by JULIET WATERS

I wasn’t going to read Elizabeth Hayt’s I’m No Saint: A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leaving. Why would I want to? Why would anyone want to read a memoir by a self-described JAP from Great Neck, New York who gets married too young and re-discovers her sexuality as a 34-year-old Manhattan divorcée?

Well... there’s this opening paragraph where Hayt describes walking down the aisle as a 25-year-old Jewish bride. And then there’s the next paragraph, which begins, “A few hours earlier, I had performed cunnilingus on one of my bridesmaids, Cathy.” And that’s when I realized I had a responsibility to read this book, since very clearly this was the latest addition to an emerging genre in popular literature for women, the Pornoir.

Every year there seems to be a new version of this. Last year there was the cringe-worthy translation of Italian teenager Melissa P’s S&M confessions, 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed. Before that there was French writer Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Hayt, a former art critic and current style writer for The New York Times, adds a New Yorker’s candor to this trend, so at least the language is a little less cerebral. But essentially it’s pretty much the same formula: A woman uses a quest for self-actualization as an excuse to catalogue her sexual exploits, with usually mixed results.

Sadly, it wasn’t long before I remembered why I didn’t want to read this book. It’s that kind of icky self-conscious “badness” that poisons most porn, that pseudo-subversive insinuation that sex just can’t be satisfying if you’re doing something your parents might think is okay.

But if that’s what you’re looking for, Elizabeth Hayt doesn’t disappoint. At 34 she goes on a cosmetic surgery binge and goes after high powered New York men, from an unnamed legendary music producer, to a predatory high-powered art dealer, to a billionaire political wannabe. When she realizes she’s unlikely to find good sex—let alone love—with the endlessly dysfunctional alpha crowd, she downshifts to a narcissistic Bobo, then a romantic but impossible long-distance relationship, then an eccentric rage-aholic personal trainer... all to end up with (spoiler warning #1, skip next paragraph if you read porn for the story)... her husband.

You see, it’s like Ross and Rachel. She needed to have many, many other relationships and sexual experiences before she really knew he was her soulmate. Except (spoiler warning #2, skip next line if you read porn for the happy ending) as soon as her husband reads the first draft of this book he dumps her.

Hayt’s autobiography comes at a point when the endless flip-flop between sex-positive and sex-negative attitudes in mainstream feminism is definitely on a flop trend. Last month saw the publication of two alarmist anecdotal polemics, Pornified by Pamela Paul and Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy. Both books argue to some extent that sex culture as it exists in our society today is depriving women of authentic intimacy, healthy relationships, self-esteem and dignity. Both books fail to grasp an essential truth about the relationship between sex and self-esteem. If you have low self-esteem, no amount of sex is going to change that. And if you have high self-esteem no amount of sex, or lack of sex, is going to damage it.

For all its bravado, Hayt’s pornoir is essentially another contribution to the sex-negative trend. What feminism really needs to be working on at this point is to stop trying to control sex, and start trying to loosen the vice-grip false correlation between sex and self-esteem. Maybe we need to treat sex a little more like we treat cooking. A potentially great, satisfying, even sacred pursuit (if accomplished safely), but not something that ever has to be, or should be, the essential ingredient in anyone’s sense of self-worth. Not only would this improve our sex lives, but no doubt it would improve our books about our sex lives.

I’m No Saint: A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leaving by Elizabeth Hayt, Warner, hc, 292 pp, $33.95