In the very first line of Lillian Fishman’s debut novel, Acts of Service, the book’s narrator lets us into a secret; “I had hundreds of nudes stored in my phone, but I’d never sent them to anyone.” Eve is a 20-something barista who lives in Brooklyn, has a long-term girlfriend, Romi – “the noblest person I had ever met” – and spends a lot of time considering what it means to be a good person. She also, we quickly learn, has unmet desires. “My body was crying out that I was not fulfilling my purpose,” she says. “I was meant to have sex – probably with some wild number of people.”
One night, feeling “exceptionally beautiful and isolated”, Eve posts her nude photos online, and as a result meets a woman, Olivia – who introduces Eve to her wealthy, charismatic and often misogynistic boyfriend – and boss – Nathan. So begins a sexual entanglement and power play between the three of them, explored in urgent, vivid detail over the next 200 pages.
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If you believe the headlines, there’s not all that much sex happening right now. We are living, apparently, through a “sex recession”, with young people especially having less. The blame has been pinned on everything from the housing crisis and the pandemic to a backlash to the hook-up culture of the past decade. But there is one place where sex is resolutely on the agenda – in literature. Particularly that written by women. In a new slew of fiction and non-fiction books by female writers exploring the messy intricacies of desire, sex isn’t just a subtext or a brief encounter; but front and centre.
Lillian Fishman’s debut novel, Acts of Service, is frank in exploring female desire (Credit: Lillian Fishman)
Twenty-eight-year-old Fishman’s novel is one of the most talked-about debuts of the year, hailed a “sex masterpiece” by the Guardian. It’s a book that takes sex seriously, asking questions about its purpose and what it means to honour your desires – even when those desires at are odds with how you’ve been taught to live your life.
“Rather than a book about sexual desire, it’s much more a book about how we how we reconcile ourselves to mainstream expectations,” Fishman tells BBC Culture. “The problem that is most central in the book is that the attraction to and the repulsion from heterosexuality stem from the same place. I wanted to find an approach to the problem in a novel that would really dramatise it and give it a visceral feeling.”
The book has a broader resonance too; what it means to find yourself turned on by something you’re meant to be disgusted by
Fishman set out to write a queer story, exploring how it feels to disappoint yourself and your community by pursuing heterosexual desires in a time where sexual identity and expression is politically charged. “I feel like in the generation before mine, but in mine as well, there is a real belief in human sexuality and the importance of discovering it and sort of like staking your life on it. And in a world in which that’s the case, the community around that identity is so crucial.” But the book has a broader resonance too; what it means to find yourself turned on by something you’re meant to be disgusted by. “Sex is the corner I’ve used [to explore this], but the same good book could be written about wanting to be rich,” says Fishman.
In the affair, Eve gives into pleasure and finds relief in not having to be a “loveable girl”. But – as someone concerned with what her choices says about her – she struggles to reconcile her desires in the bedroom with the feminist and anti-capitalist values she tries to live by. “I had spent a lot of time talking myself out of the things that I liked so that I could be a different, better kind of person,” says Eve. In the book, Eve follows her desires instead of her moral compass and has to reckon with that – especially when Nathan is accused of workplace harassment. For Eve, sex is “a truth-teller just waiting to find me out”.
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Though very different books, the racy sex scenes in Acts of Service has seen it often mentioned in the same sentence as Fifty Shades of Grey. Fishman isn’t too annoyed. “I wanted the book to be philosophical, but I also wanted it to enrapture people, and excite them to read. So it’s a success for me in that way to have people make those comparisons.”
All or nothing
If Fishman’s book is about a woman believing her body’s purpose is sex, another recent book is about choosing the opposite: celibacy. Emma Forrest’s memoir, Busy Being Free, covers five years following the end of her marriage in which she swapped sex for solitude – a period concurrent with the presidential term of Donald Trump. “My divorce was being filed around the time that Trump was elected to the presidency, and I’d just turned 40,” she tells BBC Culture. “The worst man in the world was now the most powerful man in the world, and the most powerful man in the world also consistently expressed a visceral horror at middle-aged women. So the conscious decision was ‘I’m going to abstain completely for the time of his presidency’.”
(Credit: Agnes Wonke Toth)
Explaining her decision in the book, she writes: “At the age a woman is considered to be of decreasing sexual currency, so they must twist themselves in knots emotionally and physically to continue getting chosen for the team – I’m not playing this game.”
Forrest – who has published four novels and a previous memoir, Your Voice in My Head, and directed a film, Untogether – had spent a lifetime guided by romantic attachments. “I’d been sexually active since I was 16. And I’d been completely devoted, for better or for worse, to romance since that age. I knew this would be something new.”
The longer I went without it, the more it felt like yep, never need to do that again – Emma Forrest
Though it shouldn’t, it feels radical to read about solitude as not only a legitimate choice, but a great one, when the default narrative for a single woman is often that something is lacking. Forrest says that, not long after her separation, well-meaning friends tried to set her up, even though she wasn’t interested. In the book, another friend is concerned Forrest is losing part of herself by choosing to be alone. Her mother also worries about her decision.
But Forrest makes solitude sound as seductive as any love affair, writing: “Celibacy was not only bearable, it was epic – a place inside myself where a woman can run late at night with headphones in her ears and not have to feel afraid.” Not having sex became “addictive”, she says. “The longer I went without it, the more it felt like yep, never need to do that again. In many ways, it was the best time of my life.”
For a book about celibacy, it fizzes with sexual energy. “That cliche that a woman coming into their 40s is coming into their sexual prime, I think it’s true. It certainly was for me. So having that wave of feeling and nowhere to put it, I got to keep it and it just became other things. It became easier to work and easier to make decisions and easier to clarify what I was into, in men, in love and sex. What I was into about myself, what my values were.”
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Forrest’s abstinence – coupled with a Covid lockdown – also gave her space to reflect on past relationships and sexual experiences, from the ones she chased to those she never wanted. “To be a woman is a balance between how much we want to have sex with a particular person and how our greatest fear is having sex against our will with a stranger,” she writes.
She considers how men were “the smartphone in which I’d lose myself”, how many of her decisions – clothes, jobs, homes – were dictated by them, and how often she’d mistaken being desired for feeling desire. “The default setting as a woman for the longest time, and maybe even forever, is to think you’re meant to respond to someone because they want you, almost like it’s politeness,” she says. But celibacy offers “a room correctly equipped to record your own desires, without picking up all the passing vibrations that belong to other people”.
When she finally does start dating and having sex again, towards the end of the book, things are different. Forrest feels able to voice her desire out loud, and has a newfound “power to conjure sexual encounters exactly the way they were in my fantasies”.
Between the sheets
Everywhere you look in literature right now, women are exploring their desires. In Julia May Jonas’ buzzy debut Vladimir, a college professor becomes sexually obsessed with a young author after her husband is involved in a sex scandal. Anna Fitzpatrick’s Good Girl, described as “Secretary meets Fleabag”, is about a woman struggling to reconcile her feminist ideals with her tendency towards masochism. In Jessica Andrews’ Milk Teeth, a young woman tries to figure out what she really wants – in love, sex and life. Cat Brushing, a collection of short stories by the 80-year-old debut author Jane Campbell, gives voice to the sensual lives of 13 older women. And in her collection of autobiographical essays, The Crane Wife, CJ Hauser calls off her engagement and realises she has spent years living a life she was supposed to, rather than one she truly desires – (“Even now I hear the words as shameful: Thirsty. Needy. The worst things a woman can be.”)
It’s a subject that fascinates Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, a collection of short stories about the hidden desires and appetites of southern black women. “I didn’t consciously set out to write about sex, but rather I found myself writing about dissatisfied women,” she tells BBC Culture. She says it’s a feeling she could relate to, despite having done “everything right and in the right order; I’d gotten married, to a man, before having children. And I was still deeply unhappy, deeply dissatisfied. I was very interested in the question of satisfaction and desire, once you strip away all the shoulds. What’s left? What’s possible?”
Deesha Philyaw has written about the intersection of sexuality and Christianity in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (Credit: Vanessa German)
Growing up in Florida, she was fascinated by the black women around her. “I was so curious about them as sexual beings as I tried to understand and reconcile the church’s teachings, which were so anti-pleasure and so heavy with shame, fear, and guilt.” As an adult, she was still thinking about those women. Imagining their secret desires and interior lives inspired the stories in her book – which won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction and is being adapted into an HBO mini-series.
While these books all detail singular experiences, there is a common thread – women trying to figure out what they actually want, disentangling their true desire from what’s expected of them
For Philyaw, it was important to position sex in the realm of pleasure. “I wanted to challenge the idea that sex and sexuality is always fraught, that we should operate as sexual beings from a place of fear, or shame, or guilt,” she says. “What if instead the first things we’d been taught about our bodies was that they are good, that they belong to us, and that we should prioritise our own pleasure? What if we’d been taught to prioritise our own satisfaction over serving and pleasing others?” Her characters are not raised that way, but they are striving to break free and follow their desires. “The results are messy and complicated,” says Philyaw.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies tells of experiences that are very different to those in Fishman’s Acts of Service, Forrest’s Busy Being Free or other recent books exploring female sexuality. And yet while these books all detail singular experiences, there is a common thread – women trying to figure out what they actually want, disentangling their true desire from what’s expected of them.
Forbidden desire
This comes at a time when the subject feels increasingly fraught. Over the past few years, Trump, #MeToo, the rise of revenge porn and the collapse of Roe v Wade have all contributed to a sense of anxiety around sex. Several recent non-fiction books – including Bad Sex by Nona Willis Aronowitz, Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation and Want Me by Tracy Clark-Flory – look at what sexual liberation really means for women living in a misogynistic, patriarchal society. Desire – expressing it, following it – feels more complicated than ever.
“What makes it even harder is that you let the side down no matter what you do,” says Fishman. “On the one hand, if you’re remotely a feminist, you want to believe in and express and manifest a real type of sexual freedom. And then at the same time, there is also this deep belief in love and the family and that these are the fulfillments of life that casual sex won’t ever satisfy. It’s absolutely a trap in any sense. And I think we’re all cognisant of that.”
But now, as always, the page remains a place for women to explore the complications of desire freely – as it was for Anaïs Nin, Erica Jong, Anne Rice, Catherine Millet, Mary Gaitskill and more. For Fishman, sex in literature is a form of communication – “an extension of the conversations between the characters, that expresses something that they can’t express verbally or are too afraid to”. She says Sally Rooney is the “master” of this. “It’s such a satisfying thing that a novel can do, and I think she does it wonderfully.” But she also thinks that contemporary authors are often more coy about sex than 20th-Century writers. “There are some writers from the mid-Century that were really formative for me in terms of how much explicit sex writing you can get away with, like Mary McCarthy. There’s like an amazing few passages in The Group about sex.”
Eve Babitz – who died late last year – is another inspiration, even lending her name to Fishman’s narrator in Acts of Service. Emma Forrest is also a big fan of the cult LA writer, best known for her writing about life in ’60s and ’70s Los Angeles. “What I love about Eve Babitz on sex is that she sees it as an art form; that great sex is art. It has an almost religious fervour for her.”
For Philyaw, the best sex writing “features women who are unapologetic about embracing their desires and seeking pleasure, even at other people’s expense. Toni Morrison’s Sula will always be the gold standard for me in that regard.”
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On why sex continues to enrapture writers, she refers to the writer Garth Greenwell – hailed as one of the best contemporary writers on sex, and who edited a collection of erotic stories, Kink, last year. Greenwell wrote in The Guardian: “sex is a kind of crucible of humanness, and so the question isn’t so much why one would write about sex, as why one would write about anything else.”
If sex is a way of exploring the big questions about humanity and interrogating our culture, it can also be pretty joyful for writers, too. “The more free and subversive and unapologetic [my characters] were, the more fun I had writing them,” says Philyaw. So, can we expect literature to keep its libido? She certainly hopes so. “There is so much more to explore.”