Comedian and podcaster Sofie Hagen had not had sex in 3,000 days ( and counting), and it turns out, she’s not the only one….

Her attempts to find out why we’re not having the sex we want, Sofie asked the questions: can we blame a lacking sex education? Is it all just sexual trauma? Where’s the radical sexual liberation we were promised? What are we going to do about this? How do you overcome being a 35- year-old virgin ( when it come to queer sex, that is)? How do the socially awkward and the neurodiverse have sex?

“ I haven’t had sex for eight years’: my life as a reluctant celibate” comedian  and podcaster, Sofie Hagen  said, who is sex positive but isn’t actually having any. According to multiple surveys, rates of intercourse have been dropping for every age group. There’s even an online subculture of men who call themselves  “incels” ( involuntary celibates) and define themselves by their inability to get laid. 

Will I Ever have Sex Again is Hagen’s warm, curious, charming attempt to reveal why it’s been so long and whether it can change. It is not, however, about the wider question of who is having sex and why some people aren’t having as  much as they want. Instead it is relentlessly, exhaustingly  solipsistic,  revealing Hagen’s identity as a “fat queer, white non-disabled, non-binary person”.

“ I am not a woman, a lady girl, a female, I am a person, a human”  writes Hogan, who perhaps didn’t;t mean too imply  that “woman” and “person, human” are mutually exclusive.

“Queer” is also tendentious “ I am queer, as in I don’t care which gender you are. Aren’t.  I’m into it”, but I have only ever slept with cis penises. I’m all for sexual exploration, but claiming the rainbow flag surely demands more commitment than this, like the terrifying mum in Saltburn, Hagan writes lesbianism and finds it “all a bit too wet”?

Hagen published in 2019, Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You, in which she promised readers that “ you can be fat and sexy, fat and healthy, fat and happy”, building to the inspiring declaration : “ I love my body”.

“The underlying insecurity that comes from an entire lifetime of fat phobia is a huge part of the reason I have behaved in ways I do not like.”

Hagen’s one anecdote “ I once f***ed a man in a bush who had a pregnant fiancé at home because he pointed at the bush and said “Wanna f*** in that bush?” Another partner, by th name of Big Mike, claimed that he was moving to Finland the day after, despite there being no packed moving boxes or suitcases to his boardery house.” Hagen’s sexual encounters seem to have been marked by  that internal pressure to be the “cool girl” in the Gillian Flynn Gone Girl sense,  compliant female who is down for whatever sluttiness a man suggests and rarely lets her libido make inconvenient demands.

During Hagen’s early stand-up performances  Hagan says “ I tried to distance myself from my own alleged womanhood by distancing myself  from women in general”.

Grimmiest of all is Hagen’s story of being raped while drunk. Compounding the betrayal, a friend of hers probably conspired with the rapist. “ It would be years before I realised that it had most likely been planned. That Sally had brought me to her friend’s place, that they had decided to get me drunk enough that she could leave me with him. So he could have sex with me.”

Hagan looks  to the new authorities: mostly pronographer. There are also interviews with a therapist, and a trans woman who rhapsodises about “ feeling the sun on my c***”, but many of the experts  turn sex into  “content” for money. Since  she is a sex positive  there’s no room in Hagen’s philosophy to ask whether part of the problem is the commodification of intimacy.

Will I Ever Have Sex Again? by Sofie Hagen, Blink Publishing £18.99, 336 pages