Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback

An urgent, hopeful, and unapologetically radical new book about consent, democracy, desire, and the future of sexual politics from award-winning writer Laurie Penny.

＂I can’t really think of another writer who so consistently and bravely keeps thinking and talking and learning and trying to make the world better.＂ -Caitlin Moran

We are in the middle of a sexual revolution.

In our era of crisis, collapse, and reactionary tyrants, we are also witnessing a productive transformation: profound and permanent changes in how we define gender, sex, consent, and whose bodies matter. It’s a time of creative disobedience, of reimagining ways of organizing care, reproduction, and the work of building and sustaining the human species. These changes threaten the social and economic certainties that form our world; they threaten existing power structures, and they undermine the authority of institutions from the waged workplace to the nuclear family. No wonder the far right is fighting so hard. A shakeup in sexual and gender relations is a shakeup in political, economic, and social life as well. The stakes could not be higher.

Based on Laurie Penny’s celebrated, Ellie-award nominated Longreads series about rape culture, Sexual Revolution is the culmination of years of journalistic research, written for a broad audience, drawing on the work of Shulamith Firestone, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Silvia Federici, Wilhelm Reich and Michel Foucault. This is a hand grenade of a book, a manifesto of social change, and a story of how feminism can save the world.

Laurie Penny is an award-winning author, columnist, journalist, and screenwriter. Their seven books include Bitch Doctrine, Unspeakable Things, and Everything Belongs to the Future. As a freelance journalist, they write about politics, social justice, pop culture, feminism, mental health, and technology for outlets including the Guardian, Longreads, Time, Buzzfeed, the New York Times, Vice, Salon, the Nation, and the New Statesman. They were a 2014-15 Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University. As a screenwriter, Laurie has worked on The Nevers (HBO), The Haunting (Netflix) and Carnival Row (Amazon). Laurie Penny is based between London and Los Angeles. laurie-penny.com / @PennyRe