Gillian Anderson as the wonderfully candid sex therapist Jean Milburn in the mega hit show Sex Education. Photo / Netflix
They are the new stars in a raft of novels, podcasts and TV shows — but do they reveal the secrets of sexuality or just give us a cheap thrill?
Jen Beagin had a lot of fun researching her latest novel — because it mainly involved asking friends and strangers about their sex lives. “There are many sexually dysfunctional people out there, I’ve been in relationships with them, and I interviewed people. I know what kind of problems there are,” the bestselling American author says.
These “problems” (of which there are many) are at the heart of Big Swiss, her third novel, which features 2023′s must-have: a sex therapist. Beagin’s is appropriately named “Om”. Among Om’s clients is a gynaecologist nicknamed Big Swiss, who has never had an orgasm and who says sex with her husband of six years is like “driving home from work and not remembering the ride”.
Readers get access to Om’s clients’ sex secrets via transcriptions of the therapy sessions. It’s a brilliant set-up: what’s more appealing than listening in to people’s darkest, most intimate issues?
Big Swiss is shaping up to be one of the funniest, hottest novels of the year. On both sides of the Atlantic reviews have been effusive. Even before publication the manuscript leaked and sparked a 14-way bidding war for the screen rights. Beagin went with Jodie Comer, who is adapting the series for HBO and will play Big Swiss.
By all accounts the material is unusually explicit: choking, penchants for “porny slaps” and masturbating to pictures of flowers all feature. And that’s just for starters. “I wanted the book to be horny and funny,” says Beagin, 52, over Zoom from the home she shares with her husband in Hudson, New York. “I’ve slept with lots of women and I didn’t always know what I was doing. It’s not totally intuitive, so I like writing kind of clumsy, awkward but also graphic sex.”
Beagin is certain that, a few years ago, no one would have published Big Swiss. What has changed? “I think people were a lot less open about sex. We’re all talking about it more openly and looking for ways to feel better about it and ourselves,” she says — which is where therapy comes in.
Om is by no means the only sex and relationship coach hitting the page and screen. Earlier this year the London psychoanalyst Maxine Mei-Fung Chung brought us tales of female desire from her couch with What Women Want: Conversations on Desire, Power, Love and Growth. There will be more therapy sessions in Adrienne Brodeur’s debut novel, Little Monsters, set in Cape Cod, published in July.
On screen there’s also no avoiding sex therapy. In BBC2′s Couples Therapy, Dr Orna Guralnik nods and grunts empathetically as New York couples unveil their problems. “I am the easiest person to deal with. All I want is zero responsibility and all the sex I want, without any work,” one of her clients says, before going into why he didn’t like the dominatrix his wife got him for his birthday. Less classy, just as intimate is Channel 4′s Open House: The Great Sex Experiment, which shows a stream of couples quite literally probing the question of whether monogamy is the right fit for them. The second series started earlier this month.
The inspiration for all this is Esther Perel, 64, the Belgian-American therapist whose podcast Where Should We Begin? features sessions with couples in crisis. Each episode has the feel of an Elena Ferrante novel: psychologically complex, with gripping twists and turns and a lot of heartache.
So from novels to non-fiction, podcasts to TV drama, sex therapy is everywhere. All of which makes you wonder: have we become more sex-obsessed, or are we just more into talking about it? And is there more to this trend than base voyeurism wrapped in the language of therapy?
The question of female desire has assumed huge significance in publishing, explains Alexis Kirschbaum, the head of Bloomsbury Trade. This hasn’t always been the case. “I’ve worked at publishers where the mantra was ‘sex doesn’t sell’,” she says.
The knockout success of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women (2019), which addresses in detail the question of female sexuality today, proved otherwise. As did The Right to Sex (2021), a philosophical treatise on the matter from Amia Srinivasan, a professor of social and political theory at Oxford. “These books gave women the sense that they should be having these conversations, and they could have them. They opened up a new market,” Kirschbaum says.
For eight years Taddeo embedded herself in the lives of three women who then confided their unmet desires and intimate sex secrets to her. Three Women became one of the most talked-about books of the decade. Later this year the TV adaptation will arrive, starring Big Little Lies’ Shailene Woodley.
One reason Three Women felt groundbreaking was because, up until this point, most literature about female desire was written by men. “I was reading Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese and all these other books about desire, and I realised that my experience, even of my own sexuality, is largely authored by the opposite gender,” says Taddeo, 43.
Even in fiction, Saul Bellow, John Updike and Philip Roth were the mouthpieces for what women want until relatively recently. “What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood,” Bellow’s character Herzog said. This male take deflected nuance from female desire, Taddeo says. What did she discover from her quasi-scientific research? “Women have a fear of saying what our actual desires are, often we will say other ones that are more in line with the times, with whatever part of the world we’re living in.” Which partly explains why the publishing phenomenon of EL James and Fifty Shades has fallen away: its extreme sexual power imbalances don’t speak to our times.
For all that we are more open and frank, honesty about sex can be hard to come by. We may live in a sharing age, but everything on social media is curated for public consumption. Three Women cut through that. Ironically Bloomsbury was flooded by letters and emails from readers saying that the book could not have been written by a woman. “They said there is no way a woman could have had that insight,” recalls Kirschbaum, who published Three Women in the UK.
It was the grassroots feminist movement of the 1970s that brought the question of female desire to public consciousness when Nancy Friday published her revolutionary hit My Secret Garden, detailing women’s anonymous sexual fantasies. Earlier this year the actress Gillian Anderson announced that she was inspired by Friday to compile letters from women around the world for a book that aims to be an expansive portrait of female sexuality today. “Are women still the silent sex? I suppose that is one of the things we’re going to find out,” Anderson writes. Partly she was inspired by her role as the candid sex therapist Jean Milburn in Sex Education, a Netflix drama that made it normal to put all kinds of problems on the table and discuss them, no matter how weird.
For many, these series and books in which people talk about love and sex with honesty and humility are a kind of public service. You take comfort in their stories, Taddeo says, they help you to understand your own desire. “We want that so badly and yet we deny it to ourselves and to one another because we feel scared.”
It’s easy to dismiss Open House as a mere shagfest. But it also offers people “a safe space” to explore sexual preferences with therapists, says Vivienne Molokwu, who commissioned the show for Britain’s Channel 4. “People want to be able to talk about their feelings. As a nation we’re more open to being aware that talking these things through can help us come to a better place.”
The preponderance of sex therapy on screen also mirrors real life. The stereotype that British people aren’t into therapy, and Americans are, has broken down, the sex therapist Cate Campbell says. Demand for therapists is growing. The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy noted a 58 per cent leap in inquiries to registered therapists from 2018, through the pandemic, to 2021. Sex therapy has been normalised through novels and television, so that now people seek it out, she says.
In our age of porn culture, sex therapy also seems rooted in the authenticity of real sex. However, there’s also no denying that the appeal of novels, shows and podcasts in which the sex therapist is hero is also voyeuristic. Frankly, it’s fascinating to hear people exposing their most lurid secrets — which is exactly what Beagin hit on with Big Swiss. At one point her transcriptionist Greta begins to listen to the therapy sessions without typing them up, “as if it were a podcast or radio interview”.
For Beagin, a devoted eavesdropper herself, it’s “a totally natural impulse. I think people have been eavesdropping since the beginning of time. We just haven’t known what to do with it.”
Clearly we do now.
Written by: Francesca Angelini
© The Times of London
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