my marriage is not open

the first and hopefully last time i argue with a review of my work

I am generally of the opinion that the most churlish thing an author can do is quibble with reviews, positive or negative, smart or stupid, of her own book. To be read and discussed is its own reward, even if the reading and discussing sometimes leave something to be desired. Besides, by now, I understand the risks involved in writing for the public. I know that I am courting the friction of other minds, a friction that is no less indispensable for sometimes proving painful. Friction is what reading and writing, at their most bracing and elemental, are all about. To be sure, sometimes we read to recognize the familiar self recapitulated—a pleasure sometimes facilely referred to as that of “relatability” or “representation”—but we also read to confront the sharp shock of an alien outlook. I want my book to be read by others as I would never read it myself. That’s why I wrote it, and that’s also, in a sense, what it’s about. The lust for other people—truly other people—is a major theme.

In my own very fortunate case, there is little to complain about. By and large, my book has been reviewed generously, and most of the people who have argued with me have done so respectfully, even admiringly. An erstwhile philosopher never outgrows a taste for courteous disagreement, and there is plenty to mull over in, say, these fascinating appraisals from Eve Tushnet and Ben Sixsmith, two writers I find consistently smart even though I almost always take a different approach.

But there is an exception to my principle of letting well enough alone. Factual errors and everything following from them are fair game for contestation. I love The Hedgehog Review—in fact, two of the pieces collected in All Things Are Too Small first appeared in the magazine, a testament to its unusually high tolerance for what I might presumptuously call ambitious writing and might more humbly concede to be my writerly idiosyncrasies—but the review of my book that appeared there last night is inaccurate. Worse, the review is to some extent organized around a rather offensive inaccuracy.

Catherine Tumber, the author of the piece, initially wrote that I am in an open marriage. I am not, and I do not claim that I am in my book. That Tumber would read this sugestion into the text is symptomatic of her biases, of which more in a moment.

I want to be clear that I do not blame The Hedgehog Review for this mistake. I edit reviews, and I write them, and I know that it is simply not possible for an editor to read every book he or she assigns. The enterprise of reviewing depends upon intellectual trust, and even the most careful fact-checking of, say, particular quotes or claims will sometimes fail to uncover a very fundamental and all-encompassing misreading such as this one. Good faith mistakes happen. I’ve made them before, and I’m sure I’ll make them again. The editing at The Hedgehog Review is top notch.

I confess, however, that I am not quite as sympathetic to the reviewer as I am to the magazine. Tumber makes some good points. She’s right, for instance, that I do not think much about what fruitful forms of excess would look like for older people. But the central error sticks in my throat, and I think it taints the rest of the piece, almost all of which is about my alleged sexual ethics.

* * *

 Tumber’s error has since been corrected, but some of the lines that linger do not make much sense without it. For instance, Tumber writes, “it appears that the only restraint Rothfeld’s marriage respects is bondage play.” Here another (inaccurate, as it happens) assumption rears its head. Elsewhere, I have written about BDSM, and in the book, I write about BDSM in the film Secretary. Nowhere do I claim that it figures in my own marriage (much less that the only restraint or boundary in my marriage involves bondage!).

Before I get to the ways in which Tumber’s mistake undermines many of her criticisms, I want to pause for a moment to reflect on what her assumptions about my romantic life reveal about her overall worldview, at least as it pertains to sex. Her confusion is somewhat representative of the broader tendency that several of the essays in my book criticize—and the many things she takes so brazenly for granted shed a bright light on the degree to which her misreading tinctures almost the whole of her review. In a way, her astonishingly thorough misunderstanding is almost a gift: I could not have invented a more perfect illustration of my book’s thesis about the movement I call New Puritanism and its blatant inattention to what its ideological nemeses actually say, think, and stand for.

For a fuller characterization of New Puritanism, you’ll have to read the book, where I write about it at length. But, in brief sum, the New Puritans argue that sex is not a good in itself but the means to an end, generally the end of pregnancy or the expression of commitment. The ambassadors of this tradition I treat in the book are Christine Emba and Louise Perry, but there are many others. They usually supplement their picture of what sex is for—namely, something other than sex itself—with a caricature of the sexual liberal, a creature supposedly allergic to limits who fetishizes autonomy at all costs and cares about nothing but pleasure. The sexual liberal eschews commitment and believes that choice is the highest good. Accordingly, she expresses her feckless and wanton hedonism by courting perverse sexual practices like choking (a particularly disfavored kink among the New Puritan set) and having open relationships. BDSM, open relationships, and liberalism of one kind or another are a package deal for the New Puritan, and they are all reflections of liberalism’s refusal to adopt substantive ethical norms.

One of the arguments in my book is that “the sexual liberal” does not exist. There is no one that I’m aware of, and certainly no one with any widespread cultural cachet, who thinks that the only ethical imperative in the sexual domain is that of choice. Indeed, the “woke” youngsters that many of the New Puritans also dislike are if anything overly moralizing about sex, attentive to possible transgressions of all sorts (age gaps and the like). Yet the New Puritans see the specter of sexual liberalism everywhere. They are so incapable of following what I posit as the core ethical imperative of sex and everything else—taking a good, long look at the person in front of you, and mustering true willingness to be surprised by what you see—that they go on insisting that this fantasy hedonist is lurking in every corner.

Disappointingly, Tumber does the same, projecting the fabled sexual liberal onto me when she mischaracterizes my argument thus: “this retreat into the stale provisions of traditional marriage, she [me, Becca] argues, has far more in common with conservative attacks on individual autonomy by postliberals such as University of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen than with the individual pleasures and choices full-throated feminism might offer.” Elsewhere, she claims that I regard “monogamous union” as a “site of dreary ‘new puritan’ obligation.”

But my book is not a critique of “monogamous union,” which is never framed as a “site of dreary…obligation.” My account of my (monogamous!) marriage may be distasteful to Tumber for many reasons, not least because I enjoy sex within it, but I certainly do not think anyone could accuse of me of framing my relationship as “dreary.” Nor is my book a critique of marriage in the least. On the contrary, it is a celebration. What it questions is the idea that sex in marriage is a good solely because it is a means to something beyond itself (paradigmatically, pregnancy). It also questions the assumption that sex within marriage is tamer, staler, or less thrilling than sex outside of marriage. I do claim that transformative and ethically commendable sex is possible outside of marriage (or other committed relationships). I do not claim—and would not claim, because I do not think—that it is only possible outside of committed relationships.

Nor are my essays about sex a commendation of “individual autonomy” or “individual pleasures.” Only someone who reads through the misty lenses of preconception could possibly understand them that way. Autonomy is a political good, surely, but the upshot of my essays about sex is that good erotic encounters change us so thoroughly that we cannot exercise the familiar sort of “autonomy” within them. We are not solely ourselves: we are the products of our intimacies. “Full-throated feminism” is rarely partial to unfettered autonomy, either. Most of the tradition involves acknowledgment of human dependencies that patriarchal societies often paper over. Many of Tumber’s assumptions, then, are symptomatic of her determination to see what she wants to see, a sexual liberal who does not exist and whom I certainly do not represent.

For many New Puritans, perhaps her among them, anything outside of the traditional confines of marriage is a seething slush of lawlessness; either we accept the old rules (sex is only acceptable within committed relationships, and only as a means to a secondary good), or we accept no rules but the rule of pleasure itself. Perhaps my book is confusing to Tumber because it resists this dichotomy, proposing that the old ethical imperatives are bad but that there is a different and better moral code available. She writes of my position, “sex is its own good, in which unreasoning desire and what we make of it collide in an unstable compound of wanton, directionless, creative play.” But that is simply not right. My claim is most certainly not that good (and erotic) sex is directionless. Something that is done for its own sake need not be oriented only towards itself. Rather, I argue that truly erotic sex is directed towards another way of life: another person, in all her specificity. If only all reviews could be the same.