Orgasming Without Pornography

On the Novels and Television of These Strange, Alienating Times

René Magritte, The Mark, 1948, Oil on canvas

When I was in third grade, my school counselor gave me two books. One was about a girl raised by dolphins. This girl is “rescued,” taught to use language and walk normally and generally act like a human. The other book was about a girl growing up in the nineteenth century who learns, suddenly, that it’s actually 1996: she’s been living in a kind of historical museum, as a living diorama, and now must enter the real world of telephones and cars in order to obtain lifesaving modern medicine for her community.

Only later did I put two and two together. This was all happening a couple of months after Hurricane Katrina, at my evacuation school in Houston. I cried every morning, unconcerned that my parents had bigger things to worry about. I constantly faked (no, really experienced) stomachaches and headaches. The guidance counselor, I now understand, thought I’d relate to books about children wrenched bewilderingly and suddenly from their contained worlds. At the time, I simply resented the guidance counselor, and I above all resented the fact that I loved these two books: her plot against me had worked.

This fall, I again found myself absorbed by a book about a girl who leaves the confined world she’s known all her life. And, once again, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of resenting the recommender. In this case, that recommender was not an employee of Houston public schools, but the TikTok algorithm. I Who Have Never Known Men isn’t, frankly, the kind of book that tends to go TikTok viral. It’s a sparse Belgian novel from the 1990s, a novella almost. Out of print in English for decades, the book was reissued in a new translation by Ros Schwartz in 2022, along with a new title (interestingly, Schwartz translated the previous edition as well, revisiting the text for the more recent one). Romantasy, this is not. And yet here it is, sitting beside A Court of Thorns and Roses and the latest Colleen Hoover on the “TikTok Recommends” table of the bookshop, selling 100,000 copies last year in the US alone.

The book’s structure is basic, sparse. A girl grows up in a one-room bunker along with thirty-nine other women. Her companions refer to her as “The Child.” The older women, unlike the narrator, remember a world outside of the bunker, but they still aren’t sure how or why they’ve wound up there. They have vague memories of a catastrophe. They suspect they have been drugged. They are stalked by a cadre of male guards, who supply them with enough food to survive. One day, the guards disappear, and the forty women manage to escape. They stick together and survive and even thrive. They find food without much trouble. They find tantalizing clues. But they never encounter any other human beings, neither friends nor foes. They never figure out who their guards were, or whether the rest of humanity still exists at all. They aren’t even sure whether the meager, unchanging landscape where they wander is a part of planet Earth. These are not spoilers. From the first page of the book, really, the narrator tells us that our questions will go unanswered, the mysteries on the page unresolved. The book’s ample suspense comes, not from anything resembling resolution, but from miniscule expansions and contractions of its suffocating setting. Its extreme limitations make even microscopic shifts feel momentous.

I Who Have Never Known Men, though technically decades old, is part of a small vogue for narratives about escape — or exile — from snow globe worlds. First, there’s Apple TV’s Severance, now ending its long-delayed second season. This show follows a group of office workers, “Innies,” who have voluntarily undergone a procedure to separate their work memories from their external ones. What this means, in effect, is that they are two entirely different individuals at work and at home: like a girl who has never left her dolphin pod or her history museum, these work-selves have never, in effect, left the office. They both crave escape and know that true escape would constitute a kind of suicide, a total death of the in-office self. Then there’s Susanna Clarke’s bestselling, prizewinning 2020 Piranesi, where an eponymous narrator lives in and attempts to catalogue what he calls “The House”: an infinite series of rooms full of statues. Piranesi has never left the House. He believes, based on various remains scattered around the House, that “since the World began it is certain there have existed fifteen people.” However, he has only ever encountered one other living human, whom he simply calls “The Other,” explaining, “Of the fifteen people whose existence is verifiable, only Myself and the Other are now living.”

What’s up with these narratives about radical naiveté, about characters learning that their world is not The World but only a slice of it? I have a weakness for these kinds of stories, of course: I have, evidently, since third grade. But the reading and viewing public at large seems, at the moment, to share this weakness for stories in which the world is radically reduced, and in which the Real World, the one we all inhabit, turns into a site of danger, enchantment, mystery, and strangeness.

The obvious answer is, of course, COVID lockdowns. Clarke wrote Piranesi while herself isolated at home, suffering from a mysterious chronic illness, and published the novel precisely as the rest of the world was entering its own quarantine. The first season of Severance was filmed during the pandemic, disrupted by lockdowns and released into a post-COVID world, while I Who Have Never Known Men was re-released in English translation in 2022 and found virality last year. It isn’t just that we remember the experience of a locked-in world. Even now, five years on, we have remained antisocial. Nobody, we are told, goes out anymore. Nobody seems to make small talk. We spend record amounts of time by ourselves, in our houses. We are all Piranesi wandering the halls of the House, Innies at their desks, the Child in her bunker.

And now in our greater cultural lives, a kind of itchiness, a sense that the world we live in must not be the world but only a minor slice of it, has taken hold. The itchiness is intragenerational and crosses the political aisle. On the right, even as politicians hyperventilate about border enforcement, there’s a wild, nearly hysterical desire to reopen the frontier. Greenland, Canada, Mars. Even for those who aren’t trying to colonize Greenland, the Western, or the reimagined Western, is newly ascendant after decades of dormancy — Yellowstone, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, even Anna North’s feminist reimagining Outlawed. Cowboy boots have had a renaissance. Country music is mainstream again. There’s an instinct to expand, to rush the frontier, even though that instinct betrays its own cramped imagination: it’s only a redux of the nineteenth century (or of the twentieth century’s cliches about the nineteenth century), a retreading of a future that once existed. The reigning sentiment is more or less: this can’t be everything — but, goddammit, we just can’t imagine what else there might be.

Meanwhile, our lives as consumers of both digital and material content have begun to feel like endless, depressing remixes. We are promised the bliss of unending novelty. Infinite scroll. Shein dresses that cost less than a loaf of bread. AI chatbots who are smarter than you, who can whip up anything you dare to ask them for in seconds. Budget airline tickets that can take you to Spain or Iceland for the price of a nice dinner out. But of course it all feels like empty calories. We’re bored out of our minds, trapped inside the dopamine bunker, scrolling the phones we got hooked on during our pandemic-induced isolation. Every cheap new outfit falls apart in days. Every city feels the same, is lined with the same chain restaurants, filled with the same tourists from the same budget airline flights. The AI seemed so wondrous to behold at first, but now it’s just the same thing again and again, an endless unreadable re-assemblage of existing digital parts. This time the perimeter of our world is stalked by its own set of hulking guards: tech overlords, politicians promising that everything will feel better if we can just make Canada the 51st state, or reach the ever-shifting AGI target.

I don’t mean to make a facile allegorical argument, claiming that we like these containment narratives purely because we’re bored and trapped. I assume humans have always been bored and trapped, in one way or another: by hardship, by custom, by topography, by mortality. By prosperity, sometimes. I Who Have Never Known Men is newly resonant, newly popular, but not new. And in any case, I suspect that what resonates in these works is neither the relatability of being trapped nor the tempting possibility of escape. Rather, it is the depiction of a kind of coming-of-age, a thrilling rejection of false consciousness. These adventures are animated by dramatic irony — by the gulf between what we already know and what the protagonist knows. The thrill of them is, in a dark way, akin to the thrill of watching a friend amble into a seemingly empty room, not knowing you’re all about to leap out and scream surprise! Both I Who Have Never Known Men and Piranesi are first-person narratives, reflecting not just limited worlds but fenced-in perspectives. In one scene from Severance, the Innies are taken on a kind of glamping trip. One of them gazes up at the sky and screams, “Holy shit! Out-fucking-side. Oh, my God. I mean, I knew there was no actual ceiling, but this is fucking insane.”

In I Who Have Never Known Men, the escape begins, not with an exit, but with a turn inwards — with the protagonist’s newfound attention to the rhythms of her body, to the questions under the surface of her mind. “Back then, I wasn’t curious about things,” she recalls of her earliest life, in a description that reminded me of nothing so much as the earliest pages of Helen Keller’s diaries, another famous epistemic adventure. The narrator’s first period, a change from within that contrasts with the oppressive monotony of the bunker outside, ignites her curiosity for the first time. She is enraged when the other women refuse to explain her puberty to her. Then she begins fantasizing about an anonymous male guard, bringing herself to orgasm: “an immense sensation surged through me, an overwhelming eruption, an extraordinary burst of light exploding inside me.” She starts spending hours a day devoted to “the task of producing the eruption.” And then, in the book’s most astonishing turn, our narrator begins counting her heartbeats in order to establish a kind of clock for herself and the other women in the bunker. She learns, by this incessant counting of her own heartbeats, that the guards turn lights on and off and serve meals at random times, furthering the women’s sense of chaos and confusion. “Inside the bars, my strong, regular heart fuelled by youthful anger had restored to us our own territory; we’d established an area of freedom,” the narrator explains. Her circumstances have not changed, but her body and mind give her agency over her surroundings, or at least understanding of how little agency she has. “We'd decided no longer to worry about the anarchic routine they imposed on us — my heart would act as our clock.” The epistemic adventure has begun.

For this reason, though the romantasy-clogged TikTok recommendation machine initially seems an unlikely source for the explosive popularity of I Who Have Never Known Men, it’s actually a somewhat predictable development. Just as my much-resented guidance counselor, representative of the place that had trapped me, was the only one who could have suggested those children’s books, the TikTok algorithm, trapping us in brain-rot jail, is possibly the only consciousness that could have foreseen widespread hunger for this book. This algorithm gobbles up our data and feeds us back to ourselves, disguising the familiar as new, masking unending repetition as abundance. We, like the narrator of I Who Have Never Known Men, know that we’re stuck, but we don’t know what it would look like to unstick ourselves, to regain control over our mental lives. Our algorithmic warden, it seems, has a remarkably keen grasp on our own experience of mental confinement, just keen enough to know which books will strike a chord — like the managers in Severance letting their employees glimpse the sky for a day, catching sight of the outside just enough to remind them they aren’t free to explore it.

When the narrator of I Who Have Never Known Men begins to wonder, to count, to fantasize, the other women approach her with curiosity and suspicion. “What are you doing?” one asks, and she replies, “Thinking.” The others are baffled. They accuse her of having a secret, and she does. It is this secret — not any particular bombshell, but the development of a private internal life, any private internal life at all — that lends meaning to her existence for the first time. Through her secret she begins to build humanity from the ground up, starting inside her own body. When the outside world is limited, the inner one expands to compensate, the smallest contractions of a muscle turning into events, the cavities of the body becoming great rooms. In true deprivation, a monastic, transcendental inventiveness comes to life.

Out here there are no secrets. On TikTok, I am pummeled with advertisements for Oura rings and Apple watches, which turn heartbeats into data, transforming the events occurring in the body’s interior into fodder for more slack-jawed screen time. Even your own heartbeat, your own REM sleep, is for sale. This, at least for me, is what makes I Who Have Never Known Men such a potent novel, and what makes TikTok itself such a potent force for selling it. What would it be like, the book prods, to sit still and let our internal lives unfurl? To let our phones die, to be bored, to have no choice but to count our own heartbeats? To make our minds steelier, sturdier, more critical? To be able to sit in our own thoughts, instead of drowning them out? To orgasm without pornography, to clothe and feed ourselves without consumerist novelties, to attend to the humdrum details of our own bodies rather than running toward cheap distraction? To know something about yourself that others don’t? What would it be like, in other words, to have a secret?

Eleanor Stern is a writer focused on linguistics, literature, and pop culture. In addition to her Substack, Wicked Tongue, she has written nonfiction and criticism for outlets like The New Inquiry, Bookforum, and The London Magazine, and runs a popular TikTok page focused on literary and cultural criticism.