The Seam

Issue 1

Every piece is a place where two books we have read genuinely disagree — still unresolved, both positions stated, and what turns on it named. Free, always.

Where the field disagrees · relationships

Which Lens Explains Sexual Behavior?

Explain outcomes primarily through internal mechanisms — neurobiology (dual control), evolution (Why Is Sex Fun), attachment, or trauma-somatics located in the individual body and history.

Explain the same outcomes primarily through sociocultural forces — gender socialization and the orgasm gap (Girls & Boys, Becoming Cliterate) shaping what people feel and do.

What turns on it · Where you look for the cause of a problem determines whether you work on your nervous system, your relationship, your history, or the cultural scripts you absorbed.

Drawn from Understand Sex And Intimacy Honestly — read it free, in full.

Where the field disagrees · relationships

Whose Sexuality Is the Subject?

Center a gendered subject — female pleasure and the orgasm gap (Becoming Cliterate, What Do Women Want) or male socialization (Boys & Girls), addressing how each gender is shaped differently.

Center a gender-neutral couple/attachment subject (The New Naked, Sex-Starved Marriage), treating partners as two people negotiating a bond regardless of gender.

What turns on it · Whether you read your struggles as products of gendered conditioning or as generic relational dynamics changes what you name and repair.

Drawn from Understand Sex And Intimacy Honestly — read it free, in full.

Where the field disagrees · relationships

Does Closeness Fuel or Starve Desire?

Attachment books (Love Sense, Hold Me Tight, The New Naked, Sex-Starved Marriage) hold that emotional security and closeness are the ground desire grows from — feeling safe lets you open erotically.

Mating in Captivity, What Do Women Want, and the psychoanalytic couple book argue that too much fusion kills eros; desire needs distance, mystery, and the partner as a separate 'other.'

What turns on it · Whether you treat a stalled sex life by building more togetherness or by deliberately cultivating separateness and unpredictability — opposite interventions.

Drawn from Understand Sex And Intimacy Honestly — read it free, in full.