Publisher Description
A sexual history of the 1990s when the Baby Boomers took over Washington, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue. A definitive look at the captains of the culture wars — and an indispensable road map for understanding how we got to the Trump Teens.
The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido examines the scandal-strafed decade when our public and private lives began to blur due to the rise of the web, reality television, and the wholesale tabloidization of pop culture.
In this comprehensive and often hilarious time capsule, David Friend combines detailed reporting with first-person accounts from many of the decade’s singular personalities, from Anita Hill to Monica Lewinsky, Lorena Bobbitt to Heidi Fleiss, Alan Cumming to Joan Rivers, Jesse Jackson to key members of the Clinton, Dole, and Bush teams.
The Naughty Nineties also uncovers unsung sexual pioneers, from the enterprising sisters who dreamed up the Brazilian bikini wax to the scientists who, quite by accident, discovered Viagra.
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“If sex had a defining feature in the 1990s, it was ubiquity. In his new book The Naughty Nineties: Triumph of the American Libido, David Friend locates that decade as the moment when Americans finally brought sexuality into the open, realizing the promise of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and coming ‘to accept themselves as profoundly sexual creatures.’ It was an era of sexual fads and experimentation: the booty call, the Brazilian wax, and the sex tape belong to the 1990s.”
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New York Review of Books
