Chastened
No More Sex in the City
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
For the last year Hephzibah Anderson has flirted, dated, swooned, and sighed. She has been tantalized by intense conversations, lingering looks and clinches in the back of taxis. She has watched dawn break cradled in the arms of a dangerous ex, sipped cocktails against the Manhattan skyline with a dark-eyed companion, and dined al fresco in the English countryside with a man who promises to be more than just a friend. She has talked, embraced, kissed. But she has not had sex.
Turning on its head the maxim that declares romance dead, journalist Hephzibah Anderson has thrown herself headfirst into finding romance in an age obsessed with sex. Chastened: Adventures in Abstinence is the story of her personal quest to stay chaste for a year, fusing a candid and pithy month-by-month account of her personal challenge with an exploration of what sex means in the twenty-first-century western world. In a welcome antidote to the pole-dancing hen night, Anderson elegantly unpicks our attitudes to relationships; and reconnects with the much undervalued values of courtship and intimate friendship in our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Everything but the sex seems to be the theme of this fluffy dating chronicle by British journalist Anderson. Having recently turned 30 and being determined to break a baffling, bruising cycle of consistently mistak casual hookups for rose-tinted beginnings, Anderson decided that she d had enough sex without love; it was time to try love without sex. The purpose? Not, as she hints with feminist bravado, to become faithful to my instincts nor even to achieve emotional self-sufficiency (as she enjoyed some playful banter with potential boyfriends like Dan, Jake, Quiet Guy, the Beau, N, Rafiq, and so on), but to snare a mate and that sadly didn t happen at the end of this year. Using an unwieldy chronological structure by month, Anderson moves from her resolve to embark on a year of chastity after a final emotional disappointment with Jake in late summer ( You sleep with these men too soon, her mother had warned her), through numerous travels and dissatisfying encounters between London and New York. Along with way, Anderson lards each chapter with ponderous emotional reflections, injecting just enough research and quotes from heavies to keep the reader engaged, such as brief mentions of psychotherapist Brett Kahr, a Hepburn-Tracy movie, chastity rites in ancient times, and Samuel Richardson s Pamela.