A Reading List on Sex: Seven Books That Explain the Most Talked-About, Least-Understood Subject

Sex may be the strangest of human topics: everyone talks about it — jokes, rumours, advertising and moralising are everywhere — yet the moment we try to say seriously what it actually is, most of us go quiet. We know far less than we imagine about our own bodies, our desires and our history.

This list is built on a simple idea: rather than peering through the fog, read the subject properly, once and for all. Seven books, seven angles that do not overlap — evolution, anthropology, asexuality, the history of contraception, the cultural history of masturbation, women’s sexual science and the study of desire — which together make a complete map of the subject.

Why Is Sex Fun?: Why Humans Mate the Way They Do

Jared Diamond is better known as the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and as an evolutionary biologist. In this short book he turns the same habit of questioning on sex: seen through evolution, human sexual behaviour is genuinely odd.

Other animals mate in public, ovulate overtly and breed to the end of life; humans ovulate in secret, mate in private, go through menopause, and spend a great deal of time on sex that cannot lead to pregnancy. Why? Diamond’s answer is that these oddities are not decoration but key forces that shaped the structure of human society — mate choice, cooperation and child-rearing all turn on them.

The book is short, clear and free of sensationalism, and it is the best starting point for the whole map. Once you have read it, the questions the other six books raise all fall into place.

Sex at Dawn: Is Monogamy Really Natural?

The book by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá opens fire directly on the mainstream narrative that humans are monogamous by nature.

Drawing on primatology, anthropology and anatomy, the authors argue that prehistoric humans more likely lived in multi-partner, shared intimate relationships; modern monogamy, on this view, is less a matter of nature than a by-product of the agricultural revolution — marriage became a tool of inheritance only after private property appeared.

The book is enormously controversial, and scholars have criticised its use of evidence. Its value lies not in delivering a final answer but in putting on the table a question that was never allowed to be asked: how much of what we take to be “natural” is merely the habit of the last few thousand years? The best way to read it is as a forcefully worded argument, not as a verdict.

The Invisible Orientation: When Having No Sexual Desire Is Also Normal

In a culture that treats sex as the default setting, there is a group of people who have barely ever experienced sexual attraction. They are asexual — roughly one per cent of the population — and they have long been unseen: not pathologised, and not acknowledged either.

Julie Sondra Decker is herself asexual. Her book is the first introduction to asexuality written for a general audience: what asexuality is, how it differs from “sexual dysfunction”, what positions exist on the asexual spectrum (some people are entirely without romantic inclination; others still fall in love), what the common misconceptions are, and how to explain yourself to family and friends.

The tone is calm and patient. Its most universal point is this: to understand asexuality is really to understand the diversity of sexual desire itself — what most people take for granted turns out to be a distribution, not a standard.

Contraception: A History of Technology, and of Freedom

The German historian Robert Jütte’s history of contraception runs from ancient Egyptian herbal recipes all the way to the modern pill.

Contraception has never been merely a technical matter. It is entangled with religious prohibition, population politics, women’s bodily autonomy and commercial interest: how the medieval church regulated it, how the condom went from luxury to everyday item, and what panic and celebration greeted the arrival of the pill. Jütte writes cool-headed social history — sex may be private, but contraception is public history through and through.

After this book, the idea that sex and reproduction can be separated — so taken for granted today — shows its true weight: a small measure of autonomy that humanity struggled for over a thousand years to win.

Solitary Sex: The Last Taboo Is a Taboo of Ideas

The historian Thomas Laqueur studies an even more private subject: masturbation.

He uncovers a startling fact: masturbation as a “moral panic” is very young. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, an anonymous pamphlet called Onania suddenly declared that masturbation caused blindness, madness and early death, and the panic then swept through European medicine, education and even commerce (the invention of breakfast cereal, remarkably, is part of the story). Before that, the ancients were far more relaxed about it; afterwards, generations of doctors and parents used it to frighten children.

The book is about masturbation, but what it is really about is the history of ideas: how an act is suddenly defined as “shameful”, and how that definition serves a moral industry. It will make you a little warier of the phrase “common sense”.

Come as You Are: The Science of Sex, Written for Women

Emily Nagoski is a sex educator, and this, her signature book, has been the most recommended introduction to women’s sexual science of recent years.

Its central framework is simple and useful: human sexual response works like a car, with an accelerator and a brake — the accelerator responds to “sexually relevant stimuli”, the brake to “reasons not to be aroused”. Everyone’s accelerator and brake are tuned to different sensitivities, so the range of “normal” is far wider than people assume. And what determines the experience is usually not technique but context, mood and relationship.

The book is grounded in research yet reads like a friend talking. The one sentence most worth taking away: your parts are not broken — what you need is to understand your own manual, not someone else’s.

What Do Women Want?: The Blind Spot of Desire Research

The journalist Daniel Bergner has written a field report from the front lines of research into female desire.

He visits laboratories, interviews researchers and ordinary women, and strings together several decades of scientific work on women’s desire: how the measurement methods were biased, how the stereotype that “women naturally have lower libido” took shape, and what new evidence is now overturning it. The title is a question, and so is the whole book — not because women are mysterious, but because science long refused to treat the question as a question.

It reads best alongside Come as You Are: one gives you a usable framework, the other tells you how hard-won those frameworks were.

How to Read This List

If you read in order, go from the general to the particular: build the frame of evolution and history with Why Is Sex Fun? and Sex at Dawn, see how ideas and technology are entangled with Contraception and Solitary Sex, and then come back down to particular people — to ourselves — with The Invisible Orientation, Come as You Are and What Do Women Want?.

If you only read one, read Why Is Sex Fun?. It is the shortest, and it best explains the point of this list: sex is not an embarrassing footnote but a key to understanding our species.

Getting this subject straight is not about appearing enlightened. It is because your body is your own — and knowledge about it should be your own too.