“There’s a big secret about sex,” goes one of the best jokes of critical theory. In the midst of the moral panics of the late 1980s, Leo Bersani delivered the punchline with impeccable deadpan: “Most people don’t like it.” There are, indeed, so many different ways of not liking sex: not having it, or more commonly, having it. There are sex strikes, sex changes, sex “positivity.” There is writing about it. There are the less explicit strategies: all-meat diets, attachment theory, mindfulness. There is God and the gym; love.

Bersani’s point wasn’t necessarily that “most people” are repressed, but more that sex, whether experienced as soothingly disruptive or threateningly boring, is just not that likable. Sex shatters us, including when we don’t “have” it. Even if the cracks feel familiar rather than traumatic, we constantly need to fine-tune our proximity to what feels unbearable yet inescapable amidst the debris. You don’t have to buy into the reactionary framing of the “male loneliness epidemic” or “Gen Z doesn’t have enough sex” conspiracy theories to sense what’s at play beneath all this fear.

No Job

In a world wildly structured through gendered distinction, sex is not simply a question of pleasure—it may impact how real one feels. When someone teases, fantasizes or rejects me in this exact undeniable way, I might experience myself as ridiculously possible. Or not. Darryl, the first-person narrator of Jackie Ess’s eponymous debut novel, does not feel real at all, even to himself. He pings this sense of lostness through sex, which feels entirely alien to him: “If you’d never heard of sex it would sound pretty fucked up, right? You’d probably wonder if it was safe. Maybe you’d think it was gross. But somehow we mostly come around to it.”

Darryl, first published in 2021 and recently reissued for the European market in an icy silver revised edition, explores some of the ways people keep sex at a distance—and how, nevertheless, sex comes too close. Darryl, the hysterically unreliable narrator, is a cuck. In the opening sentence, he explains what that means to him: “You live vicariously through celebrities, I live vicariously through the guys who fuck my wife.” In cuckolding, one partner (typically a straight husband) derives arousal from his partner having sex with someone else (typically an even straighter, more “alpha” guy). For Darryl, sex is something that other people have. As long as he can watch them having it from within the safety gap of humiliation, he is able to disappear into a painfully comforting sense of being just some guy.