The Sex Myth by Rachel Hills

Named one of the best books of 2015 by the New York Times’ Women In The World, and featured in more than 150 media outlets around the globe, The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies & Reality is a call for a generation to question the systems of power that shape our sexual beliefs and experiences.

The Sex Myth takes big ideas in sociology, gender studies, and philosophy, and brings them back to everyday lived experience through interviews with more than 200 teens, twenty-somethings, and thirty-somethings. It asks and answers questions such as, what’s normal? How does sex shape our sense of self-worth? How does society influence what we think of as sexually desirable? How do gender roles impact the way we’re taught to engage with sex? And what does real sexual freedom look like? 

Close To Home by Christine Delphy (foreward by Rachel Hills)

Close to Home is a classic study of family, patriarchal ideologies, and the politics and strategy of women’s liberation. On the table in this forceful and provocative debate are questions of whether men can be feminists, whether “bourgeois” and heterosexual women are retrogressive members of the women’s movement, and how best to struggle against the multiple oppressions women endure.

Rachel Hills’s foreword to this new edition explores how Christine Delphy’s analysis of marriage as the institution behind the exploitation of unpaid women’s labor is as radical and relevant today as it ever was.

Better Than Sex (ed. Samantha Trenoweth)

In an age that mashes internet porn with Tinder and arranged marriage, in an age in which everything (sexuality, gender, consent) seems fluid, what does the landscape of love look like, really? And how are the seismic jolts in the ways we negotiate sex and romance affecting women?

In the third book in Samantha Trenoweth’s series of essays by contemporary women, contributors ask whether the Tinderverse has killed romance; are women, who are increasingly powerful in all sorts of areas of their lives, more or less empowered in their personal relationships than they were a decade ago; and do women actually have more choices or fewer?

In her essay, Object Lessons, Rachel explores her personal history as a “bad object” — from an ugly duckling adolescent to a young woman who consciously and subconsciously rejected being “chosen” by others at the expense of choosing herself.