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Formats
Ebook Details
  • 01/2022
  • B09QHRWSMX
  • 255 pages
  • $3.99
Paperback Details
  • 01/2022
  • 978-1732277465
  • 249 pages
  • $10.95
Isham Cook
Author
Sexual Fascism: Essays
Isham Cook, author
At present the USA is the global innovator in sexual repression, with almost one million Americans under electronic surveillance, many rendered unemployable and indigent for offenses as minor as frat-party mooning or streaking, consensual relations between teenagers, teen sexting, erotic massage, and public urination. We seem to be a step closer to Big Brother telescreens installed in every home and Thought Police crashing through bedroom windows. But if George Orwell’s 1984 comes to mind, it’s not the right starting point. Sexual fascism takes root, rather, in the telescreens that we install inside our heads. And because sexual self-discipline is never enough, we grant powers to the state to give us a helping hand and extend its control over the population with an expanding array of judicial and carceral measures, all obscured by illusory freedoms of sexual choice and expression. The essays in this collection investigate the paradox of a culture where sexual freedom is retreating under the illusion of advancing.
Reviews
Lamenting the “sexual dystopia” of a United States he deems a “global innovator in sexual repression,” China-based essayist and novelist Cook (The Mustachioed Woman of Shanghai) calls for “sexual equality and freedom,” arguing that in the U.S. freedom of sexual choice has in recent decadessimultaneously expanded and retracted, with the new limits often imposed under the guise of fighting “trafficking.” Cook commits to pinning down his provocative title by digging into the roots, aims, and techniques of fascism, though the bulk of the polemic is dedicated to attacking the impact and impetus of “draconian” sex laws and recounting in detail his experiences in massage parlors in Asia.

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

Kirkus Reviews

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.

Formats
Ebook Details
  • 01/2022
  • B09QHRWSMX
  • 255 pages
  • $3.99
Paperback Details
  • 01/2022
  • 978-1732277465
  • 249 pages
  • $10.95
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