The surprising, beautiful horror of happy married sex

A response to Becca Rothfeld's New Yorker essay, "All Good Sex Is Body Horror" in which I claim that married sex is more transformative than she suggests

That Saturday morning was like many others. We were cleaning the basement together—I was arranging the toy closet for the umpteenth time, he was installing some new bookshelves for our young family. Until we weren’t. How we went from determinedly toiling away on meaningful but tedious tasks to him bending me over the back of the futon and giving me a baby, I can’t rightly say. But it transformed me, continues to transform me now, decades later.

This essay is the consequence of something I did on Twitter/X that I should possibly regret. I ranted there about an essay that came recommended by Anna Gát and Gát was kind enough to suggest I develop my rant into an essay. Here I am, made uncomfortable by the fact that someone, if only Gát herself, may actually read it.

Yet I came here to share the hard-earned wisdom of old age so I will persist in my reaction to Becca Rothfeld’s February 17 Weekend Essay in The New Yorker, “All Good Sex Is Body Horror.” Rothfeld’s talents are on evident display throughout; my rant did not take issue with the beauty of her language nor the evident skill with which she plied her craft. Indeed, she opened her piece with such visceral, heat-inducing language that as I began to read I eagerly expected her to take me beyond the words to a state of contemplation. Instead, she left me disaffected.

Rothfeld’s job was not to please me. It was to come up with a compelling way to describe the work of film director David Cronenberg, to somehow make it less about merely decoding the films and more about forcing us to confront what we see in ourselves through the plain horrors of his work. In this she succeeds, wildly. I have never given Cronenberg’s work a second thought and without the layer of analysis she placed atop it, I would never have done so. Yet in the analysis itself I found, beyond respect for her art, a contempt for one of the central tenets of her essay. It starts with this definition, derived from Cronenberg’s evident drive to explore through the horror genre the radical regenerations of people infected by orgiastic zombies or scientists accidentally crossbred with fly DNA:

Regenerations as radical as the ones Cronenberg envisions involve what the philosopher L. A. Paul has termed “transformative experiences,” ruptures that change “your own point of view so much and so deeply that, before you’ve had that experience, you can’t know what it is going to be like to be you after the experience.” Not only do we lack access to information that we can acquire only by plunging into the scalding water of a new life, but we cannot foresee how such a jolt will overhaul the very predilections and values that define who we are.

It’s an intriguing sentiment and one we can all identify with in some way. Except that Rothfeld continues, implying that the only true transformations are the ones that go beyond our inherently mediocre routines, that we are only liberated by becoming what we are not. Like Cronenberg’s The Fly.

Most people would give anything to be turned into anything else, because most sex is mediocre, and the measure of its mediocrity is that it leaves us unaffected. No one falls ill; no one transforms into a fly or a cockroach; nothing changes. As the narrator of Norman Rush’s novel “Mating” sagely observes, “sex can be various things, but in my experience the usual thing it is is considerate work on the part of both parties,” accompanied by the exchange of careful courtesies: “after you, no, after you, mais non.”

Her careful construction of this passage is worthy of respect. But the underlying point is suspect: We want, she insists, to be turned into something else, precisely because our sex is mediocre and does not leave us changed. We are not transformed

Speak for yourself. About the sex and the transformation.

Obviously, a woman now approaching 40 years of marriage will rebel at the suggestion that she hasn’t transformed because she only had sex with one (seriously hot) man her whole life, all within the unchanging boundaries of marriage. My twitchy response to the implication of her essay is understandable, even predictable. But my many decades of marriage have also given me something Rothfeld does not have to support my take: a history of transformative sex.

We were in the basement. I was cleaning out the toy closet in one of those rare moments of childfree bliss. Our oldest was at a friend’s house, our toddler was upstairs having a nap. I was weaning that youngest child and so my breasts, already made permanently larger due to several years of nursing, were even more swollen than normal. In truth, they were spectacular—talk about transformed! My husband, assembling the equivalent of Ikea bookshelves before that brand became common, had noticed, as he always did. The cat and mouse game of married sex often involves the woman pretending not to notice the effect she has on her husband and him carefully weighing how and when to make his desire evident.

I was playing the game just fine, knowing that that evening we would probably get together. I remember the outfit I was wearing that morning because when I bent over to pick up toys the top gapped and my breasts were on full view. Sometimes I caught him looking, other times I hoped he was looking but didn’t try to confirm. Our actual rendezvous was hours away, I assumed, so I didn’t bother accelerating things needlessly.

Somehow, triggered by something I still can’t put my finger on, I realized the unique situation we were in, alone together in the basement, children safely away. Utterly unlike me, I suddenly needed him to take me. Right there, right then. I could narrate the event, and it would be steamy, like an urgent love scene from a John Irving novel, only with love and mutual respect added to it. But the narration would be constructed post-hoc because I honestly don’t remember exactly how I went from feeling the need for him to be in me to getting into the position that I remember all too perfectly, bent over the back of the futon (it was the 90s), my sundress hiked up above my waist feeling his hands gripping my hips and the insistence of his thrusts bringing me swiftly to a degree of heat that usually took more time, more whispers, more kisses, to bring me to.

Maybe it was minutes after all, or it could have been seconds, but what I remember clearly was the thought that went through my head, each word punctuated in perfect time with his final dramatic thrusts: Give. Me. A. Baby!

The longing that modern women have to be transformed by exotic, forbidden fruit causes many of them to miss the many apples, pears, and oranges dangling all around them. Surrounded by adequate fruit, ripe for the taking, many seem to believe they will never be satisfied with what’s available for easy picking. Instead, they worry in whispers: But I haven’t metamorphosed into a fly, I haven’t sprouted wings; how will I escape to some version of my life where I am no longer a merely mediocre specimen that sophisticates will drag in the pages of The New Yorker?

Sadly we see the results of this misplaced longing everywhere. In More, the bestselling memoir boldly revealing the life of a reluctant polyamorist, author Molly Roden Winter samples the forbidden fruit that was served her by a serpent no more foreign than her own husband. She takes the fruit, finds it bitter, and keeps taking it, hoping that it will eventually taste good. Something about Einstein’s supposed definition of insanity comes to mind.

I am confident there are happy polyamorous people. Roden Winter doesn’t appear to be one of them. One sociologist friend of mine is sitting on national survey data she has about sexually open relationships—it turns out 4 percent of women say their “ideal” relationship is sexually open while the number for men is 12 percent. For those 4 percent of gals, I’m sure many of them can easily find a positive and fulfilling situation for as long as they want it. It’s the women stuck with the other 8 percent of polyamory-seeking men I’m worried about.

Everywhere those women look—along with the many more women not interested in polyamory but who are regularly invited to prefer a life of casual sexual relationships—hidden from them is this one profound truth: Women in loving, stable, monogamous marriages have better sex. They have more of it, they are more likely to orgasm from it, and they are more likely to say it is fulfilling. The most recent summary of this data is found in UVA sociologist Brad Wilcox’s book Get Married so I won’t repeat it here. The other reason I won’t repeat it here is that most people reading this will not believe it even if they do read Wilcox’s book. The facts are just too far removed from the popular depictions offered up in prestige media.

I can hear the hip crowds murmur in their final gotcha: They may have better sex, but it’s not transformative! You have no wings! You cannot fly away from the confines of your mutually satisfying, life-meaning bestowing, fulfilling marriage without wings!

Guess what, the sex those supposedly transformation-ready women are having hasn’t transformed them much either.

A few weeks ago, I responded to Aella’s annual Twitter/X post summarizing her body stats from 2023. If you know her, you know her; if you don’t, I don’t know where to tell you to start. I don’t follow her on social media because she’s a top 1 percent OnlyFans creator and that just makes me blush. But I make my husband follow her so I can lurk on her account, because despite agreeing with nearly zero of her life decisions, I find her intellect quite intriguing. Last year she shared some 2022 stats about her life, including the number of bowel movements she had, the number of times she showered (astonishing low in the eyes of some commenters), and the number of times she had sex. I saw that a year ago and found myself astonished. Was it possible that in my mid-50s I was having more sex than she was in her sexual prime?

I kept it to myself and waited a year. Maybe it was an off, post-Covid year, maybe there were extenuating circumstances, something. Then in January of this year she posted her most recent body stats and this time her sex numbers did something even more unexpected: They went down.

That’s right, one of the most sexually open, adventurous, transformation-ready women on the planet, who is super sexy (no point in denying it) and could have any man she set her sights on was having sex less often than this old lady who already has a few grandchildren! More importantly for the purposes of this essay, however, is that with all her openness, all of the fruit she is willing to eat, fed to her by whatever serpent she fancies that day, she isn’t transformed by it much at all. She’s posting the same stuff day after day, year after year, doing the same things, expressing the same neuroses as before. Aella is living the freeest sexual life modern womanhood supposedly adores and not only is she having less sex than the average married woman, it’s not changing her at all. Maybe the transformation myth Cronenberg longs to bring to fruition only works in horror movies.

I knew in the very moment, receiving my husbands final exhausted thrusts, climaxing in time with him, that I was going to be pregnant. In a single instant all my life was transformed. In my head I began to calculate how plans would need to change, the adjustments we would need to make, ways my body would need to overhaul itself to accommodate the new life that would soon begin to divide inside of me. I also knew that my husband, who likes to have a plan for everything, was going to need to be brought into the glaring light of the consequences of our heated action gently.

That night, after we got the kids fed, bathed, and put to bed, I crawled into the sheets next to him, and snuggled in close. I rested my head against that spot between his shoulder and his chin that I love so much, and breathed him in deep. He smelled of man, he smelled of father. My DNA had not crossed with that of a fly or any other beast, it had crossed with that of a handsome, caring, potent man. My man. And soon I would be a mother again. I could already taste how sweet it would be.

“I love you, Daddy,” I said, nestling into him.

“I love you, too, um, Mommy.”

Feeling as warm as I did then, I slipped my leg between his legs, pressed my breasts against his chest and with a teasing movement of my hand down his abdomen let him know that I was not yet done with his body for the day.

There will be time yet for me to tell the rest of that story and its uncertain, sorrowful unfolding. How it tried my faith in God and what it did to ultimately cause me to weep in desire to be re-transformed, first for myself, and then for my child. The one that I was supposed to have as a result of that day’s love but which I was sadly denied. There will be time for that transformation tale. It’s a body horror of it’s own, and it all happened within the constraints of a supposedly familiar, mediocre love. Exactly the love I have found offers the most blissful transformations even as it buffers you against the most aching ones.