Mid sex belongs not to the nights we try to forget, but to those we strain to remember.
One of the most notorious sex scenes from contemporary fiction, “Cat Person,” Kristen Roupenian’s now infamous 2017 short story, memorably depicted sex so viscerally bad that the story went immediately viral. In that scene, Robert and Margot have sex that’s great for Robert and repulsive to Margot. Instead of imbuing it with the designation of merely average, lackluster, or even “mid,” the intensity of Roupenian’s language prevents us from easily using labels that might seem to signal mediocrity. Roupenian textures the sex scene with bodily details and a general ambience that evokes Margot’s visceral repulsion, not a sense that the sex was merely mid. After all, has there ever been a worse phrase than Roupenian’s description of Margot feeling “the small log of Robbie’s erection straining against his pants,” followed closely by “his fluttery, high-pitched moans”? These details conjure, rather than the mild forgettability of the mid, the darkly comical abjection and wry, lowkey disassociation at play in watching ourselves have actively repulsive sex.
In contrast, mid sex is usually sex we forget: not close to good enough that it’s memorable, nor even bad enough to be anecdotal. Mid sex belongs not to the nights we try to forget, but to those we strain to remember. Why, then, does Joan – the narrator-protagonist of Lisa Taddeo’s 2021 novel Animal – spend almost the entirety of that novel reminiscing about mid sex, contemplating it, posing endless questions about it, each of which remains unanswered, and only provokes another? Unlike Margot in Cat Person, Joan is inexplicably drawn to the long series of men with whom she has sex that is, by all measures, seemingly completely average. In Animal, there exists a strange dissonance between the length and intensity of the time Joan spends thinking vigorously about her former partners, and the sex that they actually had. Joan’s many inner monologues, laid bare for the reader, stage with dramatic intensity the questions mid sex raises, the same questions we would otherwise disregard. What is it that mid sex would be able to reveal to us – if only we could remember it?
Joan’s attempts to pin down some elusive, exact quality about the mid sex she has offers an allegory, I think, for another effort in locating a type of midpoint: the longstanding attempt, across both various feminist critical threads and in public discourse, to understand rape as a precise relationship between structural and intimate scales of violence. Where is the meeting point between the two scales – what is the exact nature of their interpenetration?
An implicit idealism, I worry, is also operative in many structural theories of violence. This idealism is latent in theories that set out to explain how harm can occur without an individual intent to harm, yet lack a concrete analysis of how the putative structure actually operates. With this in mind: I’d like to suggest that naming sex as mid indexes something about the rhetorical slippage between, say, state and man (the core relationship that scholarship on rape frequently seeks to understand) as well as this slippage’s analytic shortcomings.
Mid sex closely resembles another kind of disappointing sex: what is often referred to as “gray area sex,” or, sex that is variously unsettling, unsatisfying, and uncomfortable, and that may occur under coercive conditions, but lacks the explicit violation of consent. Gray area sex has thus been taken up as emblematic of consent’s shortcomings as a metric of liberatory sex, insofar as gray area sex’s affective dimensions register the various scales through which coercion materializes.
But Joan responds inquisitively rather than viscerally to all the mid-sex she has, usually with Vic, a middle-aged man with whom she’d been having an affair. After Vic kills himself, Joan sets out on a quest of sorts – nominally to find herself, but in actuality to retrospectively revisit other affairs she’s had with other men like Vic. Each memory generates earlier ones; each man resembles the previous and next ones, like a long hall of mirrors. At one point in the novel, Joan remarks that Vic was “more of a feeling sometimes,” more atmosphere than person. And yet as she spends the novel attempting to define that feeling more exactly, she finds he was only ever one of a long chain: a stand-in for a stand-in.
What mid sex indexes—in Animal, but also I’d venture, in our daily experiences of it as well as how we try to communicate those experiences in spheres both public and interpersonal—is distinct from the mundane abjection that Roupenian captures. Rather, it is a kind of disruption between macro and micro scales of violence. If Roupenian’s grotesque viscerality makes palpable a certain scale of violence, then to instead designate sex as mid encapsulates the ambient confusion that surrounds us, caused by constant slippages between scales. Think of what I suspect is a common, even ubiquitous, experience of talking about sex in casual and interpersonal forums: telling your friend the sex was just okay, maybe briefly grimacing, thinking for a moment about whether you want to elaborate or not, before ultimately deciding to move on to a different topic of conversation. This is a confusion about how to understand intimate experiences through larger frames, but one we seem to be easing into rather than away from. Rather than the well-wrought #MeToo imperative that motivates “Cat Person” – to expose individual male actors as emblematic of wider institutional and cultural rottenness – “mid” communicates a deferral. Faced with the sense that the micro scale of everyday disappointment feels not big enough to contain an experience of violation, at the same time that the suggestion of the “state-at-rapist” resonates as too capacious, to call sex mid is to defer the imperative of articulating a meeting ground. If neither the macro nor the micro affectively resonate as a container for the feeling of sexual harm, to name sex mid is to put off having to find something more precise, at least for now.
Anna Krauthamer is a writer and a Ph.D candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her research focuses on sexual violence and contemporary fiction. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, The Baffler, Boston Review, The LA Review of Books, Cleveland Review of Books, Public Books, and Avidly.