You're listening to It's Been a Minute From NPR.

I'm Brittany Luz.

And a warning to listeners, today's conversation is entirely about sex.

And not just any sex.

Sex that's kind of mid unsatisfying sex.

Bad sex.

Bad sex is the title of a book that gets into the causes of lackluster sex.

Mental, emotional, historic, and systemic.

And the author really changed how I thought about being a woman who's dated and loved men.

It's about the unfinished business of the sexual revolution, especially when it comes to female

desire.

That's Nona Willis Arontois.

She wrote the book as she was leaving an unsatisfying marriage and re-entering the world with

a big libido and a lot of questions.

Like how do you discover your true desires?

And sex is a seeps into sex.

And while I was on this personal journey, I was also reading a lot of history.

Nona found that for centuries, women who date men have grappled with balancing safety

and respect, with love and pleasure.

That's honestly a throughline that I saw through every generation of activists, where you

have these feminists who are trying to imagine a better future for themselves, but they're

actually living in the present and dealing with people who have been socialized in the

...