Sasha Grey and the Book She Owed Herself

Sasha Grey announcing she was writing a book was the kind of news that made certain people smirk and certain others—the ones actually paying attention—feel a particular anticipatory curiosity. The obvious assumption was that it would be exactly what you’d expect: photographs, skin, the industry that made her famous. And Neu Sex is exactly that. But "exactly that" turned out to mean something more than the smirkers anticipated.

What made Grey interesting was never the work itself—plenty of people do porn, most of them without footnotes or philosophical frameworks. She started at eighteen with an aesthetic and an argument. She cited Bataille in interviews. She listened to harsh noise and power electronics. She acted in a Soderbergh film while still one of the most visible performers in the adult industry. The industry didn’t know what to do with someone doing it deliberately, enjoying it deliberately, and winning the conversation about it on her own terms. She was supposed to be damaged and grateful for rescue. She declined.

There’s something specific about the cultural moment she occupied—mid-2000s internet, everything suddenly visible and nothing contextualized—where she provided her own context, which was both unusual and, for anyone who found the standard narrative about women in porn intellectually unsatisfying, genuinely refreshing. Whether or not you found the work itself interesting, the self-construction was impressive. She was one of the few people in that space who understood that the career was the argument.

Neu Sex came out eventually via Universe Publishing—a photography book, personal and explicit, the kind of object you either display or you don’t, and the choice says something about you. I preordered it partly out of curiosity and partly because it felt like the right thing to do for someone treating the arc of their career as a body of work rather than just a body. That distinction mattered to me then. It still does.