Maria Yagoda’s New Book ‘Laid and Confused’ Offers the Honest and Refreshingly Inclusive Sex Ed We All Deserve

There may never be an ideal way for a parent to initiate “the sex talk” with their child, but from here on out, that conversation should certainly be improved by journalist Maria Yagoda’s new book Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop. Broken up into several essay-length musings on what it’s like to be sexually active—or not—in the wake of a pandemic, the book was written for readers of all ages, including those not often represented in mainstream sex writing, such as members of the LGBTQ+ community and people living with disabilities or chronic illness. Personally, I can’t help wondering how much more fulfilling my earliest sexual experiences would have been if I’d had a copy of Yagoda’s book to guide me; at the very least, with her wry yet earnest voice in my head, I might have felt less alone as I attempted to navigate the one-night stands and situationships of my 20s.

Vogue spoke to Yagoda about turning her college-era beat as a sex writer into a book, separating out bad sex from sexual misconduct (to the extent that that’s possible), and creating space for open and honest communication around sex. Read the full interview below.

Vogue: How did the idea for this book come about? 

Maria Yagoda: This has been on my mind since college, in part because, you know, a lot of people are having a lot of bad sex in college. But it’s something I spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about because it struck me as so strange, looking at myself and all my smart, empowered, quote-unquote progressive friends; all these things mean we think the sex we’ll have will always be good or fulfilling, and there was just a disconnect there that wasn’t really being talked about. That was 10 years ago, when I think there was more of a sense of sex positivity being this really cool and empowering thing and meaning that we could have a lot of casual sex and not be ashamed. There’s definitely really great things about the destigmatization of casual sex, but I was thinking purely from a pleasure perspective; what were these encounters giving me, and why was I going back to them? Why were my friends? 

I also specifically became interested in thinking about bad sex, which I sort of separate from another conversation that was going on around college campuses and nationally about consent, and rape, and sexual assault. I felt like: Okay, I’m somebody who is not ashamed about sex. I am the perfect sacrifice. I’m willing to humiliate myself and start a larger conversation about this—because aside from just general sexual shame, I’ve found in my decade-plus of writing about sex that people feel embarrassed about having not satisfying sex. It can be this big secret that people have, where it’s like, “Oh, I just don’t enjoy having sex with my partner of many years, but you know, whatever.” And I just thought that was interesting. I approach it without any judgment, because I also think this idea that the sex we have should be orgasmic and fulfilling and empowering and feminist is asking way too much of sex.