Essays

We humans have been writing for over 5000 years (cuneiform, circa 3000 BC) and somewhere over that arc of history we developed the essay, perhaps one of the most effective literary forms of persuasion, argument and criticism in politics, history and daily life. We are dependent on essays for understanding, from long essays like John Locke’s, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the works of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) to Gore Vidal’s Pornography and the daily and weekly essays in The Atlantic, The New Yorker and digital media everywhere.

At Love & Sexcess, we curate the essays we think shed light on the shadows and shades of gray in human sexuality, in trying to bring further insight and understanding into everyday conversations about all things sexual.

Peruse. Enjoy!

Caraglio’s Loves of the Gods
(British Museum)

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Sex as it could be? Should be? And certainly has been

The Oneida Community Mansion, built between 1861-1878, is, today, a museum of ... depending on your point of view, either cult sex, a social order created on sexual pleasure, or a school of utopian, sexual theory and beliefs. As its founder,…
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Confessions of a Male, Feminist Sex Addict

Image: Interior of a brothel in Naples, Italy, photographed in January, 1945   From Quillette, by Eric Frances McKillen (pseudonym), published February 11, 2019 "Sex without companionship corrodes the soul. I know this because it happened…
NYT archives
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Safe-Sex Lies

photo: NYT archives The lies we tell ourselves about sex never change By MEGHAN DAUMJAN. 21, 1996 (10 minute read) January 21, 1996, Page 006032 Buy Reprints. The New York Times Archives This is a digitized version of an article from The…
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Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex?

Lora Gottlieb wrote this essay in the New York Times Magazine in 2014 (20 minute read) "Power — and the act of balancing it — is a common topic with the couples I see in therapy. They’re eager to talk about leveling the domestic playing…
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Boys on the Side

Is the hook up culture toxic or beneficial for women? By Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic, September 2012 (15 min. read) The hookup culture that has largely replaced dating on college campuses has been viewed, in many quarters, as socially corrosive…