Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Unwifeable
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 10/24/1975
WEBSITE: www.mandystadtmiller.com
CITY:
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| HEADING: | Stadtmiller, Mandy |
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| 670 | __ |a Unwifeable, [2018] |b ECIP t.p. (Mandy Stadtmiller) datasheet (advice columnist for New York magazine and the New York Post) |
PERSONAL
Born October 24, 1975; married Pat Dixon, 2015.
EDUCATION:Northwestern University, graduated, 1997.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. New York Post, NY, reporter; xoJane.com, NY, writer and editor-at-large; New York, columnist. Host of the podcast, News Whore.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including the Des Moines Register, Maxim, Time Out, Village Voice, and Washington Post.
SIDELIGHTS
Mandy Stadtmiller is a journalist based in New York. She holds a degree from Northwestern University. Stadtmiller has served as a reporter for the New York Post, and editor-at-large and writer at the xoJane.com website, and a columnist at New York Magazine. She has also hosted a podcast called News Whore. Articles by Stadtmiller have appeared in publications, including the Des Moines Register, Maxim, Time Out, Village Voice, and the Washington Post.
In 2018, Stadtmiller released her first book, Unwifeable: A Memoir. In this volume, she chronicles her sexual and romantic history. She tells of her rape as a teenager, her unsuccessful first marriage, the years she spent living promiscuously, and her eventual stable and happy marriage to her current husband.
In an interview with Marianne Garvey, contributor to the Bravo website, Stadtmiller explained how she developed the book’s title. She stated: “I’ve always been fascinated by how men talk about women when no one is around. … Snoop Dogg in particular once lambasted Kim Kardashian by saying of her first husband, ‘You shouldn’t have tried to wife the bitch, man; she’s not that type of ho.’ I asked myself, is that my problem with relationships? Am I just ‘not that kind of ho?’ Am I actually unwifeable?” Stadtmiller told Elena Nicolaou, writer on the Refinery 29 website: “I thought about ‘unwifeable’ in the context of how I was often received by men who often looked very nervous after they googled me. Everyone does that. Everyone sizes someone up within the first five minutes. To me, unwifeable is an incredibly broad, sexist, and limiting term that I tried to reclaim and unpack through telling my own experiences in love and dating.”
“Laying bare her soul and uncomfortable correspondences, and dropping plenty of names, Stadtmiller wins readers over with ease,” asserted Annie Bostrom in Booklist. In a lengthy assessment of the book on the New Yorker website, Naomi Fry suggested: “Stadtmiller is a sure, easy writer, and her plight arouses sympathy, not least because she doesn’t attempt to make any of it sound pretty, or better than it was. But it’s hard to forget that many of the experiences that she churned quickly into blog posts for money are some of the same ones that she is retelling in Unwifeable, a book that is framed as—finally!—an act of true unburdening.” Fry added: “Compared with the xoJane posts, Unwifeable has a downbeat, reflective tenor. But, of course, this newfound honesty-via-monogamy is its own kind of performance. And who’s to say whether letting go of performance is even possible at all?”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2018, Annie Bostrom, review of Unwifeable: A Memoir, p. 34.
ONLINE
Bravo Online, http://www.bravotv.com/ (August 22, 2018), Marianne Garvey, author interview.
Chicago Tribune Online, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (October 15, 2018), author profile.
Mashable, https://mashable.com/ (October 15, 2018), author profile.
New Yorker Online, https://www.newyorker.com/ (May 17, 2018), Naomi Fry, review of Unwifeable.
Refinery 29, https://www.refinery29.com/ (May 10, 2018), Elena Nicolaou, author interview and review of Unwifeable.
Northwestern alum penning memoir about her dating disasters
Mandy Stadtmiller
Writer Mandy Stadtmiller attended Northwestern University and lived in Chicago. (Shameless Photography)
Tracy SwartzTracy SwartzContact ReporterChicago Tribune
New York magazine columnist Mandy Stadtmiller has landed a book deal about her failed romantic relationships that date back to her time as a Northwestern University student.
The memoir "Unwifeable" -- the same name as her weekly New York column -- is due out next year, Simon and Schuster imprint Gallery Books announced this week.
Stadtmiller, 41, studied journalism at Northwestern from 1993-97. She wrote for her alma mater, performed stand-up comedy and hatched a blog called Bloggy McBlogalot while living in Chicago from 1999-2005.
MOST READ ENTERTAINMENT NEWS THIS HOUR
She went on to write for the New York Post -- one assignment included visiting a Nevada brothel to "have a go" with America's first legal male prostitute -- xoJane and Penthouse Forum, among other outlets.
She married comedian Pat Dixon in 2015.
Mandy Stadtmiller is a New York-based writer and editor-at-large of xoJane.com. She is the host of the “News Whore” podcast on the Riotcast Network and is writing a new weekly relationship series on Amazon called “Dear TMI-ary.” She has written for the New York Post, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, Maxim, Time Out, the Des Moines Register, In These Times and Penthouse. You can follow her on Twitter at @mandystadt.
QUOTED: "Laying bare her soul and uncomfortable correspondences, and dropping plenty of names, Stadtmiller wins readers over with ease."
Unwifeable
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p34. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Unwifeable. By Mandy Stadtmiller. Apr. 2018.320p. Gallery, $27 (978-501174032). 070.
A woman isn't born unwifeable; she becomes it. Or does she? Stadtmillers outrageously entertaining, candid, and well-written memoir begins with her escape from Chicago and her emotionally abusive marriage at age 30 for a job as a reporter for the New York Post. Stadtmiller, who studied journalism at Northwestern, quickly learns the sticky business that is the gossip beat. When her coverage morphs into a weekly dating column, "About Last Night," its hard to tell where research ends and life begins. She spends years mostly happily dating a clenched-teeth upper-cruster before realizing he will never marry her (but not before sending him an email detailing the reasons why he should, reproduced here in all its cringe-inducing glory). She faced it: she was unwifeable, and she'd do all the partying and relationship sabotaging to prove it. Luckily, confronting her past and her addictions led to a new understanding of herself, and to finding the love of her life. Laying bare her soul and uncomfortable correspondences, and dropping plenty of names, Stadtmiller wins readers over with ease.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Unwifeable." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 34. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956784/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0e561933. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956784
1 of 1 9/30/18, 11:13 PM
QUOTED: "I thought about ‘unwifeable’ in the context of how I was often received by men who often looked very nervous after they googled me. Everyone does that. Everyone sizes someone up within the first five minutes. To me, unwifeable is an incredibly broad, sexist, and limiting term that I tried to reclaim and unpack through telling my own experiences in love and dating."
In Unwifeable, Mandy Stadtmiller Describes What It's Like To Bare Her Darkest Secrets For A Living
Elena Nicolaou
May 10, 2018, 9:40 AM
Before delving into our discussion about her new memoir, Unwifeable, the first thing Mandy Stadtmiller tells me is that I need to download the voice recorder app she swears by. Journalistic advice is a fitting start to our conversation, because while Stadtmiller's memoir, out April 3, is ostensibly a book about the intersection of addiction and dating, it's also a book about a woman willing to follow her journalistic ambition to all the strange places it takes her — like sex clubs and a meeting with a Las Vegas gigolo.
Unwifeable begins when Stadtmiller arrives in New York at the age of 30 to begin her new job at the New York Post. Newly divorced, Stadtmiller finds the world of dating as boundless as the world of journalism. She establishes herself as a household name as the Post's sex and dating columnist, blogging about her relationships with men (like the bland, excruciatingly preppy "Blaine") in installments. Later, Stadtmiller becomes an editor and uber-confessional columnist for the now-defunct website xoJane — often positioning herself as "the girl you love to hate." But is that who Stadtmiller was, or wanted to be?
In Unwifeable, Stadtmiller bares the truth of what was happening behind all those columns — uncomfortable encounters with stars, a dark struggle with addiction, and persistent acts of self-destruction. Unwifeable is a compulsively readable memoir. Through hard work and reckonings, Stadmiller's sense of self shifts throughout the book, culminating in something she never expected would happen: a happy marriage, and a memoir that reads more like a revelation than a confessional column. I sat down with Stadtmiller to discuss her memoir in more detail.
What does "unwifeable" mean to you?
“‘Unwifeable’ was a term I’d heard used before in culture. I thought about how much it resonated with me, and how much it angered me, and how much it made me want to get a giant punching bag for the Madonna/whore dichotomy and obliterate it. I thought about ‘unwifeable’ in the context of how I was often received by men who often looked very nervous after they googled me. Everyone does that. Everyone sizes someone up within the first five minutes. To me, unwifeable is an incredibly broad, sexist, and limiting term that I tried to reclaim and unpack through telling my own experiences in love and dating.”
You made a career writing about your life, both at the Post and xoJane. Have you always wanted to write a memoir?
“From the moment that I got to New York, everyone said, 'Do a book! Do a book!' It’s something you’re told if you work at a newspaper or a website. It feels like this — not pressure, but the ‘next leveling’ of your ability as a writer. The problem was that a lot of my initial cracks at writing about my past were done with a real sense of resentment and victimization and self-pity. Or just total lack of authenticity, where I was trying to sell myself as a ‘Seven Tips and Tricks To Get That Man’ kind of expert. That’s never been my area of expertise. I would read all the books — Why Men Marry Bitches, The Rules — but I have the kind of personality where I start to feel dead inside if I employ that in my own life. I eventually have to call myself out on it, or I feel a little crazy."
So many of the people that you’re writing about are public figures. Did you ever hesitate to name names, or include certain stories?
“If I were a total opportunist, I could have reframed minor flames and flirtations as being these epic things, and then tried to bank on someone’s reputation, body of work, and everything they had built up in their life — recognizing that’s what I did when I was starfucking it up. It’s a good recognition to have. God forbid I work on my own body of work. Why not just latch on to someone who’s figured it out and get validation and self-worth through everything they’ve done? That’s usually not the best way.”
At one point, you write about the period you were dating media giants Aaron Sorkin, Keith Olbermann, and Lloyd Grove at the same time. I geared up for gossip, but you cut my expectations off. You wrote, “While the nihilistic old me would hash out the entirety of this gossip (and I could fill several books), I now realize that that’s the same person who didn't think she was worth anyone on her own...so I will only relay the highlights of this love triangle.”
"My editor had me go back and put more in. I hope there’s enough to get people’s desires for stories sated. But to completely throw people under the bus who trusted me — and also, all three of them, there’s nothing to throw them under the bus with. You can paint a nun as being a dickhead if you want, depending on the selectivity, quotes, and framing."
You’ve been airing your personal life for so long. What’s it like to have strangers talking about you, and for them to have opinions on how you're living your life?
“Are you familiar with the Overton Window? It’s a nice way of explaining cultural shifts in society. Between the time in working at the Post, a fairly conservative tabloid institution, and working at an intensely liberal feminist website like XoJane, the culture also dramatically shifted. And the Overton Window shifted in terms of what was acceptable to talk about and write about, and what was not acceptable anymore. A lot of cultural mores shifted during that time.
"When I was coming to xoJane, I was very naive about a lot of issues. I’d never heard about body acceptance politics. I remember a girl pitched me something about an eating disorder and I was like, 'Great, do you have picture of yourself when you were at your lowest weight?' I had no idea. Because in the tabloid Post world, you want the shocking picture. That’s something [xoJane founders] Emily [McCombs] and Jane [Pratt] were protective about initially. Some of the stuff I sent them when I first starting writing there was like, 'Hey, how’s this for an unlikable female narrator?' And they said, 'Well, kind of let people get to know you first.' I was so willing to sell myself out, rather than thinking – oh, well that’s personal, Mandy."
It’s probably hard for you to know what’s personal when, by that point, you had already bared your intimate life in the Post column for years.
“I think my brain rotted a little bit, from my inability to imagine a life where I didn’t write about my romantic life. On one hand, I respect the fact that that’s the writing that oftentimes resonated with people the most. I also think there’s something weirdly perverse about bedding men based on not wanting to repeat the experience of what happened with Blaine. It’s like, am I a fucking casting director in Hollywood, choosing the Bachelor? That’s an infinitely sick perspective with which to confront one of the greatest pathways to human happiness, which is an authentic relationship with another person.”
It’s like you became a character, and the column was the novel. There’s a tangible difference in the chapters about Blaine and the chapters about Pat Dixon, your husband. You communicate so differently with them.
“I was always trying to gain Blaine. I was always trying to work him. To produce him. What a nightmare! No wonder I broke and sabotaged the whole relationship and went down a rabbit hole of drugs, sex, and drinking. You eventually have to let out all the ticking-time-bomb conflict and denied humanity that you pushed down within yourself.”
Your first date with Pat was actually a marketing set-up. It was a fake date. You handed him a list of your five main relationship needs — and it worked! How do you think that blunt communication might help the dating process at large?
"I’ve never been asked that. That’s freakin' hysterical. I kind of love that. My friend, Jenn Hoffman, said, 'Do you not realize how hilarious that is? That it took you doing a completely marketing, branded, phony thing for you to get real? For you to tell a man what you needed and what you deserved?' I’d never really quite realized the starkness of that contrast. I love the idea of women doing the 2-minute date as a challenge and seeing what happens. At the very least, it would be a fascinating litmus test. We have all these cultural litmus tests — 'You don’t like The Graduate? You don’t eat meat? Bye.' But a relationship expectation litmus test would be a fascinating thing to try."
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QUOTED: "I’ve always been fascinated by how men talk about women when no one is around. ... Snoop Dogg in particular once lambasted Kim Kardashian by saying of her first husband, ‘You shouldn't have tried to wife the bitch, man; she's not that type of ho.’ I asked myself, is that my problem with relationships? Am I just ‘not that kind of ho?’ Am I actually unwifeable?"
his Woman Called Herself "Unwifeable" — Then Married the Love of Her Life
Author Mandy Stadtmiller wrote a hit book all about her journey.
by Marianne Garvey
August 22, 2018 • 12:21 PM ET
Email
Mandy Stadtmiller’s memoir Unwifeable kicks off with her arrival in New York at the age of 30 to begin a job as a reporter at the New York Post, where she eventually becomes their star dating columnist.
She ended up writing about much more than her love life. She hooks up with a gigolo and dates various celebrities. (Yes, she spills secrets.) Her struggles with addiction and eating are also themes throughout the book, and while in the throes of it, she determines she is “unwifeable.” As it turns out, Stadtmiller does lead us to a happy ending, landing in a fulfilling marriage with the love of her life.
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So, how did she go from Unwifeable to happily married? Personal Space talks to the author about her journey.
Personal Space: When and how did the term "Unwifeable" pop into your brain?
Mandy Stadtmiller: “I’ve always been fascinated by how men talk about women when no one is around, and so many refer to either the kind of girl you want to ‘wife up’ or someone who you want to ‘hit and quit it.’ Snoop Dogg in particular once lambasted Kim Kardashian by saying of her first husband, ‘You shouldn't have tried to wife the bitch, man; she's not that type of ho.’ I asked myself, is that my problem with relationships? Am I just ‘not that kind of ho?’ Am I actually unwifeable? I Googled the term and saw it used sparingly although ‘undateable’ was far more common in the zeitgeist.”
PS: Did you ever think that one day that the dark experiences you had would lead to an incredible future?
MS: “Above all else, I really try to be all about resilience. So even when I was on the verge of self-destruction, I think there was always some light mixed in with the dark, where I was trying to find my way out of chaos into something more authentic and real. And my true nature and spirit — wanting to live a life of adventure and risk and fearlessness — just needed the right outlet. Sex, drugs and self-immolation were the twisting of good impulses — to break out of my shell — expressed in destructive activities because I was too afraid to look deeper at my underlying issues.”
PS: I love the way you describe your parents in the book. You're so honest but still careful not to hurt their feelings. What was their reaction to the stories you tell in it? (Stadtmiller tells uncomfortable stories of growing up and manages to give details of her parents true personalities while remaining incredibly kind to them.)
MS: “They loved it, although it was a process to be sure. Writing about my parents was one of the most healing parts of the book, for sure, and from what I've gathered from reader feedback, one of the most resonant themes of Unwifeable for many people. It's so wild how we all wrestle with our own highly personalized (and very specific to our own life journey) versions of the family shame narrative. I did try to be careful not to hurt my parents, but we had some surreal conversations to negotiate what I would and wouldn't include. In the end, I think it brought us a lot closer.”
PS: Do you think/know you're wifeable now?
MS: “I do. And I think I always was, which is the most wild part of self-discovery, just realizing how easily we can flip the script on deeply ingrained stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. That's the theory behind the site I just started to kind of extend that moral of the book. It's called Un-Yourself. Essentially, what story are you committing to right now that might not be true or could be reinterpreted into something tremendous and filled with potential? Because think about it. There's, ‘Ugh, unbelievable.’ And then there's, ‘OMG, unbelievable!’ We can always choose to reframe what we think are the most doom and gloom parts of our personal story. There is a true sense of possibility, always.”
Here is a smiling Mandy with her husband, comedian Pat Dixon.
Personal Space is Bravo's home for all things "relationships," from romance to friendships to family to co-workers. Ready for a commitment? Then Like us on Facebook to stay connected to our daily updates.
QUOTED: "Stadtmiller is a sure, easy writer, and her plight arouses sympathy, not least because she doesn’t attempt to make any of it sound pretty, or better than it was. But it’s hard to forget that many of the experiences that she churned quickly into blog posts for money are some of the same ones that she is retelling in Unwifeable, a book that is framed as—finally!—an act of true unburdening."
"Compared with the xoJane posts, “Unwifeable” has a downbeat, reflective tenor. But, of course, this newfound honesty-via-monogamy is its own kind of performance. And who’s to say whether letting go of performance is even possible at all?"
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Whither the Slut? Mandy Stadtmiller and Karley Sciortino Reveal All
By Naomi Fry
May 17, 2018
In her memoir, “Slutever,” Karley Sciortino concentrates not on the pain caused by sluttiness but on the pleasure it has brought her.
Photograph by Michael Nagle / NYT / Redux
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“Unwifeable,” a new memoir by Mandy Stadtmiller, begins and ends with the same scene. A single woman in New York—who describes herself as having been, for the duration of her adulthood, “a living don’t”; who, having given up alcohol and cocaine, has claimed indiscriminate sex as her “favorite escape-the-moment drug”—is lying in bed with a handsome near-stranger. Going through the motions of seduction, Stadtmiller writes, involves switching “into a character I can do on cue: the Slut.” Making her voice “as breathy and helpless as possible,” she asks the man, “Do you want me to touch myself?” But the man—who, we know by the second recounting, has since become Stadtmiller’s husband—refuses to play along. “What’s this thing you do, where it’s like you’re doing a show?” he interjects.
For Stadtmiller, to be a slut is, by definition, to play a slut: to act out a character in order to attract attention and love. A sexual-assault survivor—at fifteen, she was raped by a distant relative—Stadtmiller learned early on how to turn her vulnerability into what she assured herself was a strength. “Instigating sexual chaos provided me with the perfect excuse for my inability to save myself or learn from past mistakes,” she explains of her years of sometimes anonymous, often destructive, and always detached sexual encounters, which, she convinced herself, were part of a “vague empowerment narrative”: “See that fiery burning wreckage? I did that. That was me.” At nearly forty, she writes, “I considered myself unwifeable. And I liked it.”
The modern slut originated with the post-sexual-revolution rock groupie in the sixties, and has held cultural sway since then, through the powerfully libidinal Madonna in the eighties, the self-consciously carnal Courtney Love in the nineties, and the fictional but influential “Sex and the City” vixen Samantha Jones in the early two-thousands. All of these figures openly expressed sexual desire and agency as part of a trajectory toward freedom, but their unrepentant sexuality also often contained something like its opposite—a need for love, the possibility of an emotional unravelling, and, always, the potential for reform. The slut’s beckoning could also read like a dare or a seduction, as if to say, “Help me be good, Daddy.” Stadtmiller, like the icons of sluttiness before her, was allowed the sexual privileges of the white, middle-class woman, who, for all her emotional suffering, is relatively unburdened with the pressures of respectability politics. Before meeting her husband, Stadtmiller, following the path of voracious sex as empowerment, “wasn’t just a self-destructive exhibitionist whose crippling neuroses manifested in navel-gazing narcissism and random acts of implosion,” she writes. “Instead, I told myself I was a feminist.”
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Starting in the mid-aughts, Stadtmiller worked as a journalist in New York—first as a reporter for the Post, often on the first-person single-girl-in-the-big-city beat, and then later at Jane Pratt’s women’s Web site, xoJane, during the height of the personal-essay boom. In the early-to-mid-twenty-tens, she commissioned and edited confessional stories from the likes of Sydney Leathers, known for sexting with Anthony Weiner, and the Duke undergrad turned porn star Belle Knox, and herself wrote sex-themed or otherwise sensational pieces like “Today Is National Coming Out Day, and I’m Coming Out; Ask Me Any Invasive Sexual Question You Like,” “I Don’t Think I Can Have Casual Sex Anymore Because the Power Balance Shifts So Dramatically,” and “I Wet the Bed Last Night After Spending the Weekend Recreating My Childhood in Psychodrama.” In these posts, Stadtmiller recalled traumatic episodes from her past, like her rape, her failed first marriage, and her fraught relationship with her well-meaning but difficult parents, and also documented her sexual encounters as an unattached career woman in New York. In the pivotal passage that bookends “Unwifeable,” Stadtmiller’s future husband, objecting to Stadtmiller’s “show,” tells her, “Nothing is wrong unless it’s untrue.” But isn’t the constant excavating of trauma while on deadline in the clickbait era another kind of prison? Stadtmiller’s personal essays, she writes, were essentially performed for attention or money—they were, in other words, slutty. At xoJane, Stadtmiller laments, “every bit of my personal pain becomes commodified and packaged.”
Stadtmiller is a sure, easy writer, and her plight arouses sympathy, not least because she doesn’t attempt to make any of it sound pretty, or better than it was. But it’s hard to forget that many of the experiences that she churned quickly into blog posts for money are some of the same ones that she is retelling in “Unwifeable,” a book that is framed as—finally!—an act of true unburdening. She writes, “I will go deeper until I find out what I am really made of.” Compared with the xoJane posts, “Unwifeable” has a downbeat, reflective tenor. But, of course, this newfound honesty-via-monogamy is its own kind of performance. And who’s to say whether letting go of performance is even possible at all?
A couple of years ago, I started to notice that women, usually young and conventionally attractive, were advertising Venmo or PayPal or Amazon links on their Twitter and Instagram bios, asking men to send them money or gifts. What they were willing to give in return was rarely specified. In an article last year, one young woman wrote about how she asked men to send her five dollars on Tinder to “see what happens,” with a winking emoji. Once she pocketed the money, she unmatched the men on the app, making it impossible for them to get a “return” on their “investment.” Whether explicitly or not, such payments are framed as a kind of restitution for society’s long-standing power imbalance. “Horny men are desperate,” the subhead of the Tinder scammer’s essay summed up, and a commenter on the article responded, “The fact that any of us were giving it away for free at any point in time is the real crime.” Another recent pop-culture figure who orbits this new brand of empowerment is the young reality-TV personality Lala Kent, who, on the Bravo show “Vanderpump Rules,” has often bragged of the powerful oral-sex skills that make a happy lackey of her man, an older suitor who keeps her in Chanel bags and Range Rovers. And, on the podcast “Red Scare,” the actress and podcaster Dasha Nekrasova recently said, only half-jokingly, “If you feel disappointed by the corporate feminist promise, I made up a new kind of feminism called ‘Venmo feminism.’ . . . Because of the rampant sexual harassment in our society, it’s not really safe for women to have a job . . . so, in retribution, all gainfully employed men should just hop on Venmo and make things right, and just redistribute the wealth, if you will . . . and in return I won’t call anyone out, and I’ll stay relatively hot.”
In “Slutever: Dispatches from a Sexually Autonomous Woman in a Post-Shame World,” the author, Karley Sciortino, also concentrates not on the pain or humiliation caused by sluttiness but on the pleasure and material gains it has brought her. Sciortino is a sex columnist for vogue.com; a host of the show “Slutever,” on Viceland; and a self-proclaimed slut. For her, sex isn’t about politics; it’s about getting off. That what makes you orgasm is often inextricable from power—that, for instance, one of the sexual partners Sciortino especially desires, Malcolm, is a wealthy dominant in a Tom Ford suit with cultural cachet and a “stupidly expensive watch” who casually objectifies her as another luxury object in his arsenal—is acknowledged, but not especially probed. Such imbalances are just the conditions of the world in which women live.
Nor does Sciortino’s sluttiness have anything to do with trauma. Growing up in a conservative Catholic family in a small town in upstate New York, Sciortino was just really, really horny—resigned, she writes, “to just date the bathroom faucet until I met ‘the one.’ ” For Sciortino, even when sex is bad, it is still worth having. Of being a high-school slut, she writes, “The sex, of course, was terrible—but so fun”; of her encounters as a dominatrix, “There was a solid year of my life where the vast majority of my income came from peeing into the mouths of middle aged men, which I admittedly found quite glamorous.” Sciortino, who is roughly a decade younger than Stadtmiller, admits to having been influenced in her early twenties by Courtney Love and her messy aesthetic of torn nighties and smudged makeup—which, worn “like strapping on armor,” allowed Sciortino to express her sexuality more brazenly. But her greater inspiration is the world of two-thousands porn, in which women such as the crossover adult-film actress Sasha Grey married sexual voraciousness with business sense.
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Parkour New York
Unlike Stadtmiller, who used writing about dating and sex to cobble together an often meagre income, Sciortino uses sex work to pursue her writerly ambitions. “I was financially comfortable for the first time in my life,” she writes about her time as a sugar baby. “I felt more confident. And on a superficial level, the money meant that I could finally afford a good colorist so that my hair didn’t look green in certain lights, and I was able to start wearing some (somewhat) nice clothes, which I’m pretty sure are both factors in why Vogue decided to hire me to write a column.” To be sure, in this world, there are few nuances: “This is not the moment to subvert the male gaze or to fight the patriarchy or whatever,” a sex-worker friend explains to Sciortino. “If you’re going to do this, you have to appeal to a standard of beauty that the most basic, white bread, man-baby finance bros finds attractive.”
It’s no surprise that Sciortino is partial to the ideas of the feminist writer Camille Paglia, who has suggested that, rather than putting the onus for women’s sexual oppression on the patriarchy, women should take responsibility for their own desires and actions—an argument that, critics have said, could be seen as victim-blaming. (“There is no such thing as safe sex,” Sciortino writes. “We are not victims, we are predators.”) Sciortino calls her readers to embrace and protect all types of sex workers—queer, trans, of color, street walkers, strippers, massage-parlor employees. But she writes best of her own experience: that of a woman who is hot, young, cisgender, and psychologically resilient, living in, as her fuck buddy Malcolm puts it, “this Ayn Rand-ish self-centered world, whether we like it or not.”
By the end of the book, Sciortino has created a mini empire of slutdom, with her column and a TV show, in which she explores sexual behavior in the modern world. She imagines a potential “slutty future” in which, if she decides against entering a more conventional relationship, she will continue to enjoy “all the space I need to fuck strangers for blog anecdotes.” Meanwhile, Stadtmiller, having turned her back on her sexually wild ways, ends “Unwifeable” by recounting how she and her husband decided to stream their marriage proposal, via the app Periscope, from Times Square—a gimmick announced in advance in the Daily News—and then held their marriage ceremony at the Gotham Comedy Club, advertised as the New York Comedy Festival’s “first wedding-slash-comedy show.” Even as sexual promiscuity gives way to monogamy, the attempts to promote and monetize and brand oneself in the name of self-expression must go on. In this economy, you are all you’ve got.
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Naomi Fry is a staff writer at The New Yorker.Read more »
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