Abstract
Sex advice has featured in popular media from the earliest periodicals to the newest digital forms. While the content has changed in line with social attitudes, men’s sexual agency continues to be privileged, and issues of sexual coercion, harassment, and abuse are rarely addressed. This chapter explores how ‘progressive’ US-based sex and relationships advice columnists and commentators, including Dan Savage, Cheryl Strayed, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, Heather Havrilesky, and Tristan Taormino, framed the #MeToo movement as a watershed moment. Mobilizing the metaphor of a ‘reckoning’ in gender and sexual relations, these sex advisors explored critical questions such as how to take care of the self or others with survivor stories, how to reflect on one’s own sexual histories for evidence of potential instances of perpetration, and how to avoid exceptionalism in progressive and sex-positive communities regarding the relevance of #MeToo for these progressive sexual cultures.
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Newman, C.E., Haire, B. (2019). ‘A Reckoning That Is Long Overdue’: Reconfiguring the Work of Progressive Sex Advice Post #MeToo. In: Fileborn, B., Loney-Howes, R. (eds) #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15213-0_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15213-0_15
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