Sexless in the City: A Frigid Evangelical Can't Find Love in the Big Apple

By Hadley Suter, AlterNet. Posted May 3, 2008.

Reviewed: "Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity" by Anna Broadway (Doubleday, 2008)

Timed to coincide with the release of some movie that's supposed to be big, Sexless in the City (Doubleday, 2008) is the debut memoir by a woman writing under the pseudonym of Anna Broadway. It is the story of a 20-something evangelical right-winger from rural Washington and the "men who wander in and out of her life -- but never into her bed."

Only everything the book claims to be, it isn't. The back flap would have you believe that the book is about a small-town girl in the big city. But for the most part, it's the gloomy memories of a small-town girl at a small-town college. When Anna finally does move to New York, about two-thirds of the way into the book, the city has virtually no role in her daily life, with the exception of the occasional subway ride. She could have had these same experiences in Kansas. Nor does this turn out to be a relationship memoir. Broadway has not a single real boyfriend in Sexless -- unless, maybe, you count Jesus.

Anna Broadway has always fancied herself a bit of a rebel: As a child, she develops the dangerous habit of reading teen romance novels. Though at first she gleefully indulges in these forbidden books, even hiding them from her parents to avoid punishment, she soon realizes she's being a very bad little girl when she comes across a scene in which the characters go skinny-dipping. She writes: "Something about that scene disturbed me so much, I wondered if I should stop reading the book right then." Disturbed? Or excited? Granted, the first time a kid gets horny, it can be a little confusing (Mommy, why does my shame-shame feel all warm and tingly?).

Too frightened to ask her parents if what she's doing is wrong, Anna instead sets up an ultimatum: "If God wanted me to stop reading books where people swam naked together, I'd find a hairclip beneath my bed."

Guess what? She finds a hairclip and stops reading. For a while, at least.

Finding God in the form of a hairclip typifies Broadway's crude, primitive religious beliefs. Throughout the book, coincidences are interpreted as messages from God.

When she finds out her plane ride to New Zealand happens to fly over Albuquerque, where one of her crushes annoyingly dubbed "The Winner" lives, it has nothing to do with flight paths. It's yet another message from God, telling Broadway that The Winner is the One. Oddly, God doesn't pass The Winner the same message, because Anna reveals that he blatantly ignores all of her subsequent emails.

When Broadway moves apartments from Astoria to Brooklyn, and boards the N train from Queens for the last time , she sees a homeless man to whom she once gave a squashed, half-eaten muffin (gotta love that right-wing Christian generosity). That's God, too. Although it's not clear what He was trying to say in this case.

Broadway recounts incidences like the amazingly coincidental plane ride and the second coming of the homeless man as though God's influence were self-evident; she doesn't feel the need to explain herself.

Nor does she feel the need to include any context in her story: Incidents that may have felt monumental to her life are sketched with so few specifics that you don't know if she's trying to be coy by withholding information, or if her life is just as boring as it comes across. She claims her virginity is "somewhere between technical and Amish," whatever that means. She ridicules Democrats but won't say outright that she is a Republican. She refers to comments a certain love interest leaves on her blog but won't tell us what they say. It's kind of like listening to a beginner in a language class trying to tell a story: And then I went to this place with this person, and this other person said this thing to someone about this thing, and it was so funny. Ha, ha!

The oddest thing about Sexless in the City is this: Broadway doesn't have a real relationship with any love interest in the book. In fact, not a single crush shows any reciprocal interest in her. They all seem to be avoiding her, actually. Desperately.

Between the hundreds of unanswered emails and phone calls she tells us about, the book could more fairly be called a stalker memoir.

Her victims are referred to only by cutesy pseudonyms like "Subway Guy," "Hippie the Groper," the "Captain" and "Poster Boy," and their responses to her overtures are varied. The Captain, for example, is steadfast in his "aggressive" rejections. Others are more generous with their time, especially the poor photography student known as "Married Man." Broadway says of their relationship (if you can call it that):

"It was mostly I who talked, unloading my pain and confusion and loneliness while he worked. Eventually our work-and-talk routine reached the point where he'd clap twice for me to catch the lights while he hovered before the enlarger, waiting for darkness."

Sounds like fun. One wonders what kind of Christian morality Broadway is channeling by hanging out with Married Man in his dark room.

Broadway keeps most of these men listed in an online address book, sending them (and a few of their mothers) frequent email updates about her life in New York, despite the fact that not one of them has made an effort to pursue a romantic relationship with her.

The point of this scheme is to trick one of them into falling in love with her intellect, which, if you ask Broadway, is enormous. Really. She complains often about how difficult it is to find a man who is her "intellectual equal." Females she doesn't bother with, because "one rarely [finds] intellectual engagement with other women." Indeed. Once, when some guy mentions Brecht, she is so excited to be talking about smart stuff that she spends the next few years trying to recreate that conversation with someone else, only she can't find anyone who knows anything about him. It's a good thing, too -- she probably wouldn't have liked to hear his thoughts on Jesus.

Given how hard it is for Broadway to find intellectual stimulation from others, it's not surprising that she turns to herself for inspiration. She quotes herself extensively, mixing in long passages from old diaries (dated and italicized for effect) with the rest of the account of her life. Here's an example of Broadway quoting Broadway:

It seems to me, suddenly, as if I had spent quite some time fixating on sandcastles. All around me, as a child, I saw other people enjoying them ... Since I never figured out how to get or make one, I started drawing an elaborate design for one.

Ellipses hers. The castle she goes on to describe isn't made out of sand; it's made out of "shit" -- literally. And she refers back to it dozens of times to help the reader understand that it's a metaphor for her life. Let's stop here and ask, how could a lonely Christian woman who thinks of shit castles all day compete with the allure of an established cultural phenomenon like Sex and the City? She can't.

Even though Anna Broadway is a poor study, Sexless in the City should be in demand from some part of the contemporary reading audience: it's a chance a peek into the mindset of the subservient, sexually frigid women of the Christian Right. In the end, you wind up feeling sort of bad for Broadway: She's a lonely soul, virtually friendless, definitely romance-less. But then you realize that she doesn't want your pity; she's selling this pitiful life -- she just wants you to buy her book.

              

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