How Not To Fall, by Emily Foster

A progressive sex educator tries to re-write Fifty Shades of Grey (and fix everything she dislikes about romance novels).

When I first picked up this book I didn't know it was pseudonymously written by Emily Nagoski, author of Come As You Are, a non-fiction book on women's sexuality that rampaged through my friend-circles a couple of years ago. With the caveat that I don't have internal first-person experience of women's sexuality, I thought Come As You Are was
1) good in that it got people talking and thinking about a topic where merely catalysing the conversation is worth its weight in gold, but
2) philosophically confused and confusing in ways that made me question the validity of what it was saying, and worry that people who took it to heart would come away misled.

Interestingly, Nagoski's erotica actually highlights a lot of the problems I had with her non-fiction. On Come As You Are, I wrote:

this book was based on the incompatible (or at least, tense) premises that "you are normal and fine exactly how you are," that no matter how high or low your sex drive is it's natural and normal and doesn't need to be changed, but... at the same time, the book is not-subtly invested in helping people have more sex. And I think it's kind of in-denial about that.

(Do you glaze over block-quotes in writing? I always glaze over block-quotes in writing. Hey, come back, read this block quote!)

This is exacerbated by a claim the book is very keen to make but which I think (based on the book's own information!) is completely misleading. Basically, the book says that men have more sexual desire (etc) on average, but that “there's more variance within groups than between groups.” The author uses the analogy with height: that the average height for men is 5 inches taller than the average height for women, but that the variance within each group is bigger than that, so "a lot of women are taller than a lot of men".

(Alright, I'm sorry, but just a little bit more)

Similarly for sexual desire, if we accept Nagoski's claims and her own height comparison (I've done no further reading about this, to be clear), the overwhelming majority of men-women couples will have a man who wants more sex than the woman does. I think denying that is just misleading, given what the author wants to do, and comes back to my feeling that this book doesn't really tackle the actual real-world problems people have around sex; it solves the problems that you might have in some idealised world that you're not actually in.

I think the real problem of sex for most humans is that your partner(s) have different needs and wants than you do; solving that equation to everyone's true satisfaction is not actually possible; and what's worse, people's relationships are fraught and vulnerable and uncommunicative (in general, and even more so when it comes to sex) This is a really hard problem!, and one that Nagoski's characters don't ever properly encounter. To me this throws into question the whole book.

Hoooooo boy is that relevant to How Not To Fall. In order to write a functioning erotica novel, the characters have to have a lot of sex (← the kind of insightful commentary you've come to expect from Book Thoughts), but even by those standards, the female protagonist of HNTF is unbelievably DTF, hornier than a cornucopia overflowing with other, smaller, horns. This is very convenient! It means there's no conflict between her and the also-constantly-horny male protagonist who wants her to be his BDSM plaything: they both live in the imaginary world that Come As You Are fantasised about, where everyone is fine exactly as they are because conveniently as-they-are is having high sex drives, high openness and compatible kinks.

I guess this ties in with a constant question for literature, which is: for any given fictional character, an author can plausibly say that SOME people are like that, even if many/most people aren't, and since the author never claimed the book was saying anything beyond its specific fictional characters, isn't that enough? (This comes up a lot with whether having a character with Trait X as a villain is villainising all people with Trait X). And I think I'm less-willing to grant Foster/Nagoski that "out" because her book is so explicitly didactic, start to finish -- not only about sex and relationships, but also about, like, self-affirmation and being confident and happy in yourself, and also about how to learn and improve.

Look... I thought the fiction interludes in Come As You Are were horrifically bad, and the fiction in How Not To Fall is definitely better, but still a ton of it involves the female protagonist saying things to herself / in her head that are just so obviously intended as models and lessons for the reader that it's hard to take her seriously. For example: "All I know how to do is try, and keep on trying until I succeed, and then I usually try some more until I get good at whatever it is -- that's how it works, isn't it?" (This is in re: deciding whether to tell the male protagonist, the grad student in her lab, that she wants to bang him). Yes yes I get it, growth mindset and deliberate practice, but surely not even the people who have strong growth mindsets have this didactic inner monologue re: their sexual conquests? (While you're banging, don't forget to break the task down into small and separable chunks and get specific, measurable feedback about each part from an experienced coach!)

I can't find the quote right now, but Foster/Nagoski has said somewhere that she wanted to write a book that corrected all the issues she has with mainstream romance/erotica, and this book is explicitly re-writing the plot of Fifty Shades of Grey to match certain progressive values. For example, before our beloved academic mentor becomes an equally-adept sexual one, he gets enthusiastic, extensive, and near-contractual consent from our young ingenue -- explaining at length the importance of them not-sleeping together until she's no longer a student so that there can be no improper influences on her sexual choices, and even though she says "well that doesn't apply to us, I've already secured my place at Harvard/MIT for grad school dontchaknow, can't you just do me now?", he patiently explains that it's important to maintain the integrity of the system and the general rule that people with power shouldn't sleep with their subordinates (even as he struggles desperately with his overwhelming desire for her, natch). Similarly, before they commence the sexing, he makes sure to survey her extensively and responsibly about STDs, leading to this fabulously representative-of-the-book exchange:

"I've never had sex so it didn't seem like a priority."

"What specifically does never had sex mean? Never had oral sex? Anal sex? Penis-in-vagina sex?"

"All those things and a bunch of others. I guess I'm what could be called "a virgin"" -- I put it in quotes with my fingers and make a face -- "it's a medically meaningless idea, it's all just the Patriarchy and--"

"Yes," he holds up a hand and closes his eyes "I'm a feminist too. We needn't rehearse the arguments about purity as a virtue only in the context of male oppression of women."

You see why I like this guy? He says it like it's just understood that any reasonable person would identify as a feminist. I didn't identify that way until, what, two years ago? But with him, feminism is taken as read. Amazing.

Given this background, I find the things Foster/Nagoski didn't choose to change quite odd. The protagonist is still a tall blond wealthy British aristocrat who got his PhD at age 20, quotes poetry from memory and calls his lover "my termagant" (I had to look it up: a virago, vixen, shrew); he's still traumatised and emotionally unavailable but (spoiler alert!) he will eventually be made whole through the female protagonist's enduring love and devotion. The ideal woman is still, you know, a woman who will patiently and openly love a broken man unfailingly until he becomes his better self, while also letting that man do absolutely anything he wants to her in bed (which he later celebrates as one of her main amazing traits -- I can't find the quote but it's something like "you're so completely giving of yourself, so generous" and this is given as a good reason that he ultimately loves her).

I don't know what to make of any of this? Again, I'm torn between saying "this is a specific story of two people, it's not making broader claims about humanity" and "this is a manifesto disguised as an erotica novel so let's take its claims as at-least-somewhat generalisable." There's a few different readings of this book, of Foster's message here, and I'm not sure what to make of any of them. In one of them Foster is presenting a view of love/sex/desire with, um, surprisingly traditional gender roles embedded in it? "A man should be tall, rich, powerful and sexually dominant, he just should also be pro-consent, vote Democrat and support His Woman's career ambitions; a woman should be sexually willing and able to come on command, but also smart and science-y" (this book fetishises science in a way that I'm starting to see pop up in various other works lately -- Orphan Black, Ada Palmer -- as well as in The Discourse, and will maybe write about eventually, I think it's kind of fascinating).

In another reading, Foster is kind of in denial about how much what actually turns people on can conflict with what they think or say they value, and the complicated and fascinating implications of that; in this reading, that denial is showing through the seams of this book so much that it throws the entire experience of reading it (for me) into this weird meta-awareness experience: the book becoming interesting not for what it actually says, but for what it says that the author said it. Which is a kind of common reading-experience, for me, and I wish I had a word for it.