Unscrewed summary

It’s easy to think we’ve made great strides in women’s liberation. After all, there have been times when women couldn’t vote in the United States, were treated as outcasts if they had pre-marital sex, or faced charges if they tried to obtain birth control pills without being married. But there are still numerous ways in which women are being oppressed.

One of the biggest trends these days is what the author calls fauxpowerment, which is the popular yet phony idea that modern women are completely free and liberated.

In a perfect world, every woman would be comfortable with her sexuality while feeling free to enjoy it and explore it. But unfortunately, that is far from the case, as female sexuality is continually co-opted by men and used to make women less human.

The media, in particular, uses female sexuality to present women purely as objects of male sexual desire, rather than human beings with their own emotional lives.

Traditionally, sex was perceived as something that only men actively sought out, with women going along with it but not seeking it for their own enjoyment. Only relatively recently have women understood that they’ve got just as much right to play for their own benefit.

Society has generally regarded sex as a commodity, something that men hope to buy from women at as low a price as possible. This is the angle that many popular male pick-up artists have promoted, showing men how to get laid with as little effort and money as possible. For them, a successful date would be one that didn’t even involve paying for a drink. In this macho mentality, no thought is ever given to whether a woman should receive any pleasure from the date or not.

A common question on the minds of many American women today is, “How did we end up in this mess?” At the top of their concerns is how the Religious Right, a group of ultra-right-wing Republican Christians, gained so much political power that they’ve become the ones deciding what a woman can and can’t do with her body?

The modern movement can be traced back to 1976 when the Christian conservative Bob Jones University lost its federal tax-exempt status because it wouldn’t allow interracial dating on campus. The evangelical community was immediately outraged by this and began to rally support against government interference. But as they built up some political momentum, they eventually shifted their focus from defending racist policies to condemning abortion.

One of the most important steps in achieving gender equality is for women to gain control over their bodies and win back their lives and liberty from male oppression.

The name of the reproductive justice movement was co-coined by Loretta Ross, a feminist activist with a long track record of fighting for women’s issues. As the name suggests, Ross’s cause is primarily about winning the right to decide what happens to her body, but it also takes into account the many considerations that influence decisions about starting a family and other factors that affect women’s bodies. This includes access to healthcare and the economic circumstances in which a woman might live.

Students in US public schools are supposed to be taught a wide range of subjects to prepare them for adulthood. Yet somehow, sex, one of the fundamentals of life, goes unmentioned, or worse, gets misrepresented.

In many states, sex education isn’t a mandatory course. But in states where it is, the class is often focused on teaching abstinence, which means students learn nothing about how to give or receive pleasure and the importance of this in a healthy sex life. So, right from the start, girls, in particular, are being set up to think that bad sex is something they have to endure. And by teaching abstinence over the use of contraceptives, schools are increasing the chances of underage pregnancy.