Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, educator and activist, and creator of four books Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (one of Publishers’ Weekly’s Top 100 Books of 2009), What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex & Safety, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All, and her latest, Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World. Her podcast, also called Unscrewed, was named one of the Best Sex Podcasts by both Marie Claire and Esquire.

Friedman’s work popularized the “yes means yes” standard of sexual consent that has been implemented on many US campuses and made law in numerous states and countries. In her book, Unscrewed, she calls on the movement for women’s sexual liberation to move past individualistic “empowerment” messages (for which she coined the term “fauxpowerment”) to focus on collectively transforming the systems and institutions invested in keeping women servile. Kirkus called it “a potent, convincing manifesto,” and Kate Tuttle, president of the National Book Critics Circle, called it “the book we need right now.”

Friedman is a popular speaker on campuses and at conferences across the US and beyond. She has been a guest on the Today Show, Nightline, Call Your Girlfriend, and numerous other podcasts, radio and TV shows, and her commentary has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, Vox, Refinery 29, The Washington Post, Glamour, and The Guardian. Friedman is a founder and the former executive director of Women, Action & the Media, where she led the successful #FBrape campaign to apply Facebook’s hate-speech ban to content that promotes gender-based violence. More recently, she has been active in the Jews Against ICE movement.