Future Sex

Staff Top Fives 2016

Our favorite books of the year.

Last year I got really into reading about parenting, and this year I got really into reading about the Internet. Emily Witt delves into how our views on relationships, dating, and sex have changed since the Internet became our romantic other. Both personal and theoretical, Witt takes on traditional views of monogamy and dating, creating a sort of Opening Up for the tech age. She examines the disconnect between romantic relationships and technology, and whether or not we've become detached and less committed as services like Tinder and OkCupid have made it easier to find love without ever leaving the house. Is it actually easier, though? Recommended By Emily L., Powells.com

A funny, fresh, and moving antidote to conventional attitudes about sex and the single woman.

Emily Witt is single and in her thirties. Up until a few years ago, she still envisioned her sexual experience "eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center." Like many people, she imagined herself disembarking, finding herself face-to-face with another human being, "and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future."

But, as we all know, things are more complicated than that. Love is rare and frequently reciprocated. Sexual acquisitiveness is risky and can be hurtful. And generalizing about what women want or don't want or should want or should do seems to lead nowhere. Don't our temperaments, our hang-ups, and our histories define our lives as much as our gender?

In Future Sex, Witt explores internet dating, internet pornography, polyamory, and other avant-garde sexual subcultures as sites of possibility. She observes her encounters with these scenes with a wry sense of humor, capturing them in all their strangeness, ridiculousness, and beauty. The result is an open-minded, honest account of the contemporary pursuit of connection and pleasure, and an inspiring new model of female sexuality—open, forgiving, and unafraid.

"I highly enjoyed Future Sex—a moving, novelistic, exploratory, wryly funny, darkly colorful, many-storied book about 21st century romantic relationships, the rarity of love, the female body, polyamory, birth control, childlessness, internet dating and porn, and the search for more than mere contentment." Tao Lin, author of Taipei

"Emily Witt is our perfectly ambivalent yet somehow smart and hungry guide on this casually lurid tour of female driven porn, idly pervy webcams, Burning Man, and polyamory. If you think of those boring books that probably still send single straight women off to Europe to meet a nice man, Future Sex looms even more clearly into view as a hotter choice for actually almost anyone." Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

"The greatest ambition for a reported book is to offer a true history of the present; Emily Witt has succeeded in an effort few even attempt. Of the dozens of new books each year that try to say something credible, useful, and revealing about the contemporary sexual self-image, Witt has produced far and away the one most likely to be read and reread over the coming long interval of human experimentation. Witt is not only a committed reporter, but a writer of rare range; her language is as tough-minded, stark, and provocative as it is tender, careful, and exposed. Future Sex glitters in its poignancy. It makes itself felt far beyond the usual expectations." Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction

"Witt’s debut provides an illuminating, hilarious account of sex and dating in the digital age, when hook-up culture and technology have vastly altered the romantic landscape....This is a vital conflict at the center of many women’s lives, and Witt explores it with remarkable nuance, intelligence, and an admirable commitment to experimentation." Publishers Weekly

Emily Witt is a journalist, essayist, and critic. Her work has been published in n+1, GQ, New York magazine, The New York Observer, and the London Review of Books and anthologized in Best American Travel Writing. She has degrees from Brown University, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Cambridge, and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique. She grew up in Minneapolis and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.