Hatred of Sex. By Oliver Davis and Tim Dean. Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2022.  185 pp.

The late Leo Bersani began his classic essay Is the Rectum a Grave? with a provocation: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.”1 He went on to make the point that this aversion to sex is not the same as repression and coexists “quite comfortably with, say, the most enthusiastic endorsement of polysexuality with multiple sex partners.”2 In their

book Hatred of Sex, Oliver Davis, a professor of French and political philosopher, and Tim Dean, a professor of English and psychoanalytic theorist, make this statement into a manifesto. Both political and psychoanalytic, it takes aim at beloved shibboleths of democracy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, attachment theory, traumatology, and identity politics along the way. Not since Herbert Marcuse and Leo Bersani has rage and pleasure, sex and politics, scholarship and manifesto been conjoined so compellingly in a project whose explicit aim is provocations. Indeed, we must be provoked to think.

As psychoanalysts, it seems we have been content to settle into an age of poignancy, joining in with elaborate efforts to cover over and repress the single most disturbing discovery of Freud, the unruliness of the sexual drive. We have been reasserting the normal instead of normalizing the perverse, as Freud notably did in the first of the Three Essays on Sexuality.3 Instead of putting the repressive and shaping forces of civilization—shame, disgust, and morality—under interrogation we have been bolstering them up at every turn, constructing theories that have reinforced the hatred of sex, whether in the guise of misogyny, homophobia, or the seemingly more benign projects of normal psycho-sexual development, attachment theory, and traumatology. Queer theory is taken to task for its particular hatred of sex, as are