Personal essay

How much do you want to know about the literal ins and outs (and ups and downs, and round and rounds) of other people’s sex lives? My personal answer tends strongly towards ‘no, thank you’; decades ago, when a bunch of my girlfriends gathered in our student halls to do the questionnaire in Shere Hite’s Women and Love, I found an urgent reason to go to the library instead. But that’s me; I’ve always been an old fart. What if, for some people, sexual self-revelation is a politically radical act? What if it’s a way of saying the unsayable, of challenging our ideas about what women are and how they should behave?

A couple of years ago I saw that a young ex-colleague had published a book, which is always exciting. From the article I saw, I learned that her book was a memoir about the year she spent having sex with a large-ish number of men.* It was framed as a project of anthropological discovery: an expedition on which she had gathered information about how we connect with each other in an age of digital overwhelm, a time when we are ceaselessly bombarded with interactions and yet (or, and so) find it hard to find any that are meaningful.

Obviously, I didn’t read my ex-colleague’s book. I have shared a Colin the Caterpillar with this woman; the whole thing was unthinkable. I’d also just read something fairly similar: a different memoir focused around a young woman’s first few sexual relationships, except this one was more about the Noughties. (I’m not naming either book or author, because it feels unnecessarily mean.) The premise, again, was the intrusiveness of digital technology in intimate relationships: the lure of constant messaging, the headfucks of parasociality, the weird incentives of online brand-building, the distorting effects of extreme pornography.

The premise had seemed fine to me. Interesting, even. The context in which people come of age is significant, because these young experiences are so resonant. Novels and memoirs about early romantic experiences are hardly a hot new trend, after all (see Goethe). Lots of Millennials, and now Gen Zers, are writing about how digital technology impacts their intimate lives. I think we should pay attention to the fact that so many of them say that they feel queasy and manipulated and mistrustful.

So why, when I saw my ex-colleague’s lovely little face in a hundred online ad spots (this book was marketed hard) did I feel a combination of queasiness and quasi-maternal concern? Why did I feel bad for her? Well, partly because I’ve worked in the publishing industry, and know a little bit about how first books get sold. I felt a bit sick that this young woman, who presumably wants to make a living by writing, should have found this her best saleable proposition. I couldn’t expunge the thought that when she decided to sleep with hundreds of men over the course of a year, the idea that this would be a really juicy book proposal must have been floating around somewhere.

Another reason I felt so bad was that the memoir I had actually read — the one about coming of age in the Noughties — had left me feeling wretchedly voyeuristic. Rather than using personal experience as a jumping-off point, it collapsed in on itself; intimate scenarios, sensations and fantasies were disclosed in a way that initially felt heedless and then, as they piled up, concerningly compulsive. I felt as though I had been cornered by a recently-dumped friend who had had too much to drink. Except I wasn’t a friend. I was a random passer-by.

It’s ironic that both of these books were thematically focused on the maddening effects of digital culture, because that very same digital culture actively incentivises this kind of projectile disclosure. Since the dawning of the Blog Age, marginalised and underrepresented groups have used the web to write and read intensely personal essays; to feel ‘seen’. This culture of personal revelation, most of it amateurish and self-published, has been a powerful phenomenon. If you’re at all curious or empathetic, it’s now possible to access a much more nuanced understanding of how all kinds of people live their lives.

The sheer tonnage of online revelation and essaying has had the undoubted effect of dragging a lot of crappy stuff into the light, where it generally belongs. Some of the worst things that happen to vulnerable and marginalised groups happen in private or domestic spaces: classrooms, bedrooms, offices, kitchens. They keep on happening, throughout a lifetime. When these accumulated experiences are put into words, they can shift perspectives. People who had previously been a bit thoughtless or unsympathetic might change their minds; other marginalised or underrepresented people might feel affirmed and empowered. It’s become fashionable to say that Me Too was a flop, but it seems to me that the outpouring of experience of ‘low level’ harassment has effected a real change in attitudes. Take the accounts of some of David Walliams’ accusers; if you’d willingly gone home with a male celebrity in the 1980s absolutely nobody would have thought it was outrageous that he’d nagged you for sex, even if you were 15 at the time.

But most of us — and I’m very much including myself here — don’t write about personal experience only to affirm other people or contribute to a political change; we do it because we want to get paid for writing, or for political advocacy, or for something else. Telling a story about yourself, the more powerful the better, is a tactic for profile-building, partly because it’s one of the best ways to get a reader’s attention. (There’s a reason journalists try to find real-life case studies to illustrate policy stories; they can see from their online metrics that people like them.)

This is where things start to get murky. Back in the pre-digital age there were ‘misery memoirs’, and they always made me feel a bit uncomfortable; but a publisher had to commission them, an editor had to work on them, a marketer had to think about how to publicise them without ruining the author’s wellbeing. There was a quality bar, and a taste bar, and — frankly — a ‘should this person be going to therapy instead’ bar. Things are different now. The web offers the seductive possibility of a vast potential audience that can be accessed without an established reputation, without money, without having to get an agent’s attention. All you need is a Wordpress login (or a Substack newsletter). You don’t even need to be a particularly competent writer, let alone any kind of expert; you can easily knock out a few thousand words about you in an evening. (You are unquestionably the leading global expert in that, after all.) If you pitch it just right, you might make your reputation; you might even be able to make some money.

I worry about this where young people, in particular, are concerned. It’s not as though the world is stuffed with paid opportunities for people who want to write. The case for spilling your guts is very strong. There are many, many incentives to break down your own boundaries; there are precious few prizes for discretion or self-protection. And even for those — as with these two young memoirists — who are talented enough to break into traditional publishing, the wider context of the internet has made the personal memoir subject to a ratchet of sensation: the material keeps getting harder, faster, more extreme. The softer ground has been covered by thousands (if not millions) of people already. To break through, to touch a chord, to go viral — the material must be raw.

I do still believe, though, that the personal is political. There is something powerful about pulling back the curtain, busting taboos, taking up space. This is, I suspect, how both of these young women authors thought about their radical sexual self-revelation. But, as with many things in feminism, it’s so hard for women to do any of this without awakening the muscle memory of exploitation and oppression.

A few months back I had a conversation with a feminist friend about the ‘slut walk’ phenomenon, and we ended up laughing because we both had the exact same twin responses. On the one hand, of course women should be able to go topless — or flat-out naked — in the street without being intimidated or assaulted, and the slut walk was a ballsy way to illustrate this. And on the other hand, all of the photos and videos of the slut walks showed ranks and ranks of women dressed as though they were about to do a cover shoot for Nuts magazine circa 2008. This supposedly radical expression of sexual self-determination looked an awful lot like an adolescent boy’s fantasy. It is near-impossible to analyse sexuality and desire ab initio — to even imagine what real sexual liberation looks like — because almost everyone gets cognitively inducted into our sexual monoculture long before they hit puberty. So how, I asked, are feminists supposed to illustrate the objective of bodily and sexual autonomy? What is the right response? And she replied: none of the responses can be right, because the context is so wrong. It’s a finger-trap.

There’s a similar finger-trap operating now across all kinds of personal memoir and self-revelation; and the more painful and personal it is, the more the trap tightens. On the one hand, of course the personal essay can be a powerful political tool; and on the other, it carries the risk of abuse and cruelty, of reinforcing your own objectification and creating a corrupted image from which you will never free yourself. For those who have yet to make their reputations, or any money, it’s horribly difficult to avoid the incentives of the online ratchet, and instead focus clearly on your own intention and goals. But who knows: maybe these two young women authors feel that they have achieved exactly that. Maybe there’s just no way to do these things without some old fart feeling like a trespasser.

* CORRECTION: I originally wrote ‘a different man every day’, which turns out to be totally incorrect. Apologies.

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For more thoughts on what digital technology has done to our (and particularly young women’s) lives: