Thoughts: Moan: Anonymous Essays on Female Orgasm

So. This is a topic of which I can safely say I’ve not read any non-fiction about. I’ve read plenty of romance with plenty of moans, plenty of orgasms but nothing within the non-fiction realm that really looks at people’s experiences or opinions. I figured there is a first time for everything though right?!

Moan: Anonymous Essays on Female Orgasm by Emma Koenig

Source: Purchased on Kindle

Tl;DR: Fascinating but extremely short, maybe too short? I would have read another hundred or more pages of this.

Thoughts:

• Moan is a selection of essays from an online project that Emma Koenig setup, anonymous herself when it was started. They range from the narrative style descriptions of a successful orgasm to bulletted lists (my favorite format, clearly) of what satisfies someone, to simple and traditional essay style writings. There is also a wide variety in what the women are talking about.

Paying attention to female orgasm means acknowledging that women are full people, deserving of experiencing pleasure. Maybe if we focus on caring for a woman’s clit, it might make it more obvious that we should also care for her heart and her brain. And if we feel empowered to speak up in our bedrooms, we can feel inspired to continue to voice our opinions on cultural and political stages.

• There seemed to be a very uniform style to the essays and submissions that Koenig says are all anonymous even if the writer wouldn’t mind having their name associated with the writings. So while the content and format vary wildly I think the editing on most of these by Koenig or whoever her editor was made them all feel as if they were written by the same person. This definitely, at times, removed the individuality of the essays if experiences or opinions were repeated but on the stand out essays it didn’t hold them back as much.
•  Personally this was an eye opener. My own sexuality is a bit nebulous, and I don’t particularly care for labels (demisexual is one I’ve embraced in the past, though I lean harder into the ace spectrum than most I think). I don’t care either way if you’re male or female and I have very little true interest in people sexually unless I know them very intimately and that’s been – well my husband. So seeing all these different women’s real life tastes and styles of reaching orgasm really made up for the blandness of the writing for me because my own personal experience is so small. I think I could have enjoyed a book of essays twice this length and still come out wanting to know more.
• I was astounded by the number of essays that talked about women faking orgasms with men, and honestly though the number was small, the essays that talked about men’s confidence that they brought that women to orgasm. I thought that was movie levels of fiction?

Overall for me I just found this interesting. As a new student to the subject it very much appealed to me and the different experiences sold it. The uniformity of the writing was a bit discouraging but if as long as you’re looking more for the content and less for the voices you’ll be… satisfied (I went this whole time without a single bad joke, give me this one). I recommend it if you’re interested.