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“Camp is a Sensibility.” On Susan Sontag, Extravagance, and Sexuality
I have a memory. I think I was about 13 years old—probably wearing dungarees, or at least, that’s how I like to imagine my proto-lesbian self. I was kneeling in my parents’ living room and slotting a...
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How Anthony Comstock, Enemy to Women of the Gilded Age, Attempted to Ban...
Speech is a form of power. My new book, The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, & Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age, chronicles eight women “sex radicals” who went up against the restrictive...
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“You’re Food and Drink to Me.” A Letter From Henry Miller to Anais Nin
In 1932, months after first meeting in Paris and despite both being married, celebrated Cuban diarist Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller—the hugely influential novelist responsible for writing the sexually...
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Centuries Before Fifty Shades, A Runaway Hit About Kinky Sex
In 2009, an aspiring writer posted a novel’s worth of steamy, Twilight-based drama to FanFiction.net, under the nom de plume Snowqueens Icedragon. For those of you not familiar, fan fiction (or fanfic)...
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Learning About BDSM—By Doing It Myself
The man I’m meeting is a strongman coach. He trains people to flip tires, hoist Atlas stones and deadlift three times their body weight. But today I’m talking to him about his other job. As a...
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Why Writers Shouldn’t Wait for Permission to Create the Stories They Want
I’ve never really understood the idea of writers, especially women and minority writers, waiting for “permission” to write what we want, when we want. How did the process of regurgitating terrible...
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The Disorientation and Relief of Owning My Submissiveness
Spring 2015, BROOKLYN I was buzzing my clit with a vibrator as Adam mined me steady and deep with his usual authoritative ease. It felt so relieving to be fucked by him. He got hard when he wanted, for...
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Some Fundamental Principles for Writing Great Sex
The most consistent compliment I get on my novel is that the sex is great. It’s praise I enjoy, although I am certainly not an erotic writer. My first novel—City of a Thousand Gates, newly out in...
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How Covid Has Reshaped Our Concepts of Dating, Love, and Sex
Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right...
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What Pornographic Literature Shows Us About Human Nature
Years ago, as I muddled through early drafts of my porn book, a reader texted me one of my favorite pieces of feedback to date: “Weird boner.” I was delighted less by the erection than the...
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“Terra Inferna”
When my mother died, I dreamed of a man rough-sketching on gesso, palette knife scraping the angles of a woman’s face. He knuckles thin washes of color, the way a man might thumb through a woman,...
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The Under-Celebrated Erotic Power of… Hamantaschen
What’s in the middle? A good book jacket reveals something of the inside, and hints at more still hidden. The cover of my debut novel, Shmutz, features a strategically placed hamantaschen, a...
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Just How Much is Jane Austen a Precursor to Bridgerton?
The six published novels of Jane Austen all appeared during the Regency Era (1811-1820), the remarkable period in British history during which, following the descent of George III into madness, the...
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How Does Language During Sex Translate Across Cultures?
bin-bin: the sound of having lots of sex of dubitable quality * The sex I had before going to Japan was British, and it didn’t involve many words. Of course language paved the way, in both long- and...
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Profile of a Philanderer: What Kind of Man Becomes a Cheating Husband?
What if you could look into the future and know before you got married that your prospective spouse would be unfaithful one day? What if you could see it coming? Well, after talking to a lot of...
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Melissa Febos on Writing About Sex
The following is excerpted from Melissa Febos’ Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative and appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Recently, I began a weekend...
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A Tumultuous Love, a Plea of Chocolate Cake: “Would He Taste Me in Each Bite?”
Feature image by Forsyth Harmon. He left me again in December. I returned to my childhood home in the suburbs of Paris for Christmas. It was damp and gray, the sun rose late, barely lighting the sky,...
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Tracing the Romance Genre’s Radical Roots, from Derided “Sex Novels” to...
With the new season of Bridgerton airing, the topic of the romance genre’s purpose, perils, and pleasures has become a topic of conversation, once again. Long critically reviled as trash, the popular...
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Here’s the Quick and Dirty on Foot Fetishes
While we’re on the subject of whence came the concept of perversion, you might also be wondering where more pedestrian kinks come from. Whether you find yourself in a tizzy every time you see Ben Solo...
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Elif Batuman on the Need For Novels (And When Male Writers Describe Oral Sex)
It was a review of The Idiot, her 2017 debut novel, that made Elif Batuman revisit Martin Amis’s 1973 debut novel, The Rachel Papers. “The reviewer was upset that there isn’t any sex in The Idiot,”...
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