“When I published my first book and sexist, misogynist, racist, and classist insults were hurled at me for being a woman, looking the way I do, and speaking loudly of my rights and my desires — that’s when I began to identify as feminist."


By the time we&rsquo;ve reached the last of the 15 essays that make up Gabriela Wiener&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sexographies-Gabriela-Wiener/dp/1632061597" target="_blank">Sexographies</a>, just published by Brooklyn&rsquo;s Restless Books, she really doesn&rsquo;t need to tell us, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a journalist who specializes in putting herself in extreme situations and writing in the first person about those experiences.&rdquo; In one essay, she spends two nights with a polygamous man and his six wives at their home outside Lima, having shared the address with none of her loved ones. In another essay, Wiener and her husband go to a swingers&rsquo; club in Barcelona. In another, she visits a man known for his expertise at triggering female ejaculation. In all these scenarios, Wiener&rsquo;s journalist&rsquo;s hat stays on but her knickers come off.

Her fearless approach to sex is hard-won. &ldquo;Sex education in Peruvian schools, especially during the 80s, when I grew up, left much to be desired,&rdquo; Wiener recently told me by email through a translator. &ldquo;It was deeply conservative, and by no means a lesson in equality. I&rsquo;m a victim of this systematic miseducation. Like most, I had to find information by myself, and I learned little by little&mdash;from the Latin American boom and its authors&rsquo; eroticisms, from trash TV, from the few movies, like&nbsp;Porky&rsquo;s, being played on the TV, from newspapers, from porn, from men physically harassing me on the streets and verbally harassing me on the bus&hellip;Spurred on by all that culture, virulence, morale, and trauma, when I was able to go deeper I did, becoming a sort of self-taught chronicler of intimacy and sexuality.&rdquo;

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Wiener&rsquo;s libido-centric essays account for&nbsp;Sexographies&rsquo;s tantalizing title, but that title is also a bit limiting. The Madrid-based writer&rsquo;s first book to appear in English,&nbsp;Sexographies&nbsp;is made up of charged and hard-charging essays selected from three previously published collections &mdash;&nbsp;Sexograf&iacute;as&nbsp;(2008),&nbsp;Llamada perdida&nbsp;(2015), and&nbsp;Dicen de m&iacute;&nbsp;(2017) &mdash; and many of the pieces are as sexy as an IRS audit. One is devoted to Wiener&rsquo;s body dysmorphia disorder, another to her almost debilitating superstition about the number 11. What&rsquo;s interesting here is that Wiener seems to be most vulnerable in essays in which she&nbsp;isn&rsquo;t&nbsp;putting her body on the line.

&nbsp;

In &ldquo;From This Side and from That Side,&rdquo; she writes about being on the receiving end of cultural stereotypes (&ldquo;I used to be considered an oddball for being Peruvian and not cleaning houses&rdquo;). In &ldquo;On Motherliness,&rdquo; she exposes parents&rsquo; ultimately farcical efforts to show our children only our best selves (&ldquo;Sooner or later they will realize you&rsquo;re not postmodern, just an imbecile; that you&rsquo;re not funny, just careless and irresponsible&hellip;that you&rsquo;re not their friend, just their mother&rdquo;).&nbsp;Wiener may have had to disrobe in &ldquo;Goodbye, Little Egg, Goodbye,&rdquo; but there&rsquo;s nothing erotic about giving one&rsquo;s body, or at least a part of it, to an assisted-reproduction clinic (&ldquo;At this precise instant, a child of mine is growing inside of an unknown woman&rdquo;) in order to make the last payment on a master&rsquo;s degree.

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Most of us can appreciate the urgent need to make ends meet, but few of us have Wiener&rsquo;s daring. I asked her if she ever walked away from an assignment on the grounds that it was too risky. &ldquo;I turned down writing about pharmaceutical companies&rsquo; clinical trials because I didn&rsquo;t want to stuff myself with drugs without knowing their consequences,&rdquo; she told me. &ldquo;I also very nearly &lsquo;hired&rsquo; philosopher Paul B. Preciado to sneak me hormones in order to experience what he did when taking Testogel, but the whole business of sprouting a beard and being gripped by excessive lust put me off.&rdquo; A good rule of thumb: If Wiener isn&rsquo;t game to try something, it&rsquo;s probably a terrible idea.

In&nbsp;Sexographies, no less of a preoccupation than sex is feminism, and I asked Wiener when she experienced her political awakening. &ldquo;When I published my first book and sexist, misogynist, racist, and classist insults were hurled at me for being a woman, looking the way I do, and speaking loudly of my rights and my desires&mdash;that&rsquo;s when I began to identify as feminist. The barrage of insults remains a constant in my life. If anything, their frequency and violence have increased. But this radical violence has radicalized young women, who are now at the forefront of the movement.&rdquo; One of those voices belongs to Wiener&rsquo;s own offspring: &ldquo;My 11-year-old daughter is already called &lsquo;hembrista,&rsquo; the Spanish-language equivalent of &lsquo;feminazi.&rsquo;&rdquo; Even by email and through a translator, I can&rsquo;t miss the note of pride.

Gabriela Wiener on Writing Libido-Centric Essays in 'Sexographies'

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