Three Books That Changed the Way I Think About Sex

Remap your neural pathways

Photo by Piotr Szczepankiewicz

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My version of heaven is a candlelit 5:30am, sipping coffee and curled up in a blanket, reading a book before my family wakes up. Is this the hottest Substack you’ve ever read?

Sometimes I remember to grab a pen, because I enjoy chatting with the author as I go. Underlines, scribbled margin notes, the occasional “!” indicating true revelation: once an English major, always an English major. (But remind me to tell you how I was once a Religion major.)

My reading tastes look a lot like my movie and TV show tastes, which is to say: intimate character studies that usually involve sex. Not to turn myself on (it’s 5:30) but because sex is so private, a secret for most people, and I like knowing secrets. Or rather, I like worming myself into the deep crawl spaces of someone else’s mind, sex usually being the deepest, a dark room lit only by honesty.

This year, I read three books with palpable honesty about sex. All three of these are floating around on Best of 2024 lists, I’m sure you’ve seen some or all of them. They include an autofiction, a memoir, and a collection of satirical short stories. If you’ve read great books this year with interesting things to say about sex, comment! This could be a cool reading list if enough of us participate.🤓

1. All Fours

By

Miranda July

Well well well, if it isn’t another woman in her 40s who gobbled this up. I read it twice.

Synopsis: An artist in mid-life gets the opportunity to take a cross-country road trip for two weeks, leaving child and husband behind. Less than an hour into her trip, she stops into a small-town motel room that she transforms over a couple of weeks. During that time, a few locals transform her too.

Not 5:30, but close

A New York Times review called All Fours a “gaspingly explicit” novel which is both very true and very endearing; I see the journalist’s fingers trembling. Oh my. There are dildos in these pages.

What I sincerely loved about All Fours was how funny it is, which I don’t think has been remarked upon nearly enough. Yes, it’s a book about non-monogamy. Yes, it’s about a mom. Double-check for me, who enjoys that combo, but the deeper pleasure is Miranda’s writing style. I love it when writers/people are both very smart and very hilarious, packaging profound ideas in whimsical gift wrap. Miranda’s specialty.

Here’s one of the more controversial passages in the book:

Was this the secret to everything? This bodily freedom? It felt intuitive and healthy, as if promiscuity were my birthright as a woman. Maybe it was. Was this the skeleton in civilization’s closet? The reason why men had come down so hard on us since the start of time? I had the urge to call my mom and tell her the good news – but no, it was too late in every way. The moon! So huge! It suddenly seemed natural and sweet to fuck all my friends. But also my lawyer, who I couldn’t remember the face of because we only communicated through email, and everyone else I worked with, regardless if they were someone’s assistant or the head of a company – what better way to understand other people’s realities? I should have sex with both my parents of course (it was only a matter of time), and obviously my cousins, wherever they were, should all be fucked. I lamented the relatives who had already died before we could share this tenderness. Children weren’t a part of this, but the parents of Sam’s friends should be brought in, especially the mothers I had nothing in common with – fisting would cut right through the politesse. And who else? Like God making a new civilization I tried not to leave anyone out.

Forty-five minutes later I was still walking. I no longer wanted to fuck everyone in the world – that was lunacy, ha ha! – now I wanted to eat the world like a giant fruit. I wanted to go to other countries, yes, but also how come when I dropped Sam off at school I always hurried home even when there was no urgency? What was keeping me from taking a different exit? Why didn’t I throw themed parties or run an artists’ salon? I should have a lover, sure, but also other specialized relationships – someone I only cried with, someone for mutual back-scratching, artistic pilgrimages; I could be the part-time child or pet of a lonely adult, how interesting for both of us – and each of these people could be anyone, from any walk of life.

All Fours is like a psychedelic A Room Of One’s Own with a bunch of Esther Perel in the mix. “Once we had an entire village to fill all of our needs; now we ask our needs to be met by just one person” I hear Esther saying in a lilting Belgian-French accent, which you can hear in this conversation between Esther and Miranda. (I think they taped it in a bed, lol.)

The passage above captures one of the main themes of the book: the pain of living in a world not set up for unfettered intimacy. A world limited in imagination, but flush with possibility.

And by the way, I should tell you that the main character’s husband is a good guy. We’re so used to seeing this kind of sexual awakening as causal, like the only reason a woman could crave wild erotic freedom is because she’s married to someone cold and unfeeling. No! Sometimes a person, a woman, a mother longs for things outside of the prescripted life models just because. How refreshing to see that not as a reaction to a bad partner. This would be such a different (and more predictable) book if her husband was the bad guy. But instead it does something way more interesting, by allowing a female character with a good family and a good life to explore her eroticism, simply because…it exists.

Which, in the end, might be why this book feels so radical.

2. An Honest Woman

By Charlotte Shane

Never have I read a book as trenchant about patriarchy and as affectionate towards men. I wish we had a lot more books like this, to understand the difference.

Synopsis: A memoir written by a sex worker, following her journey from cam work to erotic massage to escort services. While she sees several clients and many on repeat, the main through line is Roger: an older man she sees for several years. Visually, I imagined him as Logan Roy.

There’s a tendency to view sex workers as victims. Some absolutely, factually are. But what I loved about An Honest Woman is how not-victimized Charlotte is. The top note of her story isn’t desperation – it’s curiosity.

And it’s curiosity I can relate to. Curious to understand bodies from an early age. Curious to understand male desire. Curious to understand men.

This book felt to me like an autopsy of male loneliness, the end result of a culture that provides men little room for emotional tenderness, especially between one another, and especially the further back you go generationally. There’s a scene where Charlotte is working a bachelor party, and towards the end the bachelor and his best friend take her into a room:

After making a spectacle of the groom for about forty-five minutes, Josh and I took him into one of the bedrooms and shut the door…I wasn’t offering full-service then, just hand jobs, so I sat on the groom’s right side and jerked him while Josh lay on his left side and talked his friend off. This was less fun, because it was so clear that I was merely a proxy and buffer as opposed to a real participant. I was interfering with something between them even as I facilitated it, but it wasn’t my place to say so or stop. Still, the ability to be a voyeur of other people’s most personal lives was one of the jobs’ best perks.

What would life be like for these two friends if they lived in Miranda July’s big, free world? Where two (mostly) straight men can have a sexual experience with one another, just to explore? But our world is bound by rules, and eroticism runs counter. I guess that’s why they call it unruly.

There are a hundred closely observed scenes just like this one in An Honest Woman. Being a voyeur of other people’s most personal lives is the whole reason I started Submit Here, so if you like this Substack I think you’ll like this book. May I share one more passage with you?

Attraction is dependent on so much more than looks alone, though hotness is treated like the determining factor because it’s the easiest to package and sell. I’m rarely the best-looking woman in a room, but thanks to sex work, I trust my capacity to charm and seduce, to convince many of those in the room that I am. I know now that when people look at you, they don’t see what you look like as much as they see their idea of what you look like, and that idea can be negotiated, improved, revised. Every dimension of a moment – power differentials, circumstance, timing – influences desire, which is capacious but can also be capricious, hyper-specific, and evanescent. Its mutability is a comfort and a curse.

In this story, women charging for sex are not victims, and men paying for sex are not monsters. There’s a weirdo here and there, but Charlotte quickly dispenses with them, and while sex trafficking is real and ugly, this is not that. Money defangs the transgressive nature of sex work in An Honest Woman, because it cuts to the chase. We both know why we’re here. Why don’t you tell me what you need, so I can make this experience worth the fee?

Charlotte shows us that side of things. The intimacy that shows its face when we’re paying someone not to judge us.

3. Rejection

By Tony Tulathimutte

“Skin crawling,” “truly dangerous,” “sick,” “deranged” – I’m reading these words off the back of Rejection’s cover, all from glowing author endorsements. And I’m laughing because they’re right, it’s a brilliant book that earns all of these adjectives. Buckle up.

Synopsis: A set of loosely-connected short stories whose characters spring from right now, this exact moment in time. All of them could be described as Very Online or quite normal; you’ve interacted with (or enacted) all of these people. The social justice warrior. Cool girls in the group chat. The trolls whose comments are too blunt to be actual humans, yet we fight with them anyway, their AI-generated thumbnail pics just realistic enough to scream at.

Sex is a theme in most of Rejection.

But sex here doesn’t represent erotic possibility (All Fours) or fleshy fellowship (An Honest Woman). It represents a kind of absolutist, disembodied proof that you are desirable and therefore worthy, in a hierarchical system that rewards only status. In fact worthiness is merely a stepping stone to power, a badge you can flash where? Online, where these characters marinate in harsh market dynamics and wait for it to mirror back identity.

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” That’s Oscar Wilde. “Even while having sex, it comes freighted with so many expectations, such intense anticipation of disappointment, that he doesn’t enjoy it. To finish he silently imagines the woman is pregnant and that his more potent semen is killing off the other man’s embryo, displacing it with his own.” That’s Tony Tulathimutte in The Feminist, the opening and most chilling story in this collection.

The Internet makes prisoners of us all, trapped inside individualized algorithmic realities no one else could possibly understand. Which is why real life feels so illegible sometimes. Why real people feel so illegible. I don’t want to give anything away, but that’s the central conundrum of The Feminist: a main character who’s fashioned his self-presentation to win over women, who says all the right things, has all the right values. So why doesn’t it work? A passage:

I’ve never complained, objected, or harassed anyone all these years no matter how cruel or senseless the rejection, if anything I enabled their rejections, and even took it as my duty. Which is all the more insidious, actually, that they convinced us to normalize and accept this, become complicit in our own oppression by pretending it’s not happening or doesn't matter, or even if it is happening and does matter, you deserve it: that’s right, THEY are gaslighting YOU, all to absolve themselves of guilt, at the meager cost of our lives.

You know this guy. You saw him on Reddit once. He doesn’t want touch, he wants whatever it says about him that a woman will have sex with him.

Read Rejection for the searing indictment of now. Read it because the writing is so good, it slips invisibly into the background. Read it because race. Read it because gender. Read it because if those things feel like homework to you, reasons you “should” read vs. reasons you want to read, then you’ll especially love what Tony has to say about identity and its discontents. Do NOT read Rejection for a refreshing new perspective on sex (that’s the first two books on this list). Read it for a warning about sex, and what happens to people, to all of us, when we become all mind, no body, all information, no intuition, all upvotes, no eye contact.

Now, I turn it over to you.

Have you read any of these books yet?

What are you reading right now in the world of sex?