Cook writes with outrage about “the criminalization of relatively minor infractions of sexual norms” and the fate of sex offenders in the U.S. who, following a conviction, face severe restrictions on where they can live for the rest of their lives. To his credit, he doesn’t just focus on potentially sympathetic examples, like teens whose consensual sex gets categorized as statutory rape. But while he’s persuasive that life on the sex offender registry can prove worse than prison, asking “Was [this] crime so heinous as to deserve such punishment?” about a physician convicted of the sexual assault of a medicated patient isn’t just unpersuasive–it will provoke even many sympathetic readers to abandon the book. Elsewhere, he notes that he applauds “the outing of harassment and assault,” but he avoids thorough consideration of issues of power and consent, and downplays that physician’s crime as a man “allowing his hormones to get the better of him.”
Other chapters contrasting the culture and techniques of massage work in the U.S. and Asian countries, or denouncing “privacy fetishization” in public restrooms and the American propensity to crack down on public urination, prove more thought-provoking. A scattershot chapter outlining a “modest proposal” about acknowledging that all sex is transactional scores satiric points, and Cook lambastes some true hypocrisies.
Takeaway: A provocative treatise targeting American sex laws and mores, sure to enrage.
Great for fans of: Alison Brown’s Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law, Chester Brown’s Paying for It.
Production grades
Cover: C
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B+
Marketing copy: A
Constraints on sex work, pornography, nudity, privacy, and other sexual aspects of life are forms of totalitarian oppression, according to this polemic.
Cook gamely associates all manner of restrictions on sexual behavior with a fascist persecution that is, he suggests, at least Trumpian, if not downright Hitlerian, in its mobilization of laws and prisons, malign surveillance, demonization of sexual nonconformism, and repressive imposition of patriarchal values. Some of his criticisms are well aimed, like his cogent attack on sex-offender registries that make it almost impossible for ex-cons to find jobs or housing, even if they were convicted of minor transgressions. (Underage teens, he notes, can face child pornography charges for snapping nude selfies and sending them to friends.) Other arguments can sound naïve. “A new self is born” when a woman takes up sex work, Cook rhapsodizes, because “freed of the burden of being ‘normal’ and ‘proper,’ she can now relax into psychological health”—so much so that he recommends that all sexual intercourse be paid for, with wives perhaps offering their husbands discounts. (Several chapters describe the author’s assignations with masseuses and sex workers in Asian countries.) And some of Cook’s proposals seem like fascist social engineering. He calls for unisex public restrooms with female urinals—“She must pull down her pants and pull aside her panties, legs astride in a semi-squatting stance, thus exposing her groin from the front or rear”—positioned in full view of male users, a reform desirable for “the sheer logic of it” as well as water conservation benefits. (He reassures women that “over time, one assumes, male leering and harassment of female users would dwindle.”) The author makes telling arguments against the absurdity of some of the restraints, taboos, and hang-ups people place on sex, condemning in elegant, sonorous prose “a society that is itself perverted and schizophrenic, dangling sexual temptations to ever-younger people and then punishing them brutally.” But his less convincing arguments inadvertently demonstrate that many sexual restraints, taboos, and hang-ups are pretty sensible and necessary for the safety and peace of mind of women and men alike. The result is an impassioned, thought-provoking manifesto that’s brave enough to raise scandalous questions that it doesn’t always answer satisfactorily.
A stimulating cry for sexual humanism that sometimes becomes a dubious brief for sexual radicalism.
