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There may never be an ideal way for a parent to initiate “the sex talk” with their child, but from here on out, that conversation should certainly be improved by journalist Maria Yagoda’s new book Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop. Broken up into several essay-length musings on what it’s like to be sexually active—or not—in the wake of a pandemic, the book was written for readers of all ages, including those not often represented in mainstream sex writing, such as members of the LGBTQ+ community and people living with disabilities or chronic illness. Personally, I can’t help wondering how much more fulfilling my earliest sexual experiences would have been if I’d had a copy of Yagoda’s book to guide me; at the very least, with her wry yet earnest voice in my head, I might have felt less alone as I attempted to navigate the one-night stands and situationships of my 20s.
Vogue spoke to Yagoda about turning her college-era beat as a sex writer into a book, separating out bad sex from sexual misconduct (to the extent that that’s possible), and creating space for open and honest communication around sex. Read the full interview below.
Vogue: How did the idea for this book come about?
Maria Yagoda: This has been on my mind since college, in part because, you know, a lot of people are having a lot of bad sex in college. But it’s something I spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about because it struck me as so strange, looking at myself and all my smart, empowered, quote-unquote progressive friends; all these things mean we think the sex we’ll have will always be good or fulfilling, and there was just a disconnect there that wasn’t really being talked about. That was 10 years ago, when I think there was more of a sense of sex positivity being this really cool and empowering thing and meaning that we could have a lot of casual sex and not be ashamed. There’s definitely really great things about the destigmatization of casual sex, but I was thinking purely from a pleasure perspective; what were these encounters giving me, and why was I going back to them? Why were my friends?
I also specifically became interested in thinking about bad sex, which I sort of separate from another conversation that was going on around college campuses and nationally about consent, and rape, and sexual assault. I felt like: Okay, I’m somebody who is not ashamed about sex. I am the perfect sacrifice. I’m willing to humiliate myself and start a larger conversation about this—because aside from just general sexual shame, I’ve found in my decade-plus of writing about sex that people feel embarrassed about having not satisfying sex. It can be this big secret that people have, where it’s like, “Oh, I just don’t enjoy having sex with my partner of many years, but you know, whatever.” And I just thought that was interesting. I approach it without any judgment, because I also think this idea that the sex we have should be orgasmic and fulfilling and empowering and feminist is asking way too much of sex.
How do you think media influences us to accept sex that, while maybe not overtly damaging or harmful, isn’t necessarily the best?
There are these two extremes between the magazines we grow up reading, that are like, “Here are 63 tips on how to have the most mind-blowing orgasm,” and then the actual lived reality, which made people I spoke with feel a lot of shame about their sex lives not being as fulfilling as the ones in porn and movies and magazines. It’s really important to me to separate bad sex from conversations about assault and rape; obviously, you can’t take a knife and cleanly separate the two, because power dynamics are always present, and I think something that I explore in my book is that consent—while a useful legal term—is not enough for us to get to a place of sexual justice. It’s useful and it’s important, but I wanted to explore this other piece of the sexual wellness and well-being equation, which is pleasure. I wanted to get at why myself and the hundreds of people I’ve spoken to over the years really put that at the bottom of the list of things in their life.
Why do you think it’s so hard for so many people to talk about bad sex?
Well, in general, I think we’re so black-and-white about sex because of where we’re getting our information about it. Sex ed in most schools is garbage and useless, and if you’re lucky enough to even get it, it often focuses on the worst possible things that could happen to you. It’s terrifying, and obviously pleasure is not part of it; you’re not supposed to want to feel good, especially if you’re a woman or a trans or nonbinary person. From the very beginning of when we start learning about sex, it’s always this narrative that sex is scary, bad, and dangerous—which, to be fair, it can be—or we’re reading Cosmo or watching Gossip Girl or any of this sort of escapist romance stuff where sex is portrayed as really phenomenal. Kids are getting sex info from TV, from magazines, from TikTok, and I don’t recall seeing a lot of discourse around sex that is not necessarily horrible, maybe just slightly awkward, maybe sort of “meh.” When I talk to people, what I hear is that a lot of them have already ruled out the idea that their sex life might feel great for them, which, of course, is a choice anyone is welcome to make, but I do have questions about the kind of information we’re receiving.
Is there anyone you really hope this book makes it to?
Younger people, for sure. I think it’s pretty bonkers that kids still aren’t learning that sex is allowed to feel good. I talked to people in my book who didn’t feel comfortable starting to masturbate until their 30s, and I think it’s amazing that they were able to get there, but it’s a reminder that we need to be resource-sharing and trying to be radically open about when things aren’t working for us. My big hope is that people read this book and are like, Oh, fuck. This is actually so normal and not embarrassing, and doesn’t make me backwards, or mean that I’m not liberated and empowered. This is classic stuff because we all live in the same horrible society and are all metabolizing all of these norms and all of this sexual stigma, even if we intellectually feel that we’ve moved past it.
I talk to people who were raised within purity culture from their families and schools and churches, and who intellectually kind of unlearned it and and got to a good place, but that’s not the end of the story. You can unlearn all that and then have sex outside of marriage and still feel a kind of bodily uneasiness; this stuff is stored in the body in the way trauma is. In my case, I try to put forth this persona of someone who is cool or funny or empowered or whatever, and that’s not a lie, but there’s also this aspect of me where I catch myself performing in ways I don’t even think about. I want to be able to talk about this stuff without making anyone feel bad; this stuff can feel shameful to people because it’s so unspoken. Of course we don’t know how to communicate during sex, because we’re not seeing examples of good, intimate communication. Where would we be learning that? I don’t think porn is the problem, but I do think porn is sex ed for more and more people, and without an amount of porn literacy and media literacy, I think people learn to be very ashamed that their sex is not as orgasmic as what they’re seeing onscreen. I’m not excited for certain things I wrote about to be hyper-scrutinized, but I think it’s ultimately worth it if it’s chipping away at any of that secret, private shame that people feel is so personal but is actually so prevalent everywhere.
