When shame loosens its grip
Airing out what had felt so shameful was like disinfecting sticky gunk accumulated over decades of false belief.
Something magical happens when shame loosens its grip. There’s a delicious freedom that comes from not being beholden to a false story you’ve been telling yourself. And in the vacuum, curiosity can come rushing in.
I experienced this in the summer of 2019 when I realized a story I’d believed about my sexuality wasn’t true. For decades I thought I was repressed/defective/broken because I had never once orgasmed from “traditional” PIV1 sex.
The shame of this belief was so insidious and pervasive it cast a shadow over my adult life. It felt so shameful I could not talk about it. I could barely think about how shameful it felt without a hard knot forming in my stomach and a jittery, defensive panic clouding my forebrain.
Shame feeds off silence, and starves when we tell our stories.
This feeling largely kept me from reading about sexuality. Because when I did, I never found anything that reflected my experience. I became more convinced I must be a defective outlier, and felt worse than before.
Fortunately, that belief was lifted by the gift of clarify from a book I will be forever grateful for: Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life2, by
. When I ran across a recommendation for this book, I knew I had to find a copy in a bookstore. The title sounded hopeful, but I needed to thumb through it to convince myself it wasn’t “aspirational” sex advice that didn’t reflect my reality3.Learning my experience was actually shared by many women allowed me to let go of the untrue story about being defective and broken, and along with it, shame I’d been carrying for so long.
There are deep-seated cultural reasons I’d never heard anyone talking about this common experience, including patriarchal ideas of what “sex” is (see footnote 1), and taboos in talking openly about pleasure for people with vulvas and vaginas. How many others suffered from the same false beliefs I had? I knew I had to start talking about it.
When an opportunity came to do a storytelling show for the “Dirty Talk” theme of the VAMP showcase of So Say We All, I gathered up my nerve and submitted a piece. It’s a humorous account of my first field trip to an adult store, but wrapped inside is a very real and vulnerable story about what I discovered about myself.
After the show, I was on a high for a week. Airing out what had felt so shameful was like disinfecting sticky gunk accumulated over decades of false belief.
Shame feeds off silence, and starves when we tell our stories.
That’s why I’m exited to bring you this latest Brave Book Pairing. These two books: Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, by
, and Kink: Stories, edited by Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon, bring light and air to subjects that aren’t often talked about.
Ace is what I’d call a reported memoir, as it includes Chen’s reflections on her own asexual identity as well as research, reporting and cultural critique. Chen includes a slew of stories culled from interviews with people who identify as asexual (many of whom use the shorthand ace).
If you’ve never heard of asexuality, here’s a short and incomplete definition. Asexuality is an orientation, like heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality. But instead of being sexually attracted to the opposite, same, or any sex, asexual people do not experience sexual attraction per se. It’s not just not wanting sex, and it’s not a disease or disorder. It’s an orientation that doesn’t have sexual attraction as part of its makeup. Being ace is a queer identity, the “A” in LGBTQIA+, as intrinsic as any other orientation is. There’s a lot more nuance (which you would learn by reading the book!) but that’s the basics.
What I loved about Ace is it delivers on its subtitle. Asexual people have been forced to examine what roles attraction, intimacy, physical release, and other factors play in their lives without the societal assumptions that sexual attraction is a de-facto part of them. Reading these perspectives can illuminate for all of us what each of these factors actually means.
As Chen writes in the prologue, “Aces draw attention to sexual assumptions and sexual scripts — around definition, feeling, action — that are often hidden, and interrogate the ways that these norms make our lives smaller.”
“Anyone who isn’t sexual enough or sexual in the right way becomes lesser. The label of asexual should be value neutral. … Instead, asexual [in the dominant culture] implies a slew of other, negative associations: passionless, uptight, boring, robotic, cold, prude, frigid, lacking, broken. These, especially broken, are the words aces use again and again to describe how we are perceived and made to feel.” — Angela Chen
There’s that word again — broken. The cultural scripts and assumptions that imply asexuals are broken are the same ones that convinced me I was broken. Our society has an extremely narrow window within which one is allowed to experience sexuality (including its absence) without being made to feel lesser.
Chen explores many avenues in Ace, including how intersections of asexuality with race, disability, even political leaning can bring to light previously unchallenged assumptions that affect everyone.
Ace also includes a fascinating chapter on consent and boundaries. Asexuality describes an orientation, not behavior. Asexual people can choose to engage in sexual behaviors with partners or others, for various reasons. This often requires negotiation. That can sound clinical, but Chen points out that allosexuals (allosexual is the opposite of asexual) go through these same types of negotiations, though they are often based on inferred assumptions.
In allo relationships, “one thing is supposed to naturally lead to another, then to sex,” and negotiations often only come up when one partner goes against assumptions. In Chen’s mind this means “a lack of consent is built into the system, and saying no is a burden that comes with a price to pay.”
Because of this, some aces feel more supported in the kink community, where norms dictate everything is negotiated as part of the play, and sex of any sort is never assumed.
Chen relates the story of an ace woman named Selena who started exploring kink parties where she found a form of intimacy she’d been seeking, despite her confusion that “no one was doing anything that seemed to her to be sexual. People would say, ‘I’m tying someone up, that’s sex,’ … Was tying someone up really sex, or was it a rope and some trust? Selena didn’t care about sex, but she did love rope …” Which goes again to show how eye-opening an ace lens can be.
This segues to our second book, Kink: Stories. I downloaded this as an audiobook from Libro.fm. I’d discovered the Dipsea Stories app, "sexy audio stories" made by and for women, thanks to my friend, sex ed writer Steph Auteri. But I was in the mood for something a little more literary. Kink ticked both the Erotica and Literary Fiction boxes, and listed some names I’d heard of: Melissa Febos, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, and Alexander Chee. However, I forgot I’m someone who often leaves literary short stories scratching my head saying, “huh??” and I’ll admit some of these had me doing the same.
That I found them less erotic and more literary probably says more about me than it does about the works. But I still felt this collection was worth listening to. What they lacked in outright eroticism they made up for in glimpses into nuanced interpersonal dynamics behind the scenes in a variety of kink relationships.
I forgot I’m someone who often leaves literary short stories scratching my head saying, “huh??”
To step back, here’s a short definition of kink from WebMD:
“Kinky sex is a catch-all term for a range of consensual practices — called kinks — that include role play, power dynamics, or fetishes. Kinky sex requires direct communication between partners about desires and limits to make sure that it is a pleasurable experience for everyone involved.” — WebMD Editorial Contributors, reviewed by Dan Brennan, MD
This value-free definition is far from my initial impression of kink as “deviant sex” — anything outside that narrow window I mentioned earlier.
Three stories from Kink in particular left an impression: R.O. Kwon’s “Safe Word” explores a Korean-American couple from the perspective of the non-kinky husband trying to understand his wife’s recent admission of her preferences; “Impact Play” by Peter Mountford is the tale of a divorced man in a new kink relationship wrestling with a family secret that has stymied previous attempts at intimacy; and in “The Voyeurs” by Zane Joukhadar, an Arab-American couple, one of whom is a trans man, deals with a peeping Tom in the small New England town where they live. I gravitated more to the stories about couples in relationships, which might be a third of the collection.
I’m adding one more book to the pairing this time, because why not make it a threesome?
Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life, the first memoir by Melissa Febos, covers the time from her junior year of college to midway through grad school when she worked as a professional dominatrix in a midtown Manhattan dungeon. She was also, for at least half that time, a high-functioning heroin addict.
The book is not only a fascinating insider’s look at a hidden subculture, but also a keen interrogation of the ways we so often lie to ourselves and the freedom that comes from finally seeing the truth.
Febos shows banal moments behind the scenes, her camaraderie with the other dommes, the emotional manipulations — both internal and external — required to be good at her job, and the intellectual tap-dancing she does to justify both her choice of work and drug of choice, until she can’t anymore. Her clients are treated in the book with an empathy that comes from the recognition of a fellow addict. The result is thought-provoking while being neither salacious nor condescending, which is a testament to the writing.
Each of these books is a worthwhile read for shedding light on taboo subjects. Whip Smart opens with an epigraph4 that would serve each of them well.
I am Human, let nothing human be foreign to me. — Terence
To be clear, Kink and Whip Smart are explicit. My advice in reading would be to note any uncomfortable feelings that come up and ask what beliefs and assumptions might be causing those feelings. Because while talking about your orgasms to a bar full of people might not be for everyone, bringing an open and curious attitude toward those outside that narrow window is a great way to combat shame.
I hope this brave book trio gives you something to think about. If you explore any of these books, please let me know!
Your 🫶helps others discover Be Your Own Hero
Did you know Substack doesn’t use an algorithm for recommendations? Every time you hit the ♥️ it shows other folks that an actual person read and liked the piece. And an angel gets it wings and a writer gets a tiny shot of dopamine.
PIV = penis in vagina — I likely first heard this acronym from or Dr. Laurie Mintz, both of whom are my heroes. Both say we should ditch the lazy, sexist, heteronormative shortcut of referring to only PIV intercourse as “sex,” as it diminishes an immense and diverse range of activities which, oh by the way, are more likely to be pleasurable to people with vulvas and vaginas.
All books are linked through my Bookshop.org storefront, and earn an affiliate commission. In 2023, this commission will be donated to the Strong Hearted Native Women’s Coalition in San Diego County.
There’s a story Nagoski tells about how her publisher didn’t want the book to be titled Come As You Are, because it didn’t sound aspirational enough to sell. She pushed back, claiming, as she does in this Q&A that “… it’s the most aspirational idea of all. You are already enough.” The book was a NY Times Bestseller and six years later was rerelased in a Revised and Updated edition, so I guess readers agreed.
In the audiobook version of Whip Smart, Febos attributes this quote to 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne. However, I learned this is incorrect, so I have included the correct attribution here. Essayist and Febos peer Leslie Jamison has the original Latin tattooed on her arm and wrote a piece in the New York Times about how people around her react to it.
I loved this. Thanks so much Louise! You are a Shero!
Thanks for sharing this deeply personal story, Louise. You are not only an excellent writer but also a brave human being who sets a fine example for all of us.