This Week in Sex: Tina Fey and Sasha Grey

Abortion in Arizona, fertility in Israel, Rihanna with a riding crop, and more.

By Ben Reininga

New books by Tina Fey and Sasha Grey both lauded for their feminism.

Two new feminist books are in the news, one with a much sexier cover than the other. Tina Fey’s is perhaps more obvious; at least since Mean Girls, she’s been the face of a sort of rough-edged equalizing feminism, and on 30 Rock, she plays the only woman on network TV who regularly makes jokes with cheese in her mouth, but also still goes on dates. Her new book, a collection of vignettes called Bossypants, takes a more direct feminist stance than her comedy. Writing about men like Christopher Hitchens who say women can’t be as funny as men, she says, "My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that because you don't like something, it is empirically not good. I don't like Chinese food, but I don't write articles trying to prove it doesn't exist."

Porn-star-turned-actress Sasha Grey also has a new book, Neü Sex, that’s less for reading and more for looking at — it’s mostly a collection of on-set photographs from her time in porn taken by herself and her husband, Ian Cinnamon. While there are short essays interspersed, it’s more Grey’s presence and lack of shame at having done, and liked, porn, that’s making people drop the f-bomb. In an interview, Grey said, "Sex is used so often every day in the media. I mean, we use it to sell sneakers. And microwave meals. And at the same time we're taught to kind of keep to ourselves... There's this weird thing where we're allowed to be sexy, but we're not allowed to be sexual. So to me, it's a veil of safety. So it's okay to show your tits but it's not okay to talk about what your kinks are, when you're a woman."