The End of Love
Sex and Desire in the Twenty-First Century
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
"A feast for the mind." —PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY
"A contemporary voice with the ease of Natalia Ginzburg's or Irene Nemirovsky's." —GUADALUPE NETTEL, author of Still Born
"Nuanced, deeply rich, and a joy to read." —CHARLOTTE FOX-WEBER, author of What We Want
In the twenty-first century, our romantic ambitions are intrepid... We want egalitarian and honest bonds, and we are eager to understand what that means. We also want to fall in love, to have sex, and to be loved; we want stability and adrenaline—the lifeboat and the open sea—, we want everything at the same time. But is it possible to have all of that? Or is this a recipe for frustration? Is this an honest yearning or a mere aspiration, a desire for completeness? Am I an idiot if I pursue it? Am I a cynic if I give up on it?
Born and raised in an Orthodox Jewish community in the heart of Buenos Aires, Tenenbaum learned about the sexual and emotional habits of the secular world like an anthropologist discovering an unknown civilisation.
Drawing from philosophy, feminist activism, conversations with friends, and from an attempt to turn her own experience into a laboratory for personal and collective reflection, Tenenbaum dives into the universe of affection, celebrates the end of romantic love as we know it, and proposes the eroticization of consent.
The End of Love is a tool for the creative destruction of romantic love and the principles that sustain it so that, from its ashes, a better love―one that makes men and women freer in their relationships―can rise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Argentinian journalist Tenenbaum makes her English-language debut with an incisive essay collection that shrewdly dissects the cultural pressures and ideals shaping modern notions of sex and relationships. After breaking from the Orthodox Jewish enclave of her Buenos Aires childhood to attend university, Tenenbaum felt "like I'd walked into an abyss" of unfamiliar social expectations. Yet she soon realized that her female peers were similarly "scared of doing things wrong" and "eager... to understand the rules governing their bodies." Writing that "we all arrive as foreigners in the world of desire and go through a never-ending process of learning its language," Tenenbaum critiques the ways relationship expectations filter through women's lives. In the essay "The Female Version of James Dean," she contends that even women's cultural models for "rebellion" confine their freedom to whom to marry (think Romeo and Juliet). "You Can Always Be Better" teases out the insidious ways social media dictates women's value in and out of relationships (it's not mandatory to have a partner "to take Instagram pictures with, laughing at nothing and lying on incredibly white sheets," Tenenbaum writes, but adhering to—or eschewing—these norms carries "financial, symbolic, or emotional" costs). Blazing with insight and equally grounded in personal observation and Marxist-feminist theory, these essays interrogate in lucid and persuasive prose how much has really changed for women from the oppressive past to the supposedly enlightened present. It's a feast for the mind.
