Writing About Sex Without Writing About Sex
Desire, aging, and a woman who keeps writing anyway
How can you write about sex without writing about sex? Without being labeled things? How is a woman writing about carnal pleasure (lol) in 2026 still such a risqué thing?
I hesitate to even answer.
Maybe if I lived in France it would be different. I’d follow in the footsteps of Anaïs Nin, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Catherine Millet, Pauline Réage. I would be a cause célèbre. A proper feminist. A libertine.
But here in the US, writing about sex still feels like an epic faux pas. Sex belongs to porn and OnlyFans—not to everyday women who shop at Von’s and Target.
Which is funny, because women have never been more sexualized: huge lips, tits, ass, hairless crotch. The whole package.
So yes, I hesitate to share. I would horrify friends, foes, and family—especially family.
My mum goes through my little library of new literary acquisitions after my annual summer visit to Germany, and she is usually disgusted by my taste. Two books come to mind that particularly traumatized her.
“I couldn’t finish this filth,” she said. Is it true? Or did she? Either way.
The two standouts were Ich bin so wild nach deinem Erdbeermund and Feuchtgebiete.
Kinski’s book is a persona artifact—sexual confession, rage, self-mythology. An erotic ramble.
Feuchtgebiete became a cultural phenomenon in Germany. It tells the story of an 18-year-old girl in hospital recovering from an anal injury after a razor incident, and a rather spectacular hemorrhoid situation—if I remember correctly—and nevertheless… does the thing.
I, on the other hand, am rather vanilla in comparison. I like tension and suspense, banter, intellectual whimsy. A sapiosexual, they call it. I get turned on by someone’s brain—provided it’s attached to a pretty face.
And that’s the other thing. Men get to be shallow, but women are supposed to want security, wealth, power. Not this demoiselle. Give me David Bowie, Syd Barrett, David Gilmour, Robert Plant. Hell, give me a man with a voice and a guitar.
Just kidding. Not anymore.
I’ve aged out of that phase, mentally and physically. I’ve reached the invisible age. I wouldn’t even turn Larry David’s head at this point.
But back to sex.
Writing about sex, that is.
It’s on my mind because I’m meeting W., a former lover, for a drink in a few hours. We used to want each other so intensely it almost collapsed everything around it.
He had a cuckold fetish, probably still does, and was a recovered sex addict. We used to nestle into boutique hotel beds and scan Craigslist casual encounters, waiting to see if anyone would bite.
I always chickened out at the last minute—except once, with a married French model. He was absurdly beautiful and entirely up to the task. We met for brunch at the Standard downtown, and after what was actually a rather tender and satisfying interlude, W. came into the suite, held my face, covered me in kisses, and cried for a good twenty minutes.
I knew what it meant to him.
He used to say I combined all women in one: mother, whore, virgin, Lolita, temptress, muse.
The problem is that over ten years later, I can no longer live up to that creature he built on a pedestal.
I am overweight, jaded, and blasé. I don’t even feel like shaving my legs or putting on a sexy dress. I want to show up in jeans and a biker jacket. I think I will.
And I think that’s okay.
We love to kill our idols. Maybe that’s another gift I can give him.
So yes.
Or maybe just writing about what it leaves behind.
And not apologizing for it.
There's something f**ked up about a world that allows men to exploit and sexualise women, and a helluva lot more, but puts down as immoral or worse, should any women dare to write about sex.
Even in places like this, people need to use pseudonyms because of the risk of their names being associated with something that should just be allowed.
I loved the examples you gave and how time can change a perspective to "this is what you get, and what I feel comfortable in."
Keep writing 2CF, write what makes you feel good, and you enjoy.
Great writing, as always!
Dear Sylvie,
This is right in my wheelhouse ... naming the double standard without flinching. The way Abrahamic traditions shaped the culture around women’s desire… not faith itself, but the pattern that treated women as property, temptresses, sources of sin, beings to be controlled. That shadow still lingers in how society reacts to women writing about sex.
You’re naming a cultural truth.
You write like a woman reclaiming her own fire.
I read women as divine ... not in a romantic way, but in a sacred‑human way. And when you speak of aging, invisibility, and truth, it doesn’t read as loss. It reads as liberation.
This story hits me because it lines up with what I’ve seen my whole life... patriarchal systems that fear women’s autonomy. Women’s writing is a form of spiritual authority. The divine feminine is older than any religion, and it rises every time a woman tells the truth about her own body, her own desire, her own history.
And that line ... showing up in jeans and a biker jacket ... that’s my natural skin. Not a costume, not a rebellion, just who I am. What you’re doing in that moment is the same thing I’ve done my whole damn life... showing up as yourself, not as the character men want you to be.
Here’s the deeper layer I felt in my ribs:
You’re reclaiming your body from the male gaze ... not as an object, but as a human being with her own sovereignty.
There’s an old Celtic teaching that says:
“A woman’s power returns the moment she stops performing and stands in her own name.”
That’s what you’re doing here.
Just yourself.
And that’s the kind of woman I respect ... the kind who doesn’t bow to the old rules.
Steve