I think about the sex of life all the time, but I didn’t clearly identify it until I read the excellent essay “The death of sex,” by Haley Nahman.
The sex of life, as I understand it, is the too good to be true feeling. Sometimes I’m surprised by what evokes this feeling within me, when I’m flooded with tingling, titillating excitement, warm gratitude spreading through my chest. It’s a sort of magical eroticism, a horniness for the present moment that isn’t necessarily sexual. It’s temporal and sensory, holy and hedonistic, divine and delicate. I feel it when I drizzle honey into my morning tea, or when I stay up until 3 am reading. When I wear a silk slip on a hot summer day and lay back on my bed over the covers, the ceiling fan rotating warm air overhead, feeling clean and angelic. Split seconds that crack my heart open, or transcendent stretches of time that simmer, when I know, deep in my bones, that I’m living the dream.
In her essay, Nahman writes her way around the sex of life, by positing internet culture as its antithesis.
She writes that “[sexuality] is the ultimate euphemism for earthly pleasures and all its attendant qualities: desire, touch, anguish, longing, satisfaction, thrill, connection, presence. Essentially everything the internet can’t meaningfully give us.”
She refers to this digitized sexlessness as the quality behind “everything that sucks today.” She argues that our robotic pursuit of gamified perfection deprives us of true beauty and authentic connection.
This pursuit of perfection calls to mind Instagrammable desires — the perfect hard launch partner, a poreless complexion. Here, I think of dating apps and 12 step skincare routines. The glazed boredom of sending in-app messages is akin to the laborious monotony of layering goopy products before bed that leave you so slick, having sex isn’t practical, because afterwards you’d have to start from step one.
All this compared to: hot blooded in person connection, knocking knees beneath the bar, questioning if the skin touch was accidental, eye contact that feels like speaking a secret language. The natural beauty that arises from living in the moment; the rosy flush that spreads across your cheeks after a long, sweaty run or a thick mid-day nap, the pink tint that tinges your lips after time-melting kissing.
In her essay “Touch Me Once Before You Go,” Brittany Newell adds texture to this definition of the sex of life, without explicitly referring to it:
“The world is bright with erotic potential; all you have to do is get low,” she writes. Getting low means crawling on all fours across the carpet towards what you want, dirtying your kneecaps. It’s a way of opening yourself up to the world, but it doesn’t just refer to seeking pleasure hedonistically.
Newell threads this erotic definition of the sex of life through her childhood memories and her religious experiences. She describes the thrill of playing games as a child — ones where you lay in wait, hiding with your ear pressed to the ground, heart beating hard. She writes about dropping into a church service with the same sense of connective abandon often reserved for sex:
“I felt Christ enter me like a swig of club soda. I felt myself drop it all: my personality, my history, any sense of self-preservation or regret. I was not visiting; I was enmeshed.”
To be enmeshed is to experience “the static of something real brushing up against your life and staying, even if only for a moment,” as Antonia Bentel wrote in her essay How to fall in love.
Sally Rooney defines this life-affirming sense of enmeshment in Intermezzo. When the world-weary 36 year old divorcée Margaret anxiously spirals about her beguiling sexual and romantic connection to the 22 year old chess prodigy Ivan, she comes to the euphoric conclusion that:
“Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting. There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all.”
She then articulates what I would argue is the novel’s thesis:
“The demands of other people do not dissolve; they multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more life.”
Here, I think about the difference between living hedonistically, shallowly reaching for immediate hits of pleasure that wear off like comedowns, versus this more holistic definition of the sex of life, as being divinely entwined through loving relationships. To others, and to ourselves.
In her novel Softcore, Newell defines the sex of life on a micro-level, by identifying the things that her loved ones would miss the most when they died.
“The things we loved most were both elemental and petty. You squeezed them while you slept, these scraps. They made your body look beautiful, like the perfect accessory. Dog’s kisses, blue jeans. No one was dumb enough to say justice or family. No, we lived for Halloween and yard sales and driving at dusk with the windows rolled down. We lived for paper valentines. It was garbage, but beloved. The devil’s in the details, my mom used to say as she stared at the TV. So too, it seemed, was heaven, or something just as good.”
I keep a note in my phone of things that feel like heaven. Objects of affection and conversations with friends. Like Severance and sushi takeout with Janelle, curled up on the couch in our sweats. Sitting in a café with Sasha on a Sunday, gossiping over coffee and croissants. Walking home with Sam after a night out, chain smoking cigarettes, talking about future dreams.
I feel the sex of life coming in the air tonight when the girls and I conspire to get another round at the bar. Overwhelmed with giddy glee, I feel my body unclench as I look across their flushed faces. The world is our oyster and we can stay as long as we please. We hold hands and loop together through the crowd, moving in one long line like a chain of chromosomes, heading towards the bathroom. Laughing in front of the mirror, we rifle through our purses, fishing for lip liner and dirty secrets. Back on the dance floor, a song comes on that we know by heart, Sometimes I wanna feel the pain, and we twirl around in smoke rings, singing along like it’s our national anthem.
I remember moments when I felt enmeshed in the sex of life so acutely that I didn’t even think of it at all. Smoking weed off a hotel balcony in New York with my cousin Kira, stretching our legs like ballerinas over the railing, speaking our dreams into existence in the moonlight. Coming home from a night out, martini buzzed, sitting at my desk in my party dress, writing the words that have been itching at the backs of my eyelids.
I feel particularly heavenly in dream states and in liminal spaces. A little raw, vulnerable and very much in my body. Like being hungover in a lovely way, taking a slow, hot morning shower, listening to Joni Mitchell. Or when I’m on a plane, daydreaming and looking out the window, jotting down passing thoughts in my journal. Rare occasions when there are no deadlines or expectations, and you can exist exactly as you are. The peace of this feeling. Alone in my apartment at night, dancing in the kitchen, as free as can be.
To me, the sex of life is the force behind who and what we choose to place our faith in. The sweet release that comes from trust falling into a lifelong friendship, or a really good book. It’s the force that propels me to make my dreams come true, to build a beautiful life for myself.
“I believe in the person I want to become,” Lana del Rey intones, in the Ride music video.
I believe in taking my morning coffee back to bed, and in my chosen family. Playing card games after dinner and reading books in the bath. Christmas cards and birthday cards and thank you notes. Fresh flowers and menthols. Loving for the experience of it, even though the relationship will likely end. Going to the movies alone, cooking pasta together at midnight a little stoned. Crouching down to say hello to the ginger cat on the street corner, scratching the soft spot between his ears. Texting can you tell me something good, before I go to sleep. Taking your call. Heaven being a place on earth.
First of all the Ginger the cat shoutout 🧡 second of all, this. This in all its glory. I swear you’ve articulated the meaning of life and I want to read this over and over and over!
A hymn to the erotic pulse of being alive, not sex per se, but the sensual yes whispered beneath the skin of everyday existence. What you call “the sex of life” is what the Greeks might have folded into eros, not simply as physical desire but as the animating fire of creation, perception, aliveness. The divine voltage between what is and what could be.
What struck me most is your invocation of enmeshment, the dissolution of self-consciousness into presence, into relation. When we live addicted to frictionless autonomy and sanitised “vibes,” enmeshment is almost incredible: it requires risk, porousness, the vulnerability of being seen. Not filtered, not performing…. seen. And in that, it’s deeply erotic. As Audre Lorde wrote, the erotic is not about sensation alone, but about the power of fully feeling, a power the machine logic of the internet tries to scrub clean.
If I may offer another thread to this beautiful weave: the sex of life is also the sacredness of uselessness. That which serves no productive goal but makes life bearable, shimmering, holy. Whistling in the shower, writing letters that won’t be sent. Lingering after the movie to sit in the dark, just a bit longer. We’ve growing addicted to monetising every pleasure then reclaiming useless beauty is an erotic insurgency.
You made me feel it, that prickling awareness that this, the honey, the slip dress, the girls at the bar, is what we’re here for. Not to optimise, but to burn. Brava, Georgia!