Let me start by saying that this is a very, very long book. The good news, however, is that it doesn’t feel that long. It actually flew by because it’s composed of popular culture and political vignettes that I lived through as a young adult. I was surprised how many of these incidents I’d forgotten about. Friend is comprehensive in his coverage of the decade, touching on everything from Lorena Bobbitt to the advent of Viagra; from Monica Lewinsky to Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss; from Howard Stern to celebrity sex tapes; from the rapid acceptance of queer people in popular culture to the O.J. Simpson trial.
All of this is a fun and interesting retrospective, but I struggled to find a point to this book. Maybe I’m just jaded by today’s political climate and decades of social media, but I’m always looking for an agenda. If anything, I think Friend is trying to draw a line between the dissolution of private sexuality in all sectors of American life and the knee-jerk reactionary conservatism that has taken over American politics today. I’m not quite sure how much of this is true. Still, I agree that today’s social and political climate is a reaction to what has come before, including the general dissolution of privacy and a rapid, widespread, public acceptance of sexual expression during the 90s.
Anyway, it’s a fun book to read, if for no other reason than that it brought up all kinds of memories about the 90s and made me re-evaluate some of the things that happened during that time, which I thought I’d understood.