The Sexual Load
Unequal labour in intimate life
Description
A few years ago, the phrase "mental load" escaped the sociology seminars and landed in kitchens everywhere. A French cartoonist, Emma, drew it in 2017: the invisible work of remembering the dentist appointments, noticing the empty milk carton, managing the family's logistics — labour that mostly fell on women, and that nobody counted because it left no trace. The drawing went viral because it named something people already felt. Clémentine Gallot and Caroline Michel, two journalists, took that idea and walked it somewhere less expected. If domestic life runs on invisible, unequally shared work, they asked, what about the bedroom? Their book, The Sexual Load, extends the argument into the one place we tell ourselves is spontaneous, private, and free of calculation.
Their claim is uncomfortable precisely because sex is supposed to be the opposite of a chore. We frame it as desire, instinct, chemistry — the realm where nobody is keeping accounts. And yet, Gallot and Michel argue, intimate life is full of quiet accounting. Someone tends to initiate and someone tends to respond. Someone monitors whether the other is satisfied. Someone fakes, manages the mood, worries about frequency, carries the guilt of saying no. These tasks are distributed about as evenly as the dishes, which is to say, not evenly at all.
What makes the book more than a provocation is where it locates the problem. Not in individuals, not in bad partners, but in a script — a set of expectations about who wants, who gives, who comes first — that we absorb long before we ever sleep with anyone. The question is what happens to intimacy once we notice the script is running.
The question we’re asking : What if desire, the thing we treat as the most spontaneous part of life, is actually governed by labour we never agreed to share?What we’ll see : How two journalists carry the mental-load idea into the bedroom, and what they find written there before anyone arrives.
Table of contents
01 Chapter 1 — The mental load, under the sheets
The mental load, as it was first described, is the work of management rather than execution. It is less about doing the laundry than about being the person who always remembers that the laundry needs doing, who holds the mental checklist, who delegates and then checks the delegation. The exhausting part is that it never switches off. Gallot and Michel's move is to notice that this same structure exists in sexual life, and that we have simply refused to see it because the word "load" feels obscene next to the word "desire."
Once you look, it is everywhere. There is the partner who keeps track of how long it has been, who senses the other's withdrawal, who decides whether tonight is a good night to bring it up. There is the work of setting the scene, of managing someone else's mood so that intimacy becomes possible at all. There is the quieter labour of monitoring: am I taking too long, is the other person still into this, should I pretend I'm closer than I am. None of this looks like work, which is exactly why it goes uncounted.
02 Chapter 2 — Who initiates, who performs, who keeps score
Start with the simplest asymmetry: initiation. In a large share of heterosexual couples, the authors note, one partner is understood to be the one who asks, and the other the one who grants or declines. That arrangement sounds trivial until you sit with what it demands of each side. The initiator carries the risk of rejection and the burden of reading the moment. The responder carries the burden of a constant yes-or-no that is never neutral — a no that has to be softened, explained, apologised for, because refusing is coded as withholding something owed.
Then there is performance, and here the book is pointed. The dominant script treats one person's pleasure as the event and the other's as an accompaniment — nice to have, often assumed, rarely checked. This is where faking enters, and Gallot and Michel treat it as a genuine labour rather than a quirk. Performing enjoyment to protect a partner's ego, to end an encounter, to avoid a conversation that feels too costly: this is management work, done silently, and it is overwhelmingly done by women. The fake orgasm, in their reading, is not a lie so much as a shift absorbed without pay.
03 Chapter 3 — The script we never chose to learn
That larger something is what Gallot and Michel call the sexual script — the inherited set of instructions for how desire is supposed to go. We like to imagine sex as the place where we are most ourselves, most unprogrammed. The book's central claim is that it may be the most programmed place of all, because the lessons arrive so early and from so many directions that they never feel like lessons. They feel like nature.
The sources are familiar once named. Pornography teaches a choreography in which male pleasure is the destination and female pleasure is set dressing. Romantic culture teaches women that desirability is their value and availability their duty. Sex education, where it exists, has historically focused on reproduction and danger rather than pleasure, leaving the pleasure curriculum to be written by everything else. The result is a script with fixed roles: an active partner who wants and acts, a passive partner who is wanted and responds. We rehearse it before we ever perform it.
04 Chapter 4 — Unlearning as the real labour
If the script is the engine, then the book's deeper subject is what it would take to switch engines — and here it refuses the easy exit. The sexual load is not solved by a better technique or a frank weekend conversation, any more than the mental load was solved by a chore chart stuck to the fridge. Both are held in place by assumptions that live below the level of discussion. You cannot renegotiate a division of labour you have not yet managed to see, and seeing it is the first and hardest piece of work.
This is where the book widens past sex specifically into a claim about intimacy as inheritance. Desire, Gallot and Michel suggest, is not a private spark struck between two people in a vacuum. It arrives pre-furnished with roles, hierarchies, and defaults that were set long before the two people met. To treat your own wanting as purely personal is to mistake a cultural installation for a fact of yourself. The uncomfortable corollary is that even the things we find most spontaneously arousing may be, in part, the script performing its success.
05 Conclusion
The mental load began as a drawing about milk cartons and dentist appointments, and it worked because it gave a name to something women had carried silently for generations. The Sexual Load tries the same trick in the one room we had agreed to leave uncounted. By insisting that desire, too, runs on labour — the labour of initiating, performing, monitoring, managing a partner's expectations — Gallot and Michel take the least likely candidate for inequality and show it distributing the same way the laundry always did.
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