The Politics of Sex: Writing Transgression in a World That Pretends to Be Polite

People like to say sex is private, intimate and individual. I’ve learned the opposite. Sex is public. Sex is social. Sex is political, even when we pretend it isn’t. Especially when we pretend it isn’t.

When I started writing, I wasn’t trying to make a statement about society. I was trying to write about women the way I know women: complicated, contradictory, flawed, alive. Women who use desire to survive, to distract themselves, to negotiate power, to ask questions they’re not allowed to ask in daylight. And once you write that honestly, you realize you’re not just writing about bodies. You’re writing about the world that shapes them.

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Why I Lean Into Transgression

In my previous post [LINK], I've mentioned that transgression isn’t about shock value for me. It’s about honesty. We live in a world full of rules about what women should want, how they should behave, what kind of pain they’re expected to swallow silently. Many writers have pointed to this cultural choreography. Audre Lorde described the erotic as a source of knowledge that society tries to suppress. Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the quiet training of women into passivity, and bell hooks traced how desire becomes shaped by race and class. In fiction, Angela Carter explored how sexuality exposes social mythologies, while Virginie Despentes argued in King Kong Théorie that female desire remains one of the most policed forces in modern society.

Therefore, for me, fiction that crosses boundaries exposes those rules. It shows the machinery behind them: the silences, the roles, the inherited shame. And often the most revealing moment in a story is not the dramatic scene but the small one but the uncomfortable kiss, the transaction, the bad night, the second a character realizes she’s giving something she never meant to give… or reaching for something she’s been conditioned to believe she shouldn’t want. Writers like Elena Ferrante, Catherine Breillat and Chris Kraus have all shown how these micro-moments carry political weight. And this how , sex, on the page, becomes a language of truth. A way of saying the thing that can’t be said politely.

When I began writing the Lust in Paris trilogy, I wanted a story that could entertain, something like a typical dark romance with hot daddy billionaires and damsels in distress. But that kind of story doesn’t belong to the world I was born into. I grew up in Iran, where being a woman already meant stepping into politics every time you left your home. Everything about you, your hair, your voice, your clothes, your desire, became a statement someone else wanted to control. Women were treated as currency. Your body was a contract. Your choices were public property. And the strange thing is, when you leave a country like that, you expect the rest of the world to feel different. But I learned quickly that even the most liberal societies have their own ways of policing women. The methods change, but the expectation doesn’t.

In Paris, London, New York, anywhere, a woman’s desire still carries suspicion. Her pleasure is treated as a confession. Her ambition is politicized. Her refusal is a threat. A bold example is what's happening today in the United States: Battles over reproductive rights. Laws designed to control bodies rather than support them. Public judgment of women who report violence. The way female celebrities are dissected for aging, mothering, not mothering, wanting too much, wanting too little. And outside the spotlight, countless ordinary women navigating harassment, pay inequity, medical bias, surveillance of their private lives, and hostility toward their autonomy.

Across Europe, the same contradictions appear. In France, the country that markets itself as liberated and sensual, women are still asked to walk an impossible line between being desirable and being taken seriously. In the UK, conversations about consent and power are happening only because women forced them into the open. In Afghanistan, girls are banned from school. In Iran, women are killed for refusing to disappear. Different nations, different laws but the same message: a woman’s desire is dangerous and her freedom is disruptive.

That’s why I wrote Lust in Paris the way I did. Not as fiction, but as friction. I wanted to show how a woman’s inner life collides with the roles society hands her. How desire becomes a battleground. How the world claims ownership over a woman long before she ever tries to claim ownership of herself. My characters move through a city that promises pleasure but hides judgment in every shadow. Their choices, mistakes and desires are political, because women rarely get to separate the two.

a woman’s desire is dangerous and her freedom is disruptive.

Readers sometimes tell me my characters are “too much.” But that’s the point: if women are expected to perform a version of themselves that is soft, grateful and self-contained, then showing the opposite becomes a political act. The List in Paris trilogy follows Lili who is trying to take control of her own narratives. She falls apart, rebuilds, makes mistakes. She searches for power in places she's told to avoid. And through her choices, the stories ask:

What does freedom even mean for a woman today? Who gets to define it? And what does it cost?

Red Wings: Coming This Month

The first book in the trilogy, Red Wings, will be released as an ebook on 25 November by Outcast Press. A physical copy is on the way soon after. Check their website for more info on the book.

This book is messy, sexually and emotionally disturbing, intimate, and political in the way everyday life is political. You read about Lili (nicknamed Paris) slips into a world of fetishistic work to search for a version of herself that feels real. I wrote it from a place of frustration and tenderness. I wrote it because I was tired of stories about women who only suffer or only triumph. Real women live somewhere in the tension between the two.

Sex, on the page, becomes a language of truth. A way of saying the thing that can’t be said politely.

So to conclude I may add that sex in this book becomes a way to talk about these tensions without turning the story into an essay. It let me show the contradictions instead of explaining them. It lets the reader feel the stakes instead of being told what they should think. And honestly, transgressive fiction gives us permission to tell the real truth.

If you pick up Red Wings or the later books in the trilogy, my hope is simple: that you see the humanity inside the chaos. That you recognize something of yourself or someone you know, in the way these characters search for meaning through desire, danger and vulnerability.

Sex can entertain. Sex can unsettle. Sex can reveal the world as it is.

In the end, that’s the politics of it.

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