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I’m excited to introduce One Nightstand! It’s my new book review series where I’ll read and recommend books in the sexuality space that inspire me, infuriate me, and illuminate issues relevant to my journey through vaginismus diagnosis and treatment. Obviously, I can’t resist a sex pun but staying true to form, I do most of my reading in bed and my book of the moment is most often on my single nightstand.
I picked up Every Body: An Honest and Open Look at Sex from Every Angle by Julia Rothman and Shaina Feinberg on the day I finished writing my first draft of Hard Things. I made my way to the sexuality section at the nearest Barnes & Noble, as I have many times before, and tried to envision a future where my own words might have a place on the shelf. (Note: I understand the importance of shopping small and I also frequent the independently-owned book stores in my area. On this particular day, I was dreaming big and that meant visiting a big-box bookstore. You know… the enemy but also the dream.)
I already own most of the titles pictured above. Not only is it important to me to be well-read in my own genre when I query literary agents but even as I write the book I've always wanted to read, it’s habitual for me to go looking for it. Despite pouring over, and even enjoying and recommending a lot of these books, I always feel like my experience with vaginismus lives somewhere outside the discussion, only ever acknowledged in the footnotes. Despite this condition affecting up to 17% of women worldwide, it’s an underserved market. I know that because I’ve been part of it for 10+ years.
Every Body is different — pun very much intended. I was delighted to find that people like me as well as an array of others navigating the world of sex through dysfunction, religion, infidelity, disability, sex work, sexually transmitted infections, dating, aging, and abortions were represented in the colorful pages. Reading their stories made me feel a lot less alone… which seems to be the point.
At first flip-through, Every Body seemed like a great candidate for casual beach reading. The structure is masterfully organized. Mostly anonymous, bite-sized blurbs are separated by general category. The artwork is stunning. Every page is strikingly vibrant and blatantly sexual which made reading it in public a special treat. As my growing TBR stack would have it, I purchased this book in December and finished it on a beach trip in March. It was during that trip I came to realize the reading itself was anything but casual. Some of the stories were heartbreaking, others hilarious. I snacked on SweeTARTS at a rocket launch in Cocoa Beach, Florida internally daring someone to ask me what I was reading. Nobody did, but I felt like a badass.
In a lot of ways, this book offered me companionship. I’ve been known to inquire (sometimes too much) about the sex lives of my close friends and family. Sex, specifically sex without dysfunction, is fascinating to me and talking about it openly helps alleviate an engrained, shame-fueled urge I sometimes still feel to bury it. It’s also compulsive. In my pre-diagnosis days, I hung on every word my friends were willing to share with me about sex. I’d listen intently with my eyes wide, keeping quiet in hopes that they’d share more. I’d tuck their words away in my mind to obsess about them later. I’d ask myself over and over, what do they know that I don’t? I was convinced the answer was hiding somewhere in their stories. Reading this book felt a lot like standing in a public space inviting strangers to share their sexual experiences with me which is remarkably fitting because I learned that’s exactly how this book was made.
“We included only a few of them here, but believe us, we could have made an entire book about vaginismus.”
—Shaina Feinberg
In the “Overcoming the Unexpected” chapter, the authors acknowledge the lack of discourse about vaginismus despite what they discovered made up a “shocking number” of their story submissions. This moment in the book gave me incredible pause. I know my audience exists and after spending the last two weeks sending detailed query letters and book proposals to literary agents for Hard Things, it’s nice to read that someone else knows it exists too. Oh, and the artwork featured on the page was a set of pastel(ish) dilators! If you follow me on TikTok, you know that’s my whole vibe. (From now on, puns are intended unless otherwise stated.)
Every Body is exactly what it says it is: beautifully organized, wonderfully inclusive, surprisingly affirming, and presented without judgement. It makes a compelling and hands-on case for talking honestly and openly about sexual experiences. The moral of the stories and my take after reading: when it comes to sex and any difficult conversation — it’s usually best to have it.