The H-Spot

Introduction

FOR THREE YEARS of my midtwenties, the happiest I felt was in the backseat of a car, late at night, driving down the FDR on the east side of Manhattan. I would look out the window across the river at the lit-up Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens, then the Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg, and finally the three bridges—Williamsburg, Manhattan, Brooklyn—the last of which would take me home. I took that drive probably a hundred times. It was usually dark, maybe 11 p.m., maybe 3 a.m.; maybe the sun was already peeking up. I would slump back, gaze out, and silently calculate how long I had to sleep before I had to be back in midtown Manhattan. But in those nighttime hours speeding down the East Side, I would look at the outer borough lights and the imposing bridges and this impossibly bright city and remind myself to grasp at the one thing that made me happy: at least you're here.

Up until that point, I had spent most of my life doing things right. I was a good student in high school, went to college, and then chose a path to an upper-middle-class life that is well worn by risk-averse overachievers: law school. All around me in New York City it seemed people were doing dynamic, fascinating things, but I had no idea how to be one of them, no knowledge of how to balance my desire for an interesting life with the need for stability. And growing up with parents who were the first in their families to elbow their way into the middle class, I understood instinctively that stability mattered most. So, more than $200,000 in debt from law school, I took a job at a Manhattan law firm, clicking like a Clydesdale in cushion-soled heels through the front doors of a big Midtown building every morning, feeling very grown up.

It's one of the least sympathetic and most clichéd stories of modern American life: Young corporate lawyer is overworked and trapped (in the romantic comedy version of this story, she's also undersexed and wears her hair in a very severe bun). She makes six figures, but her tasteful apartment and designer clothes don't bring her happiness (in the real-life version of this story, most of that money goes to her law school loans and she lives with a roommate in Brooklyn).

The story doesn't end with me leaning in harder and opening my own firm, or leaning all the way out and moving to Bali to do yoga, or meeting someone handsome who works with his hands and moving to a farmhouse where I find purpose making artisanal jams. It doesn't end at all, and definitely not with a self-help book or some sort of manifesto about how to find personal happiness. The book in your hands is, thankfully, not about another young lawyer who quit her job and found herself.

It is instead about all of the ways in which Americans carry, and our institutions reflect, a profound and abiding antipathy toward women's day-to-day enjoyment and our broader fulfillment. At twenty-seven, physically ill and emotionally depleted, I made the decision to seek happiness elsewhere—I left practicing law and began writing full time, and I remain lucky (and extraordinarily happy) to have a job that doesn't feel like one. Still, when people ask me what I write about, I often joke, darkly, that I'm on "the rape and abortion beat." That's what I find myself writing about again and again: stigma, trauma, pain, the moments in women's lives that are often some of the hardest, that are routinely made more difficult by American law, culture, and pervasive inequality.

In writing about the same topics from different angles—the social and often sexual punishment of women who are perceived to have misbehaved, the lashing out at powerful women, the uneasiness with which the general public interacts with women who have power or money or influence or some combination of all three, the political opposition to women having sex for fun—it became clear, quickly, that a lot of the problems feminists continue to take on are rooted in a deep hostility toward and suspicion of unfettered female pleasure, happiness, and independence.

As I rounded the corner into my thirties as a member of one of the most privileged groups of people in human history—college-educated white professionals living in a major First World metropolis—I was looking out from a bubble where feminism and progressivism were fairly standard but where, still, so many of the women I knew were butting up against barriers we assumed had been largely dismantled. We were trying to figure out which parts of the old model of femininity to keep and which ones were worth discarding—and what social costs we would bear for both.

I watched the men I know reckon with exactly none of this.

As a journalist, I talked to a lot of women outside this bubble of New York City privilege, around the United States and outside of it. What I heard is that, although the details are all different and the struggles often more pronounced, their overarching questions were similar to mine: What does it mean to be a woman when there are more ways to be female than ever before but when the choices in front of us feel at once overwhelmingly wide and impossibly restrictive? How do I reconcile what I want with the options I have—and how do I even know what I want or what my options are when so many paths seem to lead to closed doors? I've done the things I was supposed to do; why do I feel so cheated?

The challenges, too, may differ in the specifics, but there are through lines: too much work and not enough time; pressure to be a perfect wife or mother or daughter or girlfriend; anxiety at having bad sex or not enough sex or the wrong kind of sex; not enough money and not enough resources. Across the board, women are on a gerbil wheel, running to catch up—to their own expectations, to outside ideals, to men—and never quite making it.

Well before I began this book, it was clear to me that we have a problem with female pleasure and that it is holding women back. Our political and cultural priorities aren't about making life more enjoyable but about getting ahead, attaining bigger and better things, "having it all." But the system is rigged: Men have long been able to "have it all" because of free female labor. As women have achieved more highly in the workplace and gained greater social, political, and economic freedoms, the bar of success has gotten higher—never before have we had to work so much at every level, whether it's to be an accomplished white-collar professional or just to make ends meet; never before have the requirements for being a good mother been so extreme.

At the same time, political debates rage around the very policies that would make it easier for women to succeed. Women today live in a world of unfinished feminism, where we're told we're equal but see our basic rights up for grabs, where we're told to just push harder at work, or recognize we can't have it all, or marry Mr. Good Enough.

The feminist movement's answer to pervasive inequality has been simple: make women equal to men. That's a laudable goal, especially in the early stages of any movement for social equality: Get laws on the books that put two disparate groups on equal footing and enforce them. Get members of the disempowered group into positions of power, roughly proportional to their share of the population. Shift policy priorities to reflect the needs of the disempowered group so that that group may become more equal to the powerful one.

In the second wave of the feminist movement, roughly in the 1960s and '70s, there was a sometimes complementary and sometimes competing vision for the movement's priorities: appreciate women's work more, rather than pushing women to work like men. Proposals included everything from valuing more highly pink-collar care work (that is, low-skilled work dominated by women, like nursing and child care) to paying women for their at-home labor (compensating women for cleaning the house and caring for their own kids). There have been a handful of successes: unionizing domestic workers, requiring minimum wage and basic labor protections for some workers whose job sites are in private homes. But traditional "women's work" remains undervalued and underpaid. The idea that women should get paid for being stay-at-home moms is laughable, and isn't much discussed within feminist circles today, at least outside of academic settings.

Instead, we talk more about "balance" and sharing at-home work with a presumably heterosexual partner. As feminist discourse becomes increasingly mainstream, feminists continue to debate how best to achieve gender equality (some feminists debate whether gender equality is even the ultimate goal); we debate what equality looks like, what it means, and who is making themselves equal to whom. Does gender equality start with making individual adjustments to better our professional prospects—each of us climbing the corporate ladder, and giving the women below a hand up, until we break the glass ceiling? Or is the feminist project about undoing entire systems, challenging capitalist norms, and trying to improve conditions for the masses—recognizing, as feminist writer Audre Lorde put it, that the master's tools can never dismantle the master's house? Can it be both?

The more I interviewed women and wrote about reproduction and sex and work and family, the more I became convinced we were getting inadequate results because we were asking the wrong questions. No amount of trying to catch up or insisting women's work had value was going to fix the fundamental problem: we're operating in a system created by men, for men, according to their whims and desires. Of course women can't flourish in a system that needs us as support pillars for someone else's building. We're here to prop it up, not to live in it. This is not a place that was built for us to thrive.

The answer isn't then to simply value more highly what women actually do—lots of women do what they do because it makes men's lives easier. The answer isn't to simply try to be better at the limited tasks set before us. The answer is to ask, What would we make if we had all the tools? What do we want?

That's a more complicated proposition than it sounds, mostly because people are terrible at predicting what will make them happy and what they actually desire, and there are all kinds of social benefits for women who say that what they want is, conveniently, the same thing men want for them. Figuring out what works for women means talking to women and observing our lives, while also folding in the increasingly large body of social science on what makes us happy, what keeps us healthy, and what helps us to prosper. Increased gender equality is one of those things, and feminism has undoubtedly improved conditions for both women and men across the United States. What could topple the most stubborn roadblocks is a feminism and a politics that reorient themselves away from simple equality and toward happiness and pleasure.

There is no question that the women's rights movement in the United States has been a success, if one that came in fits and starts. Less than one hundred years after women gained the right to vote, we're now graduating from college at higher rates than men; we're getting married later, having fewer children, living longer. The rights to abortion and contraception have allowed many American women to delay childbearing until we're ready, opening up new opportunities and improving the health of women and our children. Women are making inroads into traditionally male careers, from law and medicine to sports and blue-collar labor. Millennial women are some of the most feminist in history. Little girls grow up hearing that they can be whatever they want.

But that promise remains unfulfilled because, still, we haven't caught up. Men make more money for the same work in nearly every profession and across age ranges. That wage gap is exacerbated when you compare white men to women of color, and it gets worse with age, especially when women have kids. Poverty remains feminized, and many of the women living in poverty are single moms who are unsupported and socially stigmatized. Women hitting retirement are finding that a lifelong wage gap coupled with social security programs that don't consider at-home work to be real work means less to live on as they age, which translates into greater financial instability and, often, reliance on their children (and caretakers for elderly parents are more likely to be daughters than sons, often pulling those younger women out of the paid workforce and perpetuating a cycle of financial vulnerability).

The problems aren't just economic. Decades after the advent of hormonal birth control, women in the United States still struggle for the right to make basic reproductive decisions without political interference. The "sexual revolution" made sex more present in the public sphere than ever before, but sexual pleasure—which is different from using visual representations of sex to sell stuff—is remarkably absent. Women's sexuality remains understood primarily in relation to men's, and women's bodies still serve as physical stand-ins for sex itself, with sexy women selling everything from hamburgers to car parts to Internet service. At the same time, we punish women who are actually sexual or who cross some always-shifting external boundary of sexual propriety. Our identities are too often defined by our relationships to other people—wife, mother, daughter—and prominent politicians defend women's rights by describing us relationally to men. Even many "egalitarian" heterosexual relationships still involve the female partner putting her career second and doing the majority of the care work, whether that's for her husband, their children, or an aging parent.

Often, you'll see this billed as "choice" or as women pursuing personal happiness because the language of feminism has been neatly co-opted by a strain of peculiarly American individualism. If you're an American woman today, you have almost certainly come across outlets promising paths to happiness and to its distorted sibling, "empowerment." Mostly, those paths involve buying something: a chain restaurant meal, a SoulCycle class, a chocolate bar, a self-help book that tells you to have more collections or own less stuff or quit your job. Happiness is now a concept you find in magazines selling women regressive ideas repackaged for an Instagram photo.

The American pursuit of happiness has morphed from a political promise made in the very declaration of our independent nation into a thoroughly capitalist endeavor, packaged and sold to individuals with the promise that if you just get this thing—if you just choose to pay for this thing—you'll be fulfilled. We are aspirational and pleasure saturated, yet still happiness deficient.

We're learning more and more about what actually benefits women and how that fits with what women say we want for our lives—and how what women say shifts as our opportunities do. The idea that women are entitled not just to equality but to pleasure—to that term specifically, with its connotations of sex and hedonism and selfishness—remains taboo in political discourse. We're programmed to assume the best women can do is to just get by—or if we are remarkably privileged, embark on expensive quests of personal self-betterment.

What if, instead, the goal were happiness? Not at an individual level, with more yoga or self-care or Pinterest-perfect hobbies, but a political one: What would the world look like if our laws and policies prioritized feeling good?

When it comes to pleasure, our political forces run the gamut from indifference to outright hostility, either ignoring any interest in feeling good or writing off pleasure as immoral, hedonistic, even lazy. That American law and policy should keep citizens healthy and safe is controversial enough; that it should strive to make us happy seems laughable.

Even in the absence of institutional and structural forces promoting female happiness, most women still try, however imperfectly and with mixed results, to maximize theirs. Which is how I found myself pinging between writing jobs before picking up and moving to Kenya: after ending my career as a lawyer, I freelanced for a bit, then took a job as a political writer for Cosmopolitan.com, and a year later left that job, too, jumping back in the financially precarious life of a freelancer, this time halfway around the world. I was moving mostly in pursuit of happiness, a career change, and love, but also because it sounded like an adventure, the kind of life I had long wanted but had been too scared to grab hold of. Still, I found myself struggling to explain why a writer who primarily covered American politics was heading to Nairobi. At a party in New York celebrating a friend's new book, I found myself in a conversation with Glynnis MacNicol, a writer I knew only passingly, and she asked me the question I couldn't quite answer: "Why Kenya?" As I stumbled out an explanation about liking East Africa and wanting a change and hoping to do more international reporting and also my boyfriend was moving there—a part of the story that felt particularly unfeminist—she gently interrupted and said, "So you're moving to Kenya because you can."

"Because I can." It was true, but I was still taken aback, and long after that conversation I found myself unable to say those words out loud. In writing this book, I wavered on writing about my own life at all—especially this part of it. I hesitated because a series of unearned racial and social-class privileges makes my experience of American womanhood an overrepresented outlier, but also because I worried any woman who says she does things just because it feels good sounds entitled and not appropriately—and femininely—deferential and self-effacing. Still, Glynnis's words stuck in my mind as a thoroughly modern justification for women's choices, largely unimaginable even a few generations ago. What a reflection of the huge gains women have made, victories for which movements for women's rights get most of the credit.

And yet, for all of the good work feminism has done, equality means very little when you're making yourself equal to men who are struggling too, or when you're seeking equality in a system that simply wasn't designed for you. In this context of such unequal feminist gains, writing about pleasure seems almost flippant; in the context of a culture hostile to female pleasure, a woman who actively pursues pleasure is spoiled, suspect, threatening. "Because I can" is spectacularly freeing. But that kind of freedom, that expanded ability to dictate the course of one's life, is not on offer for most women. For all of the gains women have made, most American women live in a world of "I can't," their opportunities and choices restricted.

That doesn't mean that happiness and pleasure are only available to a privileged few, or that women in challenging circumstances don't have ideas about how happiness and pleasure (or lack thereof) could and should function in their lives. On the contrary, I found that women for whom "I can't" is a daily reality had some of the most incisive ideas for what a society designed by and for women might look like—even if they often reacted with skepticism to my initial premise.

That was certainly true of Janet Rowland, who knit her eyebrows together at the suggestion that there is perhaps a collective social obligation to help women not only survive but thrive. I showed up at Janet's Raleigh, North Carolina, home on a hot August Wednesday, and as we talked, Janet was tired—she was still hurting from a car accident a few months back, and she spent the previous day at the hospital with her daughter, who was having kidney tests and an MRI done (she had just been diagnosed with scoliosis on top of a rare skin disorder doctors found three years prior). All three of Janet's kids were home, along with her niece, who often stays at Janet's place.

"I just don't want to get to the point that I get hospitalized," Janet told me, as the kids chattered in the kitchen, the bigger ones helping the little ones with their ABCs. "My body has broken down from stress, depression. I didn't know that that area was a big impact in my health, and I was hospitalized for a week with health issues. And that is when I learned that stress could kill you."

Janet, it is an understatement to say, is not happy. And as we talked, she explained how much of her life has been ordered around survival, on chasing after a mirage of what she's supposed to have—a job, a house, a partner, children—but which the complexities of poverty, racism, and sexism keep yanking away, just out of her reach. There hasn't been time to sit with herself and ask, "What do I want?" What she wants today is enough gas to drive to the grocery store.

In the course of writing this book, I spoke with dozens of women—some, like Janet, whose challenges stemmed in part from their socioeconomic background, and others whose privilege should have opened up a world of opportunity but were somehow still confined. I spoke with women who were already reordering their own lives in ways that better suited their needs and desires and others who believed that if they just followed the rules and tamed their unconventional or simply human impulses, they would be happy, only to wind up disappointed and resentful at all the promises that went unfulfilled. I stayed with one mother raising her children in an "intentional community" of coliving adults in Seattle and another in Maryland whose husband leaned in at home. I interviewed an OB/GYN in Mormon-heavy Utah and a young woman who regretted "saving herself" for marriage, an urban farmer in the Bronx and a sixtysomething adoptive mother. These are not women whose paths are likely to cross or who on paper seem to share many of the same experiences. And yet many of their challenges stem from the same root: impossible expectations countered by constrained opportunities.

I also immersed myself in a trove of happiness research, pop-science treatises on how to be happy, literature on women and work, studies on female sexuality, and surveys that attempt to paint a picture of contemporary American life. These, too, don't offer simple solutions, but together they begin to form a portrait of female satisfaction, experience, and desire that can inform both the individual choices women make to improve their lives and the broader political conversation about how a pleasure-centered policy landscape could more substantially address the stubborn issues and inequalities women continue to face.

Is pleasure-centered policy the magic bullet for American women's happiness and success? Of course not. But at a political moment when even the most basic rights of women are under threat—when Americans have elected a president who brags about sexual violence and who pledges to appoint Supreme Court justices who will dismantle abortion rights—it is crucial to stay on offense and advocate for what we really want instead of cowering in a defense crouch, accepting crumbs. That means countering regressive political forces with our own moral vision of a great society—one that is structured around women and what brings us satisfaction. For several centuries, women have carried disproportionate burdens to underwrite men's pleasure, success, and happiness. Now, it's time we decided that female pleasure isn't an indulgence or a privilege but a social good—and that women deserve more than just equality.