Theorising only gets you so far in bed Two books — Is It Ever Sex?

Theorising only gets you so far in bed

Two books — Is It Ever Sex?

 and The Joy of Consent — explore love, lust and the body politic

“Everything in the world is about sex, except sex,” Oscar Wilde never said. In Is it Ever Just Sex?, the Lacanian analyst Darian Leader explores the origins of desire and the meaning we ascribe to sexual encounters. It is never “just sex”, he

 argues, but an expression of love and fantasy; guilt and anxiety; violence and revenge. Sex is an analgesic: porn usage peaks on Sunday night, to allay the anxiety of the impending workweek. People are not ruled by an animalistic sex drive “desperate for release yet restrained by social forces” Leader says; rather, it is social forces that shape desire. We pick up sexual scripts from our families and the culture at large, which is not immune to trends. Male nipples were championed as an erogenous zone in the 1970s, he notes as example, before disappearing from popular culture.

 melancholy and art, Leader prides himself on a “fidelity to questions”: his titles include What Is Madness? (2011) and Why Can’t We Sleep? (2019). But while the premise of Is it Ever Just Sex? is intriguing, the book sheds little light on contemporary concerns — passing references to Stormzy and Naked Attraction notwithstanding. Given the sea changes in the sexual landscape in the past two decades, including marriage equality, shifting ideas on gender, the impact of technology and the #MeToo movement, it is a shame that Leader leans so heavily on 20th-century sexology, alongside snippets from his analysands that are more anecdotal than representative.

The book’s thesis is not clear enough to carry the reader and there are no table of contents, introduction or chapters to help with signposting. Some of Leader’s assertions are questionable: “Perhaps all of us equate” sex and reproduction, he writes. What about non-hetero, non-penetrative or post-menopausal sex? And are seals on food products really “a relic of the cult of hymenal intactness”, rather than an indication that the contents haven’t been tampered with? “Analysts tend to be quite reserved people,” Leader once said. “You don’t really see them dancing very often at parties”. The book, as such, is rather dry despite the tantalising title. Indeed, the most exciting thing about Is it Ever Just Sex? may well be the cover, with “SEX” replicating across it — “ideal”, one Instagram user enthused, “for breaking the ice on planes, trains and Tube”. Consent has become a buzzword in our cultural conversation about sex. In The Joy of Consent, Manon Garcia, a French philosopher who has worked in the US, offers a transatlantic perspective. The French think that “Americans’ obsession with consent is ruining sex”, while Americans find the French “obsessed with sex at the expense of gender equality”, she writes. “Like most clichés, these are both exaggerated and truthful.”

Garcia’s first book, We Are Not Born Submissive (2021), argued that it’s not nature but patriarchal structures that render women submissive. The Joy of Consent extends her exploration of power imbalances to sex. Sexual violence is not “a problem of communication between individuals” but founded in societal norms that justify “men’s use of women for their pleasure”, she writes.

A definition of consent as an agreement to have sex is insufficient, Garcia maintains: after all, people agree to sex for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with pleasure. Consent is a legal concept relating to contracts; in many countries, including the UK and US, the legal definition of rape is sex without consent. But it is no guarantor of good sex, and “sex can be consensual and unlawful” or “nonconsensual yet lawful”. The Joy of Consent hopes to attract a general audience, but its lengthy discussion of legal history and utilitarian versus Kantian philosophical frameworks are more academic than practical. The book breaks little new ground, particularly as it follows recent titles probing the concept of consent by Katherine Angel, Amia Srinivasan and Kate Manne. The Latin etymology of “consent” — com + sentire — means to feel together. “The deep, genuine promise of consent lies in the possibility of an eroticism that builds equality through the sexual relationship instead of presuming equal and independent partners,” Garcia writes. Sounds great, but outside of imagining a utopia in which the party with more power takes responsibility for their partner’s pleasure, The Joy of Consent offers only a sketchy blueprint for this sexual revolution. As long as one person sees the other as an object for their own needs, they are unlikely to be open to the kinds of conversations Garcia suggests are the path to erotic emancipation. Ultimately, both Leader and Garcia articulate interesting questions but fall short on how we might cultivate more meaningful or egalitarian sex. Theorising, I’m afraid, only gets you so far in bed.