Sex Beyond Yes is an upcoming book on sexual ethics by Quill Kukla, Georgetown professor of analytic philosophy. This book is a mess of repetition and vague allusions, forcing the human pursuit of sexual pleasure into a role akin to that of elementary survival tasks like eating and sleeping.

Kukla wants the reader to have good sex all the time, and they want the state and society to support this goal through positive stigmatization and social programs. As a frequent participant of "alternative sex communities", Kukla often derides the boring and vanilla coital encounters of heterosexual couples as a problematic enforcement of outdated cultural misogynies while also suggesting that as a society "we" should give preteens "exercises that help them think about what would give them pleasure" to include the activities of sexual intercourse and fingering.

This book is an endless series of hallways that somehow all cross through the same doorway every fifteen or so feet. As the title suggests, Kukla is not very interested in the role of consent in sex. If there are exceptions to the affirmations of "yes" and the shame-inducing "no", then Kukla declares that this is a post-consent world where the only truths are pleasure and control.

You don’t need a graduate degree in philosophy to read Sex Beyond “Yes” by Quill R. Kukla, but it helps to have some prior experience in the philosophy of sex and Western feminist literature or you might miss half the dirty talk. For the well-versed, it’s like a slow-burn seduction: the kind where someone strokes your mind before they touch your body.

But fair warning! This isn’t a candlelit massage of ideas. The book dives straight into the sweaty, tangled sheets of sexual politics, with frank discussions of violence and consent that will leave some readers squirming in their chairs (or beds). If your idea of a safe word is “no thank you,” you might want to brace yourself. And for those prone to kink-shaming? Well, this book will spank that habit right out of you and maybe leave you begging for more after you’ve built your very own scaffolding.

Kukla opens each chapter with a little scenario (think of it as intellectual foreplay), but the delivery is so subtle you might accidentally skip the warm-up and head straight for the main event. Which is fine, if you’re into quick, hard thrusts of argument. But I found myself wishing those openings had been more prominent, the kind you can really sink your teeth into before the book slips something bigger into your hands.

As for size, the book is short and dense like a lover who’s small enough to fit in your pocket but still knows how to hit the right spots. Yet I couldn’t help but imagine what might happen if it lasted longer, drew things out, let everyday readers ease into the experience instead of diving headfirst into the deep end of the intellectual pool without so much as a come-hither glance.

In the end, Sex Beyond “Yes” is the kind of read that will undress your assumptions, whisper things in your ear like the difference between independence and self-determination. It’s smart, unapologetic, and just dangerous enough to keep you coming back for another round.

As someone who never resonated with the model of "enthusiastic consent" as an ideal model, I had to read a book that promised to dismantle it.

The first big issue is that often the consent model assumes everyone is fully independent and autonomous, which is not how humans work. We're all inter-dependent, entrenched in a society and a web of all possible relationships, roles and beliefs were didn't independently choose, but were decided by our upbringing and place in the society. Any decision we make includes calculating how will other people react to it and what consequences of it put upon us. We can never be totally unbiased and free of outside influences.

The second issue is that we don't know the future, so how can we be sure what exactly will happen to fully consent to it? People often feel anxiety or uncertainty in front of the unknown, so the advice "if you aren't 100% sure and enthusiastic, don't do it" would exclude us from trying a lot of things at all and make us controlled by our fears and worries. It's how anxiety rules us, it tells us "if you aren't sure, don't do it" and then we don't do anything and feel passive and extremely limited.

The thing issue is that consent shouldn't be one & done, and the author focuses on discussing ideas of cooperation, continuous negotiation and ensuring the possibility of exit midway rather than black-and-white yes-or-no at start.

There's also the whole heteronormativity issue where it's expected that men ask for consent and women reply, which reinforces the idea of men as proactive and women as reactive. It tackles the societal stereotype of sex as a transaction where women give men sex in exchange for something (love, relationship, money, gifts, favours, etc.), which is an extremely pervasive stereotype.

Finally, it also debates the subjects of sex work - where sex is indeed transactional and yet there's a difference between ethical sex work and abuse of sex workers - and kink in the context of desiring to give up autonomy, situations like bdsm submission or consensual-non-consent (CNC), and that those situations require even more negotiation and agreement, which isn't always easy in a society that shames and often even criminalizes them.

In the end, this book is less about advising an individual and more a critique of the society. How shame, lack of education, discrimination (for example towards women or LGBTQ people), stereotypes, criminalization of sex work, social ostracism towards people who get into relationships or have sex "not approved" by the society, etc. contribute to sexual abuse or simply people being stuck repeating common social "scripts" rather than searching what actually gives them pleasure and fulfillment.

But anyway, one sentence really stuck in my mind:
"Some asexual people are never enthusiastic about sex but value sexual generosity within their relationships."
For that, you get 5 stars.
As an ace-spec person I carried lots of worry and shame around "not being enthusiastic enough = bad lover, denying your partner the best experience they could have". It feels validating to hear you don't always need to be "enthusiastic", sometimes it's not even possible to fully be so, but that doesn't mean you should swear celibacy or worry "you're doing sex wrongly".

Thank you Netgalley and W. W. Norton & Company for the ARC.

As a demisexual and autistic individual I struggle not to intellectualize my feelings especially in intimate relationships. I think the conversations opened in Sex Beyond “Yes” regarding expression of agency, consent framework, sex as a negotiation, and
Invitation vs request among other darker things are all interesting and important topics. I do notice the blurb mentions consent itself does not give us the tools to navigate pleasure and intimacy of which I only took a reminder to “communicate how you communicate” but not any useable tools or processes for myself which was my primary desire in reading. Perhaps this book is for those who don’t intellectualize their feelings but that is who it has appealed to. I appreciate the effort to shed light on many aspects of sex that keep us invisibly confined. Thank you again Quill R Kukla and W. W. Norton Company for the opportunity to read and review
Sex beyond “Yes” ahead of publication.