Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Action
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://amyrosespiegel.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/authors/amy-rose-spiegel/ * http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/06/amy_rose_spiegel_s_action_a_book_about_sex_reviewed.html * http://therumpus.net/2016/07/the-rumpus-interview-with-amy-rose-spiegel/ * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/20/amy-rose-spiegel-action-a-book-about-sex
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Rookie, story editor; BuzzFeed, associate editor. Creator of the Enormous Eye Web site.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, London Guardian, NME, Dazed & Confused, and FADER.
SIDELIGHTS
Amy Rose Spiegel is a freelance writer and editor. She has worked as an associate editor at BuzzFeed and also as a story editor at Rookie. Spiegel has contributed articles to numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, the London Guardian, NME, Dazed & Confused, and the FADER.
Spiegel published her first book, Action: A Book about Sex, in 2016. The volume encourages readers to embrace their sexuality without the need for embarrassment or apologies. Spiegel advises on how to mentally prepare for sex, find and be comfortable with sexual partners, and deal with awkward moments related to sex.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly insisted that “this should be required reading for anyone even considering having sex for the first time.” The same reviewer noted that the author’s inclusion of her own personal experiences in the book has a “personalizing” effect. Reviewing the book in Slate, Christina Cauterucci remarked that what it “lacks in encyclopedic breadth, it makes up for in good-natured encouragement and trust in its readers: I won’t yuck your yum, Spiegel seems to say, and don’t you dare yuck mine. She hasn’t just had a lot of sex—she worships it and treasures it for more than its carnal pleasures, using sexual connection as a means of exploring the world and the self.” Cauterucci appended, “In a world increasingly capable of accepting that young women can and do want to have a lot of sex—including queer, kinky, and nonmonogamous varieties—Action offers an idea of the next frontier of sexual liberation: Ensuring that all that sex is not only safe and consensual, but good.”
In a review in the London Guardian, Laura Snapes reasoned, “Spiegel’s gift is being able to write with total inclusivity–for queer, trans, straight, asexual, and celibate bodies and desires–without scrimping on specificity (sections include ‘how to eat a pussy’ and ‘an introduction to ass’). But it also doesn’t get bogged down in those differences of identity.” Snapes remarked, “It’s a common enough idea that you have to learn to love yourself before you can love anyone else, but that philosophy is rarely articulated with as much practicality and generosity as she pulls off here.”
Writing in Metapsychology, Christian Perring opined, “Action seems separated from most people’s lives and does not grapple with a major emotional side of sex. But it is a fun read with some interesting insights on modern sex.” Reviewing the book in Huffington Post, Jillian Capewell shared: “I can easily picture myself devouring Action as a teenager with questions about sex and no clear way to find the answers. Misinformation concerning sex can lead to dangerous, life-altering outcomes, and instead of clutching our pearls as we’ve historically done, we could use resources like this book in the hope of promoting more open, informed sexual futures for everyone.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Guardian (London, England), May 20, 2016, Laura Snapes, review of Action: A Book about Sex.
Publishers Weekly, April 4, 2016, review of Action, p. 76.
ONLINE
Amy Rose Spiegel Home Page, https://amyrosespiegel.com (February 21, 2017).
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (May 20, 2016), Jillian Capewell, review of Action.
Metapsychology, http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/ (July 12, 2016), Christian Perring, review of Action.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (July 13, 2016), Hannah Baxter, author interview.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (June 1, 2016), Christina Cauterucci, review of Action.
About
I’m a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. My first book, Action, was recently published by Grand Central and is available here. Lookit:
action cover
I am behind the website Enormous Eye. Previously, I was a story editor at Rookie and an associate editor at BuzzFeed.
My interests include the Replacements, baked pasta dishes, Roland Barthes, dead malls, Cam’Ron, the 1964-65 World’s Fair, automats, and Françoise Hardy.
You can tail me on Twitter @amyrosary, Instagram @verymuchso, or email me directly at rushandpush@gmail.com.
Amy Rose Spiegel
Amy Rose Spiegel is an editor and freelance writ(h)er. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, NME, BuzzFeed, Dazed & Confused, The FADER, and many other publications. She came up in New Jersey and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH AMY ROSE SPIEGEL
BY HANNAH BAXTER
July 13th, 2016
When speaking with Amy Rose Spiegel, two things become immediately apparent: she is whip-smart, able to perfectly synthesize the sociological and physiological constraints of sexual politics into a four-word alliteration, and she is fearlessly frank, emboldened by her own experiences and receptive to the tales of others’ lives and sexual explorations. Her debut book, Action: A Book about Sex, is a perfect compendium of her erotic philosophies. Equal parts banging field guide—complete with enough pre and post-romp etiquette lessons to make Emily Post blush to death—and revealing post-romantic memoir, Action leaves the reader questioning his or her own sensual appetites and whether to ever seriously give a damn.
I spoke with Spiegel on a Saturday afternoon regarding carnal confidence, the nuances of sex-positivity, and our mutual love of seltzer, a reoccurring player and all-around champion in the nebulous game of sex.
***
The Rumpus: Right away you address the cultural phenomenon that it is often only cis-gender, heterosexual men who are allowed to both discuss sex and openly admit they enjoy having it. As someone who does not fit that mold, why was that important to you to present from the get-go?
Amy Rose Spiegel: I think that it was important to me because I wanted to address from the onset the stereotype of a woman who writes about sex is this lousy babe who’s loud and getting attention and that kind of trope. I wanted to point out why that was unfair and untrue and to acknowledge it and also blow right past it. It was the elephant in the room in a way.
Rumpus: Early on in the book you mention, and I’m paraphrasing this, that ambition, in the context of having a crush on somebody, is born of a lack of something or someone. Many might find this subject matter, and the way you confront it, rather ambitious as well. Is there anything specifically you lacked or experienced that motivated you to tackle this project?
Action coverSpiegel: Yes, I felt that in my writing for Rookie, a website for teenage girls where I was an editor for a while, it appeared to me that what our readers were most curious about when sending in advice questions or asking for certain pieces on the site, was always steeped in sex and sexual anxiety. They were curious and felt positively about it but they were also worried because they didn’t have the precedent in what they had been reading and what they had been interested in in terms of what was positive and helpful and clear and that wasn’t euphemistic or in any way shaming. And I had always wanted that too, because a lot of what I found felt either very niche or very male, or like it came with a wink and a warning, as in you could do this, but that’s dicey territory.
Rumpus: I find that half of the book reads as how to prepare yourself and find someone to get down with, and the other as how-to approach and properly execute that. Did you set out to make a more realistic and compressive guide to literal sexual acts than the market cornered by women and men’s magazines?
Spiegel: I set out to address sex as a series of potential prompts. Maybe you could do it this way; here’s how I did it one time; try it out see if you like it. If you don’t, there’s a lot of other shit you could do. It didn’t feel so discrete in terms of having a guide and then reflections. I mean this book is a total hodgepodge. I feel that sex is so entangled in every other part of our lives that there was no other way to write it other than following that format.
Rumpus: As the reader goes on, they learn more and more about you as a person and it became more like talking to your girlfriend than a publication giving tips. How did you maintain a balance with your own sexual autobiography?
Spiegel: Well, I feel that it’s kind of impossible to trust somebody who’s ostensibly giving you advice on something unless you know that they have experience with it, and since a lot of advice is really vague about the giver’s history with that topic, I wanted to make myself the schlemiel and the schlimazel so that the reader could feel like, whatever they did, they could see how it had been for me and the ways it was messy and the ways it was enjoyable and how that all went, and then apply that to how I decided to approach the book.
Rumpus: You make a point of stating how much you loathe the term “sex-positive,” but it wouldn’t be unrealistic to categorize this book as such. How do you hope people talk about this book without using that descriptor?
Spiegel: I don’t mind if they do. That’s a personal taste. I don’t like sex-positive because I think it differentiates all sex from being positive and it treats sex-positive as the aspirational endpoint instead of what all sex should be. If that’s a distinction then it’s not the general truth. So it’s not something I like to use. I also feel like it’s a little bit distancing for people who might not be familiar with that term. So I shy away from it, but I certainly don’t mind if other people like that term and want to apply it to the book. I do think I rail against it more than any others in the glossary because I don’t think sex should be the property of the people who have the language to describe it. I don’t feel like most people know or use that term outside of certain educated circles. So that’s also a frustration of mine.
Rumpus: Sure, it’s always when people are talking about a certain movie, or music or a book or something. It’s never like “hey, I had a really sex-positive conversation with a friend of mine today!”
Spiegel: Right! Or, “I had a really sex-positive encounter last night.” Like, no, you just had sex last night.
Rumpus: In part II of the book, you begin to discuss some of the heavier aspects of sexual encounters, like unintended pregnancy, STIs and sexual assault, but still manage to keep an element of levity in the writing and execution. Why was it important to you to equally address these two sides and not shy away from the differentiation?
Spiegel: I feel like often there’s a narrative imposed on women who have sex that goes you’re either a victim or you’re a slut. It was either sex-positive or you were assaulted, and I think you can have all of those things and many more be true of your sexual history, so to not address each side of what that could be felt dishonest. I know that for a trauma survivor, how sex appears in their lives is totally different from a person who has never experienced that. And I thought that this carefree account of “ruttin and sluttin” [a catchy idiom found in Spiegel’s book] with no acknowledgement that this is a reality for so many people, not just women, would be totally negligent. And to lean too heavily on the other side would ignore the fact that people who have had that happen to them still have really robust and positive sex lives. I think it’s still possible to feel good about sex even if you have a very unique relationship to it.
Rumpus: You’re quoted as saying you want to read more about sex and more people should write about it. What advice do you have for other likeminded people who might want to share their thoughts and experiences but are afraid or shy about doing so?
Spiegel: The beautiful thing about being a person on this planet is that nothing you do is new. No matter how odd or offbeat or fetishistic or individualized you might think your experience is, or being afraid of writing about it for fear that you might seem like a total freak, someone else had done it, someone else is currently doing it. And it’s important to diversify the sexual narrative as it stands now in order to reflect that. I think it’s really important that we have a dialogue about sex that accounts for way more than just the experiences of a certain set of people that are an easy party line to toe. I think that sex can be nearly anything when it’s happening and I’d really like to see that acknowledged more publicly. I think it would be really helpful to a lot of people and helpful to the people writing it. It was very helpful for me.
Rumpus: What authors and writers did you look to as an inspiration before picking up and doing it for yourself?
Spiegel: I like most writers who tell first person or fictional accounts of sex that doesn’t look like the sex that I have. So I like Kathy Acker, I like Lynn Kestenbaum. I like Edmund White’s amazing collection of gay short fiction. I like Dennis Cooper’s “The Sluts.” Ashley Reese, who wrote a great column called “The Accidental Virgin.” I’m really impressed by anyone who is very forthcoming about what it has been for them or how they imagine it might be exactly as that is applied to their life. I think that’s cool. I didn’t look to sex columnists or sex advice outlets as much as I did just what I enjoy reading in general.
Rumpus: So many things you discuss in the book seem obvious about sex or being a stellar sexual partner—I’m thinking specifically of the “Grooming” section—because I’d be shocked to find somebody who doesn’t have a hilarious anecdote about someone, say, less than fresh. Do you think that’s why people are responding to the book, because you lay out these seemingly commonplace ideas about being a good partner? Or are you trying to smash those unspoken rules and encourage people to create a new set for themselves?
Spiegel: Oh, I want people to make their own rules completely, entirely. This is a book of suggestions. This is not a book of mandates. I didn’t want to assume that anyone knew anything going into this book. And I didn’t want to assume that I knew anything. It was a lot of talking to my friends about different things. This book is a total pastiche of experiences I’ve heard about as well as my own. It’s amazing too, because we all have blind spots when it comes to sex and even the most basic concept felt as fundamental to me as the hairier shit.
Rumpus: Plus it always makes a good story. I think everyone enjoys hearing about his or her friends, you know…
Spiegel: I mean I do! My friends are surprisingly prim about their sex lives a lot of the time, which I totally get, but when somebody isn’t I want to listen to every single word. I want every detail. Not that this is something I’m leering, panting looking for. I have a married couple that are some of my closest friends, and at their engagement party, both talked to me separately about the sex that they were having, and it was one of my favorite conversations ever because it was so loving and it was so specific and cool. It was so different from the way that I have thought about things. That to me was so fascinating. I think that should be celebrated.
Amy Rose Spiegel twitter image.jpgRumpus: Especially since it’s something you often participate in with only a certain number of people, so it’s natural to be curious about what other people are doing.
Spiegel: I also feel like when a friend or loved one tells you a story it makes everything feel less taboo. I have a friend who was telling me about an encounter with her boyfriend that hinged heavily on a specific kind of sex, and that’s not what I’m doing, but it made me feel like everything is normal. Everything is fine. No one is going to do it the same way, even with the same partner, every time they do it. That’s always really comforting to be reminded of. Plus I love gossip, man. I just love it. [Laughs]
Rumpus: It’s hard not to be impressed by the candor with which you explain your sexual exploits throughout the book, and more so the casual confidence with which you mention them, which in turn makes everything seem really relatable. Even though you didn’t set out to tell people what they should or should not be doing, would you be excited to hear that they took your advice and improved their own sex lives?
Spiegel: Yes! I would be thrilled, that would be the best thing ever. I got a letter from a woman in rural Utah and it was totally galvanizing, so great. She said, your book is making me really excited to crawl out of this hole and get together with a fuck-ton of new people in a way that makes me happy. It was the most gratifying feeling ever. I feel incredibly, incredibly lucky to have elicited that kind of response. I’m beyond grateful.
Rumpus: I think that it’s so easy for people to relate to so many of the stories. For example, my favorite anecdote was about Rex, that Republican who insisted on taking off your shoes for you before hooking up.
Spiegel: I love him.
Rumpus: Do you hope that people who might identify with more of his conservative ideals pick up this book? What do you want them to get out of it from approaching it maybe less open-mindedly?
Spiegel: I really wanted people to disagree with me; to understand that I’m not saying this is how everybody has to do everything or that your daughter, like me, has to be a queer menace on society. I didn’t want that. I wanted to write a book that my high school best friend and my little sister and all the people who had compunctions about certain parts of boning could see as something someone they know could experience and then think about it a little bit. I didn’t want to leave anybody out. I didn’t want to write a book only for people who have healthy sex lives already, although I want them to read it of course. I was really hoping that I could write something about sex that made it feel less fraught with politics or less personally condemning than maybe they thought prior to reading it. I just don’t think it works to completely deny or refuse the points of view of people outside of us even if we vehemently disagree with them. I think that conversation and respect are paramount when getting closer to each other. Which is how sex starts. [Laughs] That’s pretty much how it works, right?
Rumpus: I think the ending section “On Sluts” is potentially the most delicate and most essential conversation regarding people who enjoy sex, primarily for straight and queer women. Aside from your supportive comments to others who identify as “sexual innovators” is there anything else you hope readers of all stripes take away from the book?
Spiegel: Yes, I hope that people who are into having sex with great frequency feel supported and heard, and I hope that people who are asexual and celibate and who are maybe not interested in being sexually romantic also feel supported and heard, and everyone in between is able to see that there are so many realities. There are as many relationships to sex as there are people on this earth, so to say that one way is wrong or one way is right is to be denying the fucking lived humanity of other people. I don’t want to be pushing boning three people in a day more than I am not boning anyone ever if that’s your thing. I wanted the whole panorama of it. Which, of course, I couldn’t do, but I just wanted to promote the idea that it’s important to figure it out for yourself no matter what shape that takes and to feel okay about that. I hope that every single reader at some point in this book either disagrees with me or says that’s not my experience or says I have questions about that or that’s not how that plays out in my life. I’m not here to say this is how you should think about it, but more this is something you should think about and I hope that you do. And I hope that is in some way helpful to you.
Rumpus: You’re a sexual moderator of sorts.
Spiegel: Totally, like I’ve got glasses and a water bottle on the table asking questions about anal.
Rumpus: Yeah, sometimes you need a little help.
Spiegel: Me too.
Action: A Book About Sex
Publishers Weekly. 263.14 (Apr. 4, 2016): p76.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Action: A Book About Sex
Amy Rose Spiegel. Grand Central, $15.99 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-4555-3449-4
Debut author Spiegel charms with frank, empowering advice on embracing one's sexuality without apology. After advising that feeling good about one's self is crucial to good sex, she divides her wise book into three sections: "Ready for Action" (on mentally preparing for sex), "Where the Action Is" (finding sexual partners), and "Pieces of the Action"(advice on dealing with embarrassing moments, such as when someone walks in on you when you're masturbating and there's period blood all over the bed). No sexual subject is off limits, including enjoying anal sex, giving a blow job, buying sex toys and lingerie, group sex etiquette, sexually transmitted diseases, pornography, and fetishes. Even the sensitive topic of sexual assault is skillfully handled, with an eye toward reassuring and empowering assault survivors. Spiegel's witty, slapstick style of prose veers into the absurd (such as discussing the possible fetish of ben-wa balls embossed with the faces of America's founding fathers) but the advice is warm and sensible. Spiegel liberally dishes about sexual experiences from her life, personalizing the book. This should be required reading for anyone even considering having sex for the first time. (May)
Love, and Do What You Will
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Amy Rose Spiegel writes a sex advice book for a progressive generation.
By Christina Cauterucci
action book illo.
Matt Cummings
It’s a shame I had to wait until age 28 to read Amy Rose Spiegel’s Action: A Book About Sex. That’s not to say 28 is too old to delight in Spiegel’s coquettish writing or learn any new tricks from her exhaustive autobiographical register of sexual encounters—on the contrary, this old dog took plenty of both from her slim nonfiction debut. But had I gotten my hands on this book as, say, a ninth grader, I might have dodged a few unsavory trysts with less-than-ideal sexual partners, not to mention evenings spent spiraling into shame and self-doubt.
Christina Cauterucci
CHRISTINA CAUTERUCCI
Christina Cauterucci is a Slate staff writer.
Action is a sex advice book for a new, progressive generation, one whose views on sex are informed by a basic ethos of fluid sexuality, body positivity, and feminist responses to rape culture. In stark contrast to the women’s-magazine school of bedroom instruction (“Surprise your man by waking him up with a blowjob twice a week!”), Spiegel centers her guidance on finding personal and physical fulfillment. She opens with a quote from St. Augustine, of all people—“Love, and do what you will”—and a lengthy disclaimer stipulating she does not expect readers to agree with all of her recommendations, just to use her perspective as a jumping-off point for their own self-guided discoveries. “Imposing broad, uncritical rules on sex rankles me—this is right; this is wrong,” she writes. “I prefer to think, Yo! This is possible? Fascinating!”
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But fear not, horndogs: There are plenty of explicit step-by-steps in here, too, many of them neutral to gender, if not genital. How surprisingly radical it feels to read a directive on handling the balls of your partner, your sexual teammate, or your hunky simpleton, and not your man! Spiegel even decouples the word sex from the act of penile-vaginal or penile-anal or penile-anything intercourse, instead defining the concept as “whatever act fills in the gaps between any number of bodies, which of course includes—and can even extend exclusively to—the brains operating them.” In Action’s working glossary, that includes solo sex and cybersex. Though Spiegel’s commitment to inclusive, painstakingly broad language can make some of her advice turn in on itself—an anal dildo should either be smaller or larger than a vaginal one, she writes—it’s worth it to read an entire book that resists the mainstream centering of sex on the heterosexual male orgasm.
Spiegel’s voice is that of a hip, super-knowledgeable babysitter, the kind you wish you’d had.
Spiegel’s prose is peppered with conversational bon mots and unbound from fusty norms of style and grammar. (Spiegel is particularly fond of ALL CAPS for emphasis.) Her voice is that of a hip, super-knowledgeable babysitter, the kind you wish you’d had and that your parents, if they were anything like mine, would have rather left you home with a set of matches and a flammable nightgown than hire. She’s affirming, maternal even, in a way that feels comforting and somehow completely genuine. In one of her many discussions about sexual assault and consent, Spiegel presents a hypothetical encounter with a jerk who makes his partner feel guilty or unsure about her boundaries. “The idea of even the potential of that happening to you,” Spiegel writes, “makes me want to mail a congressperson a stink bomb and yell obscene, hideous things at a beautiful phenomenon of nature—ideally a canyon, but definitely a majestic, centuries-old sycamore, at least.” I believe her.
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Honed during her tenure at Rookie, the online magazine for teen girls that’s attracted a sizable following of twentysomethings, Spiegel’s talent for writing thoughtful advice without condescending to her readers shines brightest when combining no-nonsense real talk with reassurances that almost nothing is as life-alteringly tragic as it seems in youth. A detailed segment on making DIY nudie pics and videos counsels readers concerned about privacy to “consider not taking them, because there’s no such thing as totally secure data anymore, even if the other person guards your attachments as closely as they can.” But in a worst-case scenario, “your life is never ‘over’ if photographic evidence of your involvement in adult practices is discovered.” Have you queefed, farted, prematurely ejaculated, expelled menstrual fluids, or otherwise committed a natural bodily function in bed? That’s nothing to be ashamed of, and if your partner makes you feel bad for it, “kick them to the curb with no compunction.” In fact, writes the highly qualified author, “fucking up is how you go pro.”
Amy Rose Spiegel.
Amy Rose Spiegel.
Jordan Hemingway
That’s a lesson most teenagers could stand to learn before they first have sex—and Action is brimming with them. Spiegel leads intrepid explorations of the physical and philosophical impasses that often lead to years of middling sex: How can I buy a sex toy at a store without acting awkward? Which kind of lube goes with which kind of device? When should I tell my date I have an STI? What household items should I hide before a lover comes over—in order of priority, please, because she’ll be here in five minutes? What do I call my transgender partner’s genitals? How can I get my boo to welcome the idea of a threesome and how should I behave as the third leg of another couple’s triangle? What do we think about pubic hair? What if my identity as a feminist conflicts with my desire to watch a fake-breasted woman get face-fucked on the internet? Spiegel deconstructs the social forces weighing on each dilemma with the sensitive precision of a bomb-squad technician and the chatty irreverence of, well, a sex columnist.
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Most of Action’s blind spots are a result of Spiegel’s confessional-style reporting on her own dramatized sexual experiences, which can be at odds with her goal of preaching to a wide audience on matters of the bedroom. On flirting, Spiegel claims that 80 percent of the time, saying something honest and weird will get someone to talk to you, and 25 percent of those times the discussion could end in a kiss—if you want. “These are bullshit statistics culled from the field,” she declares. “I am not a numbers guy, but they feel really true?” That question mark is cute and familiar but may confound a novice reader taking diligent notes. Some may balk at Action’s examples of tried-and-true pickup lines, which include statements you might feel justify a knee to the groin: “If you were a hamburger at McDonald’s, I would call you McBeautiful”; “I want to make out with you in a kitchen made of fur.” There are nearly six how-to pages on fellatio, just under two on cunnilingus, and, curiously, none at all on penetrative vaginal sex with implements other than fingers.
What Action lacks in encyclopedic breadth, it makes up for in good-natured encouragement and trust in its readers: I won’t yuck your yum, Spiegel seems to say, and don’t you dare yuck mine. She hasn’t just had a lot of sex—she worships it and treasures it for more than its carnal pleasures, using sexual connection as a means of exploring the world and the self. In a world increasingly capable of accepting that young women can and do want to have a lot of sex—including queer, kinky, and nonmonogamous varieties—Action offers an idea of the next frontier of sexual liberation: Ensuring that all that sex is not only safe and consensual, but good.
Amy Rose Spiegel's Action: a candid guide to 21st-century sexual politics
Part self-help book and part memoir, Action: A Book About Sex sees the former Rookie editor break down sexual barriers and do away with outmoded ‘taboos’
Amy Rose Spiegel’s Action trades in facts and candour
Amy Rose Spiegel’s Action trades in facts and candour. Photograph: Brand New Images/Getty Images
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Laura Snapes
Friday 20 May 2016 12.20 EDT Last modified on Friday 3 February 2017 12.59 EST
While she was writing her first book, Amy Rose Spiegel regularly abandoned her apartment to install herself in various hotels and motels around New York City, including a dive in Queens overlooking the site of the 1964 World’s Fair, and a Rockaway Beach locale where she was handed a joint on entry. Action: A Book About Sex, feels as though it could have been written in an apartment at 28 Barbary Lane, the bohemian residence at the heart of Armistead Maupin’s cult queer series Tales Of The City.
A former editor at Rookie Magazine, 25-year-old Spiegel is a literary stylist whose writing betrays an infectious sense of life’s possibilities: “Gilding the kingdom of your brain will help you establish a ‘sex life’ by building, first, a multilayered ‘life’, no modifiers,” she declares, in a book that has little in common with The Joy Of Sex’s fleshy morass. She’ll use Latin epithets to discuss rim jobs, and a combination of Federico García Lorca’s poetry and the McDonald’s menu to talk about flirting. There’s a magnetic groove to her tone that feels straight out of Maupin’s 1970s, but Action is a sex book for 21st-century sexual politics, and the first written for a generation for whom gender and sexual fluidity are a matter of course rather than a curio.
Spiegel’s gift is being able to write with total inclusivity – for queer, trans, straight, asexual and celibate bodies and desires – without scrimping on specificity (sections include “how to eat a pussy” and “an introduction to ass”). But it also doesn’t get bogged down in those differences of identity. “I find that so often the tone of sex writing is very heteronormative and based in what you could be doing as opposed to the fact that you’re probably doing plenty that’s right,” says Spiegel, video-chatting from her Brooklyn apartment. “The fact that there’s even a ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ approach to sex probably feels like a trap. It’s often more discouraging than encouraging. And I feel like the more that people focus on the differences of people of different genders and sexes, the more it reinforces that.”
Action is broken down into three acts: preparation, sex and its various potential aftermaths. The hardest parts to write were the “straightforward parts that dealt with pragmatic sexual advice”, she says, because she was aware of the fact that advice can be as limiting as it is helpful. “Giving advice is to say, ‘this is the way to do it’, and I really wanted to be conscious of not inspiring that feeling in somebody else.” Publisher Grand Central is billing Action as a self-help book, though it’s also been referred to as a memoir. It feels more like a wise and experienced companion, whose belief in the reader, whom Spiegel addresses frequently, feels like a dare to trust that you could follow her confident and charming lead.
Amy Rose Spiegel: ‘Not talking about sex is as oppressive as not talking about money’
Amy Rose Spiegel: ‘Not talking about sex is as oppressive as not talking about money.’ Photograph: Jordan Hemingway
While trading in facts and candour, Action is a dispatch from a fantasy world where respect, consent and health are the enshrined foundation of all relationships, matters on which Spiegel is unequivocal. Spiegel treats experiences of a partner stating that they have had an STI, or asking her if she’s been tested recently, as a matter of honesty rather than shame. Early on, she establishes that by “consensual sex”, we simply mean “sex”, and debunks the term “sex positivity” for the negative alternative it connotes. “There’s an enormous usefulness in those terms because, sadly, a lot of the time, those aren’t things that are considered the run-of-the-mill approach,” she says. “It’s confusing for someone who doesn’t read frequently about sex or identity to have those things be separate, and I wanted to really drive home the point that that should be a part of the sex that you’re having, always! It shouldn’t be something that you feel you have to look for or identify as its own category.”
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Illuminating the darker corners of sexual discourse is key to Action’s philosophy: “Not talking about sex is as oppressive as not talking about money,” Spiegel writes, likening the notion to Michel Foucault’s idea of “repressive hypothesis”, from his book A History Of Sexuality, by which we reinforce the taboo around certain subjects by continuing to refer to them as taboo. Pitching the book helped Spiegel overcome her own fears about sex writing. Examining the anxiety, she found that she harboured internalised misogyny about the kind of woman who “writes about sex to get attention”, she says. “My fear was of the stigma of being a woman who talks openly about sex and is seen as brazen or in some way unseemly, which is a form of oppression, because it disallows you from owning something that is, in a lot of people’s cases, a huge part of your life. When I started parsing that, I realised that it was something I really wanted to work on.”
As a teenager in her native New Jersey, Spiegel’s public high school sex education had focused mainly on abstinence. “It was not at all positive, not at all representative of queer experiences,” she says. “It was scare tactics. I knew at the time – everybody did – that it was a joke, but there wasn’t an alternative.” While she had positive sexual experiences as a teenager, she says that the poor education “left a mark for a while on the way that I perceived what was OK and socially acceptable in terms of sex, and being open about it.” As an English literature major at New York’s Pace University, she loved exploring and contemplating her sexuality, but was guarded about her experiences. “There was no way of making it external for a long time, until I started writing about it.”
Writing about sex helped me realise how few resources I had encountered
After graduation, Spiegel became one of Rookie’s story editors, covering sex, culture and beauty for the teen-girl publication. “Writing about sex helped me realise how few resources I had encountered,” Spiegel recalls. “And especially writing for teenagers was useful because they had tons of questions about it. It made me realise it’s OK to try and think about this together, and that was a hugely formative experience.” She wrote Action with one hand on poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum’s My 1980s, “basically pledging my life to it”, she says, calling him “the absolute god”. EB White, the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and New Yorker critic Hilton Als were also fundamental to developing her inimitable style. “I want writing that feels very much accepting and comfortable with itself, even if that means forging a new way of speaking.”
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You can also hear the foundations of Action’s pleasure principle in Bikini Kill’s I Like Fucking, where Kathleen Hanna sings: “I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe.” Spiegel negotiates pleasure from every angle: the literal ins and outs, her desire to put attentive lovers into “a blackout orgasm”, how to make educated purchases in a sex shop, and thornier desires, like using rape as a fantasy. At its heart, Action advocates for living with honesty and respect for yourself and others, and celebrates curiosity and confidence: the first section works as a guide to living a kind and fulfilling life, linking it with the ur-sex text, the Kama Sutra.
It’s a common enough idea that you have to learn to love yourself before you can love anyone else, but that philosophy is rarely articulated with as much practicality and generosity as she pulls off here. “Sex is hard to extricate from the rest of what it is to be a person,” she says. “As I was writing the book, I realised that was fundamental, these baseline understandings of how to come at sex from a loving and responsible standpoint are rooted so firmly in the rest of how you live your life, and the rest of how you come to relationships.”
Action: A Book About Sex is out now via Grand Central Publishing
A Book About Sex That Doesn’t Talk Down To You
Amy Rose Spiegel’s “Action” gets it.
05/16/2016 12:08 pm ET | Updated May 20, 2016
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Jillian Capewell
Entertainment News Editor, The Huffington Post
GETTY
The epigraph for Action: A Book About Sex comes from St. Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions: “Love, and do what you will.” On the next page, author Amy Rose Spiegel explains her connection to this philosophy, and one other tenet Augustine held dear: “the pursuit of sex.”
This combination of ideas — starting with love and kindness while maintaining a focus on sexuality — is an apt beginning. The Action chapters that follow offer a singular exploration of what it means to be a human who has sex, with how-to sections that cover everything from hand-job techniques to boosting self-confidence and surrounding oneself with a life they love.
Spiegel inserts her own narrative within the instruction, which makes the book less like a textbook and more like it’s a long, handwritten letter covered in cool stickers from a best friend or older sister. Throughout, Spiegel remains thoughtful, informative and sensitive, writing in a way that invites any reader, regardless of gender identity or sexuality, to take part.
“I feel like advice walks a really heavy line in terms of ... you’re telling somebody what to do but you’re also telling them what not to do,” Spiegel explained in a recent phone conversation with The Huffington Post. It’s true: when offering a directive on how to live a certain way, the implicit message is that other ways are, as a result, less than. Balancing that line, of wanting to provide practical advice without excluding readers, was something Spiegel had at the forefront of her mind when writing.
HACHETTE
“I do believe in being explicit when it comes to giving advice, but I also didn’t want to preclude other attitudes or other inclinations within those things,” she said. So Spiegel drew from her own experiences as well as research, which meant delving into academic works and simply asking others around her about their experiences.
“For me, I wanted to start out with the baseline that consent is the thing that you need in order to make the rest of the vehicle of sex go. Like, that is the gasoline. You need consent,” Spiegel said. Beyond that, she knew other topics she wanted to cover: gender, group sex, queerness, polyamory, etc. “I really wanted to make sure I hit [everything], from the most basic-feeling stuff — and what’s basic is different for everyone; basic can mean polyamorous, it can mean, like, how the fuck do I give a blow job? — to the most complex, which are those same topics, just flipped, depending on how you feel.”
And why is advice like this so crucial to give? Even in an age when questions like “what is a threesome like” to “what is consent” bring up thousands of search-engine results, finding real talk about sex — heck, even talking about it at all — is rare. Early on in Action, Spiegel brings up Michel Foucault’s idea of the “repressive hypothesis” from his book A History of Sexuality. In layman’s terms, she explained, it’s the idea of saying, “‘Oh, well we all have to suffer this thing. No one talks about it. What a shame that we don’t talk about it.’ But in doing that, you’re reinforcing it.”
For me, I wanted to start out with the baseline that consent is the thing that you need in order to make the rest of the vehicle of sex go. Like, that is the gasoline.
Amy Rose Spiegel
It goes without saying that the state of sex education in America’s high schools is dismal. “I really had no sex education growing up,” Spiegel said. “I feel like there’s an assumption, as with money in America, that you know what you’re doing and you have a baseline understanding of what’s going on. But that’s not the case.”
I can easily picture myself devouring Action as a teenager with questions about sex and no clear way to find the answers. Misinformation concerning sex can lead to dangerous, life-altering outcomes, and instead of clutching our pearls as we’ve historically done, we could use resources like this book in the hope of promoting more open, informed sexual futures for everyone.
This drive to confront the uncomfortable extended to Spiegel’s writing process, too. Talking about the idea of writing about sex as a woman, she explained that “you’re so afraid of counting yourself out,” and being pigeonholed as a writer. “So sex was the last thing I wanted to write about,” she said, “but in that way, I find that the hardest thing to write that I encounter is the thing I have to write about.”
“The things that you don’t want to write about are often the most worthy,” Spiegel continued. “I had no idea that I would find myself here, but I’m really happy I did.”
Her work as a writer and editor for Rookie was an encouraging place to explore this idea. “I commissioned a lot of stories, and I assigned a lot of stories that were specifically about sex. And at Rookie, I was really lucky to be working with writers who thought about it in the way that they think about everything else, which is just that it’s part of the main framework of life as much as, like, podcasts or reading.”
This notion, that sex is important but also just another expected part of life —
“I think every sex life is a normal sex life,” Spiegel said at one point — is the artery that gives life to Action, that dictates every topic she covers. This book sends a valuable message from those just starting out to those who’ve seen it all: one of love, one that echoes the Augustine quote where it began. And even through the advice she imparts, it’s clear Spiegel is still learning herself.
“I am literally a person with cat hair on her shirt right now, like, it’s all fine,” she said. “Everyone is. Everyone is! No one is better at this than anyone.”
Action, from Grand Central Publishing, comes out on May 17.
Review - Action
A Book about Sex
by Amy Rose Spiegel
Hachette Audio, 2016
Review by Christian Perring
Jul 12th 2016 (Volume 20, Issue 28)
Amy Rose Spiegel lives in Brooklyn, is in her mid-twenties, and has a lot of sex, and her advice book, Action, seems to be aimed at people like her. She doesn't seem particularly interested in longer-term relationships and doesn't like staying overnight with her lovers. She presents a way of life that will appeal to many but more as a fantasy than a real option. Her world is one where people don't have commitments or children, and engage in perpetual flirting and random sexual encounters. Her primary orientation is to enjoy exciting new people and give them sexual pleasure, as part of her own personal growth. She sees each person as an individual and does not like labels. She writes fairly generally about sex and says very little about any particular sex she has had. Her tone is chatty and reads like she is speaking off the cuff. The unabridged audiobook is performed by her, and she brings her words to life. The kind of life she enjoys and discusses is one of hookups and short term relationships, and how to do that in an honest and caring way. She talks about kissing strangers, and trying different things with all sorts of people. It is essential in her view to be playful and communicative about one's own wishes. She also recommends being honest and open-minded. She says that to be silent about sex is oppressive. So her writing about sex is an act of liberation.
While the idea of a life exploratory life-expanding sex with lots of people sounds pretty great, I was reminded of Erica Jong's novel Fear of Flying, and the impossible search for the zipless fuck. While Spiegel gives excellent advice about fingering, oral sex and anal sex, she says nothing about the emotional complexities of short term relationships, and in particular, the fact that people get infatuated and upset when someone they have been having sex with decides that it is over. She briefly mentions that she takes meds for ADHD and anxiety, but says very little about the causes of her anxiety, apart from some about her body image. Of course, I've watched HBO's Girls and I've met people who live lives without long term relationships. But most people, especially after college, are looking for a partner; maybe not a life partner, but someone they can be with for a while. So Action seems separated from most people's lives and does not grapple with a major emotional side of sex. But it is a fun read with some interesting insights on modern sex.