Secret Sex Lives
A Year on the Fringes of American Sexuality
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4.1 • 12 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
New York Times bestselling author Suzy Spencer posted a simple online request: “Need to talk about sex…”
Suzy Spencer set out to investigate sex in America—to go beyond the talk and find out what people are really doing in their private (or not so private) lives. What she discovered online, at sex clubs, and elsewhere was truly eye-opening.
She started talking to men and women—from across America of all ages and sexual orientations—who make no apology for how they fire their imaginations and satisfy their desires. Soon she found herself invited to be a voyeur—listening in on phone sex, reading e-mails describing sexual encounters in graphic detail, and attending BDSM mixers and workshops. It was all astonishing… and enticing. At every turn she felt herself pulled deeper into people’s secret lives and began questioning her own choices about relationships and sex. Secret Sex Lives is an intimate account of a journalist who is seduced by her subject; a woman who sets out to look behind closed doors but ends up on a personal, revealing journey to find herself…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
True crime writer Suzy Spencer (Wasted) tries a new subject in her latest book: alternative sexual lifestyles. While setting out to research other people's sex lives, Spencer ultimately turns her book into a memoir, chronicling her coming to terms with her own long-held views on sex and her long-dormant libido. The interviews with swingers, dominatrices, cross-dressers, and more scattered throughout provide fascinating, human faces to the stereotypical leather, whips, and nonmainstream sexual practices. But while Spencer's personal journey ought to be interesting someone of her sexual inexperience and Southern Baptist upbringing learning the most intimate details of others' kinky lifestyles she fails to offer the strong personal anecdotes that would make the reader understand Spencer's background and her internal struggle about sex. As a result, her personal reactions to interviewees feel like unwelcome distractions from the juicier stuff. Short on research citations outside of her own interviews, and equally short on Spencer's own life and feelings, this sex book succeeds neither as a serious examination of sexual lifestyles nor as a memoir.
Customer Reviews
Never expected the ending.
This time Spencer takes a real left turn from the true crime she is known for. In this book she first tries to stay on the other side of the fence as she interviews a host of ordinary people with extraordinary desires.
More into the book she seems to be questioning her own desires but being the person she has been, an educated family oriented Christian, she remains true to herself. That doesn't change but after meeting a subject in New York for an up close and personal view of the dark side, she soon finds herself in a wrestling match with her own ethics, sexuality and spiritualism.
Great read.