Emily Witt

Harvard Book Store welcomes writer EMILY WITT and Boston Globe "Love Letters" columnist MEREDITH GOLDSTEIN for a discussion of Witt's book Future Sex—a funny, fresh, and moving antidote to conventional attitudes about sex and the single woman.

About Future Sex

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 unreciprocated. 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.

Praise

"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

"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

"Emily Witt’s Future Sex is moody, dark, and powerful, brilliantly gloomy and inspiringly funny. This is the best book by far I’ve read on women’s sexuality in the new century, because Witt is the finest writer. I don’t know if this is the future of sex, but the future belongs to Emily Witt." —Mark Greif, author of The Age of the Crisis of Man