Taking Sexy Back
Desire, shame and self-knowledge
Description
Alexandra H. Solomon has spent years teaching a course at Northwestern University with a title that made people smirk before they signed up: Marriage 101. In the classroom and in her therapy practice, she kept meeting the same thing — smart, capable adults who could talk about almost anything except what happened, or didn't, in their own beds. They knew how to negotiate salaries and set boundaries at work. Asked what they actually wanted from a partner's touch, they went quiet. Somewhere along the way, the vocabulary had gone missing.
Out of that pattern came her 2020 book, Taking Sexy Back. The title is a small provocation. Solomon isn't reclaiming "sexy" from magazine covers or from anyone else's gaze — she's arguing that the word got hijacked in the first place, turned into a performance staged for an outside audience. Her project is to bring it home: to relocate sexiness from how we look to someone else toward how we feel inside our own skin. It sounds simple. In practice, she finds, it runs straight into decades of accumulated shame, silence, and instructions we never agreed to.
What makes the book more than a pep talk is where Solomon starts. Not with technique, not with tips, but with a quieter and harder question about who we became when nobody was teaching us any of this honestly.
The question we’re asking : What would it take to feel at home in our own desire instead of performing it for someone else?What we’ll see : How a therapist rebuilds sexuality from the inside out — starting with shame, moving toward self-knowledge, and ending somewhere unexpectedly relational.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The word we flinch at
Say "sexy" out loud in a room of adults and watch what happens. Someone laughs. Someone looks away. The word carries a strange charge, and Solomon's first move is to ask why. Her answer is that most of us learned "sexy" as something we are graded on rather than something we feel. It became an external verdict — delivered by a partner, a mirror, an algorithm-sorted photo — instead of an internal experience. We spend enormous energy trying to appear desirable and almost none learning what desire feels like from the inside.
She calls the alternative "sexual self-awareness," and it's the spine of the whole book. The idea is deceptively plain: before we can share our sexuality with anyone, we have to actually know it — our bodies, our wants, our no's, our maybe's. Yet almost nothing in a typical upbringing points that direction. Sex education, where it exists at all, tends to cover mechanics and dangers: reproduction, disease, pregnancy avoided. It rarely mentions pleasure, and it never mentions that a person might want to understand their own.
02Chapter 2 — Shame learned early, carried quietly
To understand why the inward turn is so hard, Solomon spends real time on shame — and she's careful to distinguish it from guilt. Guilt says: I did something bad. Shame says: I am something bad. Guilt can be repaired; shame just festers. And around sexuality, she finds, shame is nearly universal, absorbed so early and so wordlessly that most people don't recognize it as learned. It just feels like the truth about themselves, a fact rather than a wound.
The sources are ordinary, which is exactly what makes them powerful. A parent's flinch when a child touches their own body. A religious teaching that framed desire as a threat to the soul. A locker-room ranking of bodies. A first partner who reacted with disgust or indifference. None of these arrive labeled as formative. They land as small, private confirmations that some part of us is wrong, too much, or not enough — and we file them away and build on top of them, often for the rest of our lives.
03Chapter 3 — The inside job that comes first
With shame named, Solomon turns to the practice she considers foundational: getting to know one's own body and desire on their own terms, before involving anyone else. She frames this not as a warm-up to "real" sex but as the real thing — the base layer everything else is built on. A person who has never asked what feels good to them, she notes, is poorly positioned to tell a partner, and even worse positioned to notice when something is off.
Much of this self-knowledge is about attention rather than information. Solomon encourages a kind of curiosity toward one's own responses — arousal, aversion, the moods and conditions that open or close desire. She's frank that desire is not a switch. For many people, especially those socialized as women, wanting doesn't precede touch; it emerges from it, a pattern the researcher Emily Nagoski has described as responsive desire. Believing the opposite — that real desire should strike like lightning, unbidden — leaves people convinced something is wrong with them when it doesn't. Solomon spends time dismantling that expectation, because it quietly manufactures a sense of failure where there is only a different, equally valid rhythm.
04Chapter 4 — Two people, one honest conversation
Step back from the individual chapters and a larger claim comes into view: for Solomon, the real subject was never sex in the narrow sense. It's what she calls relational self-awareness — the capacity to know ourselves and stay curious about another person at the same time, especially in the moments when it's hardest. Sexuality is simply where this skill gets tested most nakedly, because there's nowhere to hide.
This reframes the whole project. The self-knowledge of the earlier chapters isn't the destination; it's what makes a two-person conversation possible. Once we can locate our own wants and limits, we can voice them — and, just as crucially, we can hear a partner's without collapsing into defensiveness or reading their difference as rejection. Solomon treats desire discrepancy, mismatched libidos, awkward requests and quiet disappointments not as signs a relationship is broken but as the ordinary texture of two separate people trying to meet. The question is never whether two people match perfectly; it's whether they can stay in the room and keep talking when they don't.
05Conclusion
The students who filled Solomon's classroom arrived able to discuss almost anything but this, and that silence was the whole problem she set out to break. Taking Sexy Back answers it not with confidence hacks or performance tips but with a slower proposal: that a satisfying sexual life is downstream of self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is downstream of setting down shame. Reclaim the word from the outside gaze, learn your own body honestly, and only then bring that self to another person — that is the sequence, and the order matters.