Full disclosure at the top: I was lucky enough to be sent a proof of this book to read ahead of its publication later in May. Nobody has asked or told me what to write (believe me – nobody would have told me to write any of what’s coming), and these are my honest thoughts. I’ve also ordered my own (physical) copy of the book, with my own money.
If you want a taster, The Guardian published an edited extract last weekend, which you can read here (content warning: the extract contains references to sexual assault).
I don’t know if this really counts as a book review post. In a way it is, because I’m telling you what I think of the book. But it’s also a response, I suppose: a collection of thoughts I had when I was reading it, and have had since.
Truly, I’d challenge anyone to read this book and not have a LOT of thoughts after reading it. And I’ve read it in its entirety three times now (and some bits many, many more times than that.
So, if you’re not up for reading my feelings and opinions about sex and sexuality (especially if you know me and it would feel weird), this is your last chance to stop reading.
First, the premise: Sofie Hagen – comedian, podcaster, writer and activist – hasn’t had sex in over 3,000 days. In an attempt to explore why that is, she put together a survey to gain some outside perspective and was somewhat overwhelmed by the responses that came in within the first day.
The book is part factual exploration of some of the reasons people (who want to) aren’t having sex (including conversations with a wide range of experts, therapists, sex workers…the list is endless), and partly personal reflection – both from her own life and from some of the survey participants.
I didn’t do it on purpose, but that’s the form this post seems to have taken, too. Rather than my usual synopsis > verdict kind of review, I’ve talked a bit about some of the main aspects WIEHSA (as I’ll refer to it from now on) covers, and a few of my own thoughts, reflections and experiences along the way. It just seemed to fit better.
I’m offering my reflections in the spirit of the book: I hope that by me being a little bit messy, a little bit raw, it might make someone else feel a bit less alone. I also hope that it might point you towards the book that helped me feel less alone, and has gently scooped me up and carried me a little bit further down the path to actually knowing what’s happening inside my brain.
So really, this is your final chance to stop reading if you’d rather not know what I have to say on the subject.
This book is funny. Like, really funny. I’d only got as far as the dedication before I was snort-laughing, and there were plenty more laugh-out-loud moments as it went on. Importantly, what it doesn’t do is make light of the topic, of anybody’s experiences, or how much of an impact sex (or the lack of it) has on people’s lives.
The mix of information, expert insight and personal stories gives a comforting feeling of give-and-take: the anecdotes offered up in each segment meant that in having my own insights, realisations and emotional responses I didn’t feel exposed, because Sofie had gone there first.
It’s also frank. Not in the way a lot of writers are, where it actually means “I’m going to try and make myself feel big and clever by shocking you into feeling like a repressed prude when I, in fact, am the problem here”. It’s frank in an actually honest – refreshingly so – way. The way you’d talk with your friends, when there’s no worry about being judged or laughed at or made to feel wrong.
And that’s what the book feels like. A chat with a friend. But not in that jarring, “I’m trying to force a parasocial relationship which I will then constantly complain about on social media” way. A chat with a nice, safe, trustworthy and reassuring friend who genuinely wants you to learn as much as they do themselves. It’s very much like the book-version of Hagen’s podcasts, except she is both guest and interviewer. In the context of the book, and the subject matter, this is really important. In different, less careful, hands this book would have been a very different beast.
I remember filling out that survey. I don’t remember anything about the questions, or about my answers. What I do remember is thinking “I bet my responses are going to skew these results, because whoo boy are my experiences not going to match most people’s”.
Dear reader, I could not have been more wrong.
Early on in the book, Sofie writes “In [the respondents’] stories, I learned more about myself. I felt a sense of community, of support, of being part of something bigger than myself”. And that’s exactly the feeling I had when reading it.
Skimming through the chapter list before I started reading, I could tell that some of the chapters would likely have more impact on me than others. And honestly, there were some I’d expected not to really get anything out of.
Gender was one of those. As a cis woman, who is very certain of that fact and always has been, I didn’t bank on this chapter having anything much to say to me. I’ve always felt comfortable with my gender, and how I express it: mostly I’m a jeans-and-jumper girl, I don’t wear much, if any, makeup in my everyday life, and neither of those things make me feel any less a woman. It’s made me realise, though, that my default response any time I want (or am expected) to seem more sexually attractive, I really lean into stereotypical “femininity”: red lips, more mascara, heels, skirts, jewellery. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that, at all. I did find it interesting, though – none of the women who raised me really went in for much of that stuff, so it’s made me question where it’s come from. I haven’t come up with many answers yet, but I’m still chewing it over.
The gender chapter also looks at intimacy – and that’s the first time that the book made me stop in my tracks (by which I mean, made me cry). So many people use the words sex and intimacy interchangeably now (I’m looking at you, Married At First Sight) but there’s a world of difference. You can have sex without intimacy, and intimacy without sex. Which seems like it might be obvious, but it…somehow wasn’t?
Throughout the book there’s a thread that runs throughout, about honesty, truth, trust and how vital they are – how one of the keys is being able to be authentically and completely yourself, in order to have intimacy and/or good sex. I’m going to come back to this in a little while, but – having had a lightbulb moment of my own along similar lines quite recently – it hit me like a baseball bat to the face.
In contrast to gender, I was pretty sure before I started that the bodies chapter was going to give me some Big Feelings to deal with.
Sofie starts by talking about her relationship with her own body and how it’s evolved over a number of years. A lot of it resonated with me; Sofie’s book Happy Fat was instrumental in my own journey towards fat liberation, and accepting my own body. I’ve done so much work on my own relationship with my body, especially in the last few years, and, honestly, I thought the work was done. I’m relatively confident, most of the time – a far cry from twentysomething me, wearing cardigans in thirty-degree heat lest someone should see my arms.
Again, dear reader, I could not have been more wrong.
Most, if not all, fat folk have experienced the cruel flirt-pranks that Sofie mentions at least once. I certainly have. And, honestly, thinking back on it stings almost as much as it did at the time – and I am definitely still an “emotional flincher”. Add some ADHD rejection-sensitivity into the mix as well, and honestly it’s a wonder I go outside at all.
And then I read on a bit further, and I finally hit the line that hasn’t left me ever since:
“Learning to love my body is a tricky journey but it is easy, compared to learning to trust that other people can love it”
Oh.
Oh fuck.
I couldn’t stop rereading it. I literally sat on a bench on the south bank, sobbing and reading the same few paragraphs over and over again, and I couldn’t stop.(In hindsight, that might not have been the best idea while I was waiting to meet a friend, but I’d lost control of my common sense by this point)
It was such a perfect description of how I felt – how I feel – without me ever having thought about it, or how I might articulate it. Which is why it felt like a gut punch. I’ve done so much work on my own relationship with my body, to the point where I can say that I am happy with it. I love it, most of the time. But it had never occurred to me that there’s a difference between loving my own body and believing anyone else could love it. Could love me because of, not despite, well…me.
I am fat. The world spends a whole lot of time, energy, money on telling me I’m wrong, ugly, unlovable, disgusting. I thought I’d done a pretty good job of detaching those messages from my brain. But they run deep. Really fucking deep. I’ve had other situations where I’ve realised how deep, and how vulnerable and awful I can still feel (and, once again, more on that in another post soon).
I’d never thought about it, not really. Not in this context. I guess if I’d thought about it at all, I assumed it just wouldn’t ever apply to me. That I’d always be someone that, if anyone loved me at all, found me desirable at all, would do so despite the way I look. Because up until very recently, that had been my experience, without exception.
Before this year, I’d never experienced the positive things that Sofie and various of the experts talk about throughout the book: not just in terms of my body, but feeling seen, understood, cared about? Those micro-moments of trust, safety, not feeling pressured.That isn’t to say that I’ve had nothing but bad experiences – thankfully I haven’t had any that have been truly bad, and I’ve never felt unsafe – rather that it’s all been…neutral. And it’s hard to feel cared about, or understood, or desired, when the overwhelming feeling is simply…meh.
Even now, there has only been one person who has made me feel all of those positive things. I know I’m lucky that I’ve experienced that feeling at all; I know not everyone has. I still find it hard to believe that I deserve it. And harder still to believe that I’ll ever experience it again.
Statistically speaking, it’s unlikely that I’ve already met (and already lost) the one and only person out of billions on this planet who could and would make me feel sexy, desirable, desired, understood, valued. Who very obviously and clearly paid attention to all of those little micro nonverbal signals – even ones I didn’t realise I was giving out. Who I could fully let my guard down around, be myself around, who I didn’t feel self-conscious with.
But when I measure the statistics against my experience of life so far, experience shouts far louder, and has a far more convincing argument. It was late February when I started reading WIEHSA, and it’s now early May. I’ve spent time pretty much every day since then trying to unpick and unravel everything that’s going on here, and I’m nowhere near done. In the same way it’s taken years to shape my thoughts and beliefs around my body, I think it’s going to take quite some time to rethink my approach.
There’s been a lot for me to unpack, and I know there’s more to come, but I feel so much less alone than I would have without WIEHSA. Honestly, without this book I wouldn’t have even had the courage to begin, and I’d have just carried on feeling broken and wrong and weird and….other. it’s given me a sense of ownership of my own experiences and feelings and identity that I didn’t have before. Which almost feels silly to say, but there we go.
I feel confident saying that, whoever you are and whatever your relationship with sex, and your own sexuality, it will make you think A LOT. I think if I’d known that before I started reading, I might have had second thoughts. But I’m so, so, very unbelievably glad that I did read it. It’s made me cry more times than I expected, and almost more times than I can count. So far, as well as in my bedroom, on the train, at my desk and on my sofa, I’ve cried at this book in a really rather busy Wagamama; a riverside bench on the South Bank in rush hour; an ice cream shop and (as of this morning), a wall outside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
But all of that: all of the tears and realisations, and all the thinking back, has happened in a framework of total safety. Sofie has done something remarkable with this book – it’s informative without being preachy or patronising, deeply personal without being unrelatable (the dating app panic is real), and just so utterly gorgeous that I wish I could buy copies for literally every person I know, so they could benefit from it too.
I am not a millionaire, so I can’t do that; what I can do is really encourage you to read it in whatever way you can: buy the book/ebook, request it from your library, listen to the audiobook. Just, please, read it. Even if you don’t think you need to. Maybe even especially if you don’t think you need to?
Will I Ever Have Sex Again? Comes out on 23 May 2024. You can (pre-) order it here
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Stephanie Franklin 