50 Great Articles & Essays about Sex

The best writing about sex, porn, prostitution and more, all free to read online

Sex, Love and Relationships

12 Revelations About Sex by Alain de Botton

In order to transcend the discomfort that sex typically stirs, you may need to radically rethink desire, marriage, fidelity, and much more.

Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex? by Kate Julian

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

Afterglow by Tove K Danovich

The intensity of orgasm is sublime, but the gentle love cocktail that follows is what helps relationships to endure

The Limits of Sex Positivity by Angela Chen

American culture still treats disinterest in sex as something that needs to be fixed. What if any amount of desire—including none—was okay?

Why We Cheat by Lisa Taddeo

That's what I want to know. If you're going to wreck some other person's world, what's the good thing you're going to get?

Boys on the Side by Hanna Rosin

Is the hookup culture an engine of female progress?

Safe-Sex Lies by Meghan Daum

I've gone into more than a few relationships with the safest of intentions and discarded them soon after, and my hunch is that I'm not the only one...

Memoir

My Life as a Sex Object by Jessica Valenti

Should you laugh off a lifetime of objectification – or get angry?

Speaking in Tongues by Sarah Prickett

The numbers in my phone don't belong to the men who were best at fucking me, but the ones who were, and are, best at telling me how they would fuck me...

Tragedy Averted. Minimal Gagging. by Lidia Yuknavitch

When I first met Hannah in graduate school I was a woman gone numb. I would do anything. Anytime. Anywhere...

The Year I Grew Wildly, While Men Looked On by Ashley C. Ford

At 13, who I was inside, who I wanted to be, didn't match the intentions of my body. Outside, there was no little girl to be loved innocently

My First Time, Twice by Ariel Levy

Nobody would gasp if they heard a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old had lost her virginity. The clock was ticking

Hideous Men by E. Jean Carroll

As it turns out, a Hideous Man marks practically every stage of my life...

A Girl's Guide to Sexual Purity by Carmen Maria Machado

I was saved around a bonfire the summer I turned 13...

Kids These Days

Friends Without Benefits by Nancy Jo Sales

How dating apps, social media and porn are reshaping tennager's lives

Why Kids Sext by Hanna Rosin

A recent scandal reveals how kids think about sexting--and what parents and police should do about it

Sexting, Shame and Suicide by Nina Burleigh

A shocking tale of sexual assault in the digital age

Porn

Pornucopia by Maria Konnikova

Critics say that porn degrades women, dulls sexual pleasure, and ruins authentic relationships -- are they right?

Datagasm by Mark Hay

Ever-faster feedback loops and micro-targeted digital porn are pushing human sexuality into some seriously weird places

What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn by Maggie Jones

American adolescents watch much more pornography than their parents know — and it’s shaping their ideas about pleasure, power and intimacy. Can they be taught to see it more critically?

Pornhub Is the Kinsey Report of Our Time by Maureen O’Connor

The streaming sex empire may have done more to expand the sexual dreamscape than Helen Gurley Brown, Masters and Johnson, or Sigmund Freud.

Hard Core by Natasha Vargas-Cooper

As recently as 15 years ago, if somebody wanted vivid depictions of, say, two men simultaneously performing anal penetration on the same woman, securing such a delicacy would require substantial effort...

Secret Museums by B. Pietras

Struggling with the world’s, and his own, homophobia, one queer young man searches for intimacy in the world of internet porn.

Maxed out by Evan Wright

Max Hardcore and other XXX pornographers awakened something dark in me. Or perhaps it was already there.

Scenes from My Life in Porn by Evan Wright

Porn is a crude business. Even the fantasies it sells have the feel of cheap disillusionment. What seduced me was the reality.

Sex Work

The Sex Trade by Sean Flynn

A three-part series on the global sex trade (part 2, part 3)

Paying to Play by Antonia Crane

A prostitute interviews a client.

Paying to Play by Antonia Crane

A prostitute interviews a client.

Prada Prostitutes by Howard Jacobson

Two conflicting but equally sentimental narratives of the lives of prostitutes -- and by implication the men who pay for their services -- confront each other at the moment...

Daddies, "Dates," and the Girlfriend Experience by Nancy Jo Sales

The new prostitution economy

Male Escorts by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Is the growing market for male escorts a sign of female sexual liberation or just a re-run of the same old stereotypes?

Or Are You Just Pleased to See Me? by Evan Hughes

Her first move, it must be said, was devastating. Straddling my legs with her knees on my chair, she flicked her long blonde hair over the top of my head so that the two of us were now in a sort of dark, warm tent, eye to eye

The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler

A modern Robin Hood story: the strippers who stole from (mostly) rich, (usually) disgusting men and gave to, well, themselves.
The Electric Typewriter

About The Electric Typewriter
We search the net to bring you the best nonfiction, articles, essays and journalism