Bad Sex is, principally, about the search for pleasure and happiness in relationships and sex, and how sex's role has changed over time in feminist circles. The author is the daughter of two famous activists, one a pro-sex feminist and rock & roll columnist, the other a labor organizer.
The book is split between a modern-day memoir of Aronowitz's relationships, affairs, and love life, and her reading of the feminist classics.
I really liked the latter. As a whistle-stop tour of modern feminism, this is a decent place to start: the citations and references felt earned and well-researched. The stories that tried to put you in the time & place to just hear the words but understand the cultural milieu that gave rise to them: it's pretty good. Aronowitz balances biography, citation, and commentary in a way that feels natural and left me interested in each of the historical movements that she talks about. There are plenty of subcultures and ideas in feminism that this introduced me to.
The memoir half was harder to like. The personal is political, they say, and hers is especially -- each phase of her at-times monogamous, polyamorous, and celibate life is connected to the political theory. But it was hard to see how it all fit together, whether these were lessons learned, or if there was really any interesting ideas being connected by the lurid sex stories intertwined with the history. And there's so much talking to partners about sex. But she doesn't really communicate, even to her husband or friends, about the kind of topics that this book is about. It's hard to commiserate with her need for emotional and intellectual connection when she doesn't seem to try, and seems to (in her own writing) care more about the sex act. Sure, being into sex is more radical for women than for men and so maybe she's over-correcting in what she writes about, but being kind of bad at communicating is an all-to-common problem for men and it's just the same problem here.
This also takes on hetero-pessimism and, mostly, accepts it: the idea that heterosexual women are embarrassed and annoyed by their need to date men, but have no other options. I think hetero-pessimism is wrong a lot of the time - it often boils down into a sort of light misandry combined with objectification, which is sort of where Aronowitz lands. Fair enough, some men are terrible. But I don't think that her approach to the problem really works: by constantly insulting and disowning both her own attraction and the objects of it (men), she basically tries to de-politicize her sexuality by sacrificing others. She presents herself as sadly attracted to men, and thus better than men and also better than women who are comfortable and happy with their attraction to men. I don't think it's genuine to do this: either you are in relationships with men and are engaged in the complexity and danger of heterosexual relationships, or you can choose to not be: you can't participate but treat yourself as being on some higher plane. Harrumph.
Bad Sex: an interesting and decent book that I liked more as a jumping-off point to the wider world of feminism than I do as a memoir.