The End of Love
Sex and Desire in the Twenty-First Century
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Told as a series of reflections on her personal experiences, this is a bold manifesto by a brilliant young mind on our contemporary understanding of romantic love and how the contradictions of inherited traditions and technology affect the way we build relationships.
Born and raised in an Orthodox Jewish community in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tamara Tenenbaum approached the sexual and affective habits of the secular world like an anthropologist discovering the ways of life of an unknown civilization.
Drawing from philosophy and feminist militancy, from conversations with friends and colleagues, and from an attempt to turn her own body and experience into a laboratory for both individual and collective reflection, Tenenbaum explores the challenges that young people today face at the start of their adult lives.
Tenenbaum examines the multiple dimensions of affection, from the value of friendship to the culture of consent, passing through motherhood as a choice or an imperative, desired and abhorred singlehood, polyamory, open relationships, and the workings of dating apps. Timely and illuminating, The End of Love celebrates the creative destruction of romantic relationships as we know them, and advocates for the rise of a better, freer love.
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.
