Book Review: Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era, by Lorna N. Bracewell

• Author: Samantha Majic
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211053622
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(4) 646 –667

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx

1. BBC, “US judge rules Harvey Weinstein can be extradited to California to stand trial,”

Accessed August 16, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57491949.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era, by Lorna N.

Bracewell, University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 277 pp.

Reviewed by: Samantha Majic, Department of Political Science, John Jay College-City

University of New York, New York, NY, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211053622

On June 15, 2021, a range of news outlets reported that Harvey Weinstein, the

former Hollywood mogul found guilty of multiple counts of rape and sexual

assault in New York, would be extradited to California, where he would face

additional charges that he attacked five women in Los Angeles.1 To many

observers and activists, this news was a high-profile victory for the #MeToo

movement, alongside the growing number of laws, sexual harassment com-

plaints, and other sociolegal developments that have emerged in its wake.

Lorna Bracewell’s sharp and incisive book, Why We Lost the Sex Wars:

Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era, is thus an important intervention that

challenges readers to think critically about these events by situating them

within the political struggles and conceptual transformations of the feminist

sex wars.

Bracewell begins by trenchantly reminding readers that #MeToo sparked

a backlash from conservative and progressive groups, raising alarms that the

movement “is riding roughshod over due process rights and civil liberties”

(3). Although these groups held very different sexual ethics, their shared con-

cerns signaled #MeToo’s deeper attachment to the core tenets of classical

liberalism—namely, individual rights, formal equality, limited government,

and the rule of law. As a result, the movement has prioritized legalistic

responses to issues of sexual violence “over goals like dismantling entrenched

structural inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexuality” (4). The core goal

of Bracewell’s book, then, is to explore how such a broad swath of the

1053622PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211053622Political TheoryBook Reviews

book-review2021