’s writing, and it makes this one hell of a page-turner.

 

Thanks so much to Phillipa Zosime for providing this book for me to review! This post was sponsored, which means that I was paid to write a fair and honest review of the book I was provided with. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Book Review: The End of Policing

Kate Sloan

Here’s one of the whitest things I could possibly say: I’ve never had a memorable encounter with a police officer.

Unlike countless people of color and especially Black folks, I have never been harassed, victimized, pursued, or discriminated against by a cop. My opinion on the police for most of my life has been neutral-to-positive, a fact that makes painfully clear the effectiveness of “copaganda”: media created to sugarcoat and valorize the role of police in our society. From SVU to Brooklyn Nine-Nine to The Silence of the Lambs, much of our media serves to numb white people’s understanding of the havoc cops wreak on Black folks’ lives every day, and have since the birth of their institution.

It was for this reason that I felt compelled to read The End of Policing. Friends of mine more entrenched in the social justice movement than I am have been shouting (and tweeting) anti-cop slogans for years now, and – seeing the violence regularly inflicted on marginalized people by police officers – I agreed with them that something needed to change. But I didn’t know much about the nuts and bolts of the issue: law enforcement’s rampant history of racist profiling and unwarranted violence, and the alternatives being proposed to replace this frustratingly venerated institution. My privilege had enabled me to go a long time without investigating this issue beyond a few cursory Google searches and news articles, but I wanted to fix that, because information is power and can effect change. So when I saw that Verso Books was offering a free ebook of The End of Policing for a while, as per the author’s wishes to get this information out there, I snapped it up and started reading.

It’s worth noting that the author, a sociology professor named Alex S. Vitale, is (so far as I can tell) white. Some books written by authors of color on similar issues include How to Abolish Prisons by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis, both of which I’d like to explore next because they focus more on the imprisonment part of the unjust law enforcement system, while the book I’m reviewing today is all about cops: what they do, where they go, how they operate, and why they’re ill-suited for the roles we’ve slotted them into.

Vitale’s central argument is that the entire way our culture understands crime, and its causes, is wrong. There’s a hugely prevalent “bootstraps” theory of crime that paints it as the behavior of the depraved and morally flawed. Why would someone steal a loaf of bread, this theory goes, unless they were an ethical degenerate? What is there to do for them but throw them in the slammer, give them a shot at self-rehabilitation, and then toss them back out onto the streets when their sentence is done?

This perspective completely ignores the existence of structural inequality – which, newsflash, is a pretty big component of any capitalist society. When you make a law that says “stealing is wrong” (for example) but you put one group of people in a situation where they regularly have to choose between stealing and dying, while another group of people rarely or never even gets close to the maw of that terrifying decision, of course the first group is going to get in legal trouble constantly. And because our culture works how it does, that group – poor folks, and especially poor Black and Brown folks – will be treated as if their thievery was an independent decision based on a moral failing, rather than something they were pigeonholed into doing by the way the world treats them.

I’d heard it said many times in social justice circles that the police’s purpose and function is essentially to keep Black people down, and I always thought that was a claim about the police’s current atrocities rather than an indictment of the institution’s entire foundation and original purpose. But Vitale’s book set me straight on this issue. Police – which haven’t existed in their current form for as long as you might think – were always assembled and deployed with the mission of protecting people who had money, power, and privilege. They would chase down slaves who escaped, for example, and squash workers’ rights movements on behalf of the upper-class whites who didn’t want to have to give their poor employees better working conditions or higher pay. Police, both historically and presently, put a higher premium on protecting white people’s “property” and “wealth” (which, let’s not forget, was stolen from Indigenous folks and built by BIPOC’s slave labor) than on protecting Black people’s lives.

Seeing as their entire institution was literally created for this purpose, it’s no surprise at all that they continue to be one of the most racist forces in a world some people still misguidedly insist is “post-racial.” This is especially true since, as Vitale explains, police are trained (whether explicitly or implicitly) to view perpetrators of crime as their enemy in a war of sorts, so they come to view themselves as heroes when in fact they are usually targeting society’s most vulnerable at the behest of society’s most powerful.

This main idea – that the solution to crime isn’t stricter law enforcement, but instead, the end of structural inequality – echoes through every chapter of Vitale’s book. He looks at topics like sex work, border violations, homelessness, drug use, and street gangs, and systematically explains why police are not a good or even passable solution to most problems. Structural inequality, the likes of which we see between white folks and people of color in North America and elsewhere, leads to economic precarity and, in many cases, mental illness and addiction issues for those who get the short end of the stick. These factors are the roots of almost all the crime police crack down on, and yet the crimes themselves are treated as isolated incidents, related to nothing structural except the supposed moral decrepitude of the “criminal” class. Why are we surprised that we built a dam and now the water is overflowing?

Each chapter of Vitale’s book gives an overview of the area of policing it covers, including numerous horrifying statistics and stories, and then offers some alternatives to the police-based status quo. You’ve probably seen people talking about some of these alternatives on social media a lot lately. Because the law enforcement institution is deeply discriminatory and was built to be that way, reforms aimed at getting the police to behave better will never work. It’s like training a bloodthirsty animal not to eat meat: the best you can hope for is that they’ll successfully suppress their natural desires for a while, not that those desires will actually change. For this reason, police abolitionists – a group that, wonderfully, seems to be growing by the day now – want, instead, for the police to be defunded and for those funds to be reallocated to services and causes that will actually reduce crime, like affordable housing, mental health counselling, addiction treatment, employment programs, social work, and sex work decriminalization. The law enforcement system thinks the best way to reduce crime is to make life harder for those in vulnerable populations; Vitale’s perspective, and that of other police abolitionists, is that making life a great deal easier for those people is the true ticket to crime reduction and a more harmonious society.

One thing that astonished me to learn from this book is that these alternatives are usually much cheaper to run than the current law enforcement system. Vitale produces stats that back this up for a staggering number of issues. It turns out, for example, that it costs the state dramatically less to just give a homeless person a safe and stable place to live for free than it would to continually cycle them through jails and courts for the “crime” of sleeping in a park or urinating on the street. (Where else are they supposed to sleep and pee, when you’ve banned them from so many safer locations?) It would also reportedly be cheaper to supply addicts with treatment and harm-reduction services than it is to send them to drug courts or prison. The tired Republican argument of “Where will the money come from?!?” seems pretty weak when you realize that police budgets are often the highest line item in any city budget and can be billions per year. Do you actually care about “the taxpayers,” or do you just hate the marginalized people you see as intractable criminals?

While this post is ostensibly a review of The End of Policing – which I loved, and would heartily recommend – mostly I wanted to use my platform here to tell you what you can do if you believe enough is enough and the police should be defunded. You can call or write to your local political leaders to demand they take action on this issue. You can donate to, and signal-boost the work of, abolitionist activists and organizations like Critical Resistance. You can loudly question the dogmatic beliefs of your police-abiding friends and family, perhaps backed up by stats and facts you read in this book. You can educate yourself more and more on this issue until you flush the harmful “copaganda” out of your psychological system. I’ve been doing all of these things after a lifetime of relative ignorance on this issue, and I invite you to join me – because contrary to popular belief, if we truly want a safer world, we need to get rid of cops and replace them with actual solutions to the problems we face.