Young’s account of his experience with a woman who asked to be choked is a highlight. He is attentive to the complex workings of masochism and ultimately suggests that the failure to appreciate and satisfy such a request might spring from his own imaginative or moral deficit. He now recognises that choking the woman ‘attentively’ and prioritising her pleasure might serve to ‘better’ himself. This demonstrates a theoretical receptiveness to alien or marginal desires on Young’s part, which is a form of virtue. Then, by revealing that he refused her request – largely because of a strong aversion to harming women – Young demonstrates yet more virtue and deftly avoids the possibility of unsettling his readers.

Young rightly discusses the importance of humour in sexual life. ‘[H]umour is often taken to be purely emotional,’ he says. To help readers avoid this (unlikely) mistake, he explains that humour ‘cannot work without some logic. To get a joke, we must understand what we are looking at ... More specifically, much humour relies on some kind of mismatch, muddle, or contradiction.’ This is the philosophical equivalent of speaking very slowly to an imbecile.

Sigmund Freud is given short shrift. His understanding of sex served to turn ‘the richness of humanity into the poverty of a single longing’, Young argues. Perhaps he is right, but there are reasons to doubt his wisdom. He writes of Freud: ‘The Doctor ignored our need to interpret the world and ourselves.’ I’ve stared at that sentence several times, in wonder.

Young dismisses Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) as a ‘joyless’ account of ‘rutting’, largely because D.H. Lawrence prioritises animalistic desires over the subtleties and sensitivities that Young prefers. But perhaps we should be suspicious of language-rich intellectuals who regard sex as a sophisticated form of conversation. Lawrence’s lovers trust and revere each other; their bond is built on physicality. Neither of them breaks that bond despite the social stigmas and personal hardship it produces. Maybe rutting has something going for it?

The notion that we cannot enter into another person’s consciousness or experience their pleasure as they experience it is uncontroversial and easy enough to write, but Young takes a long time to arrive there. And here are four consecutive sentences that convey essentially the same thing about our reactions to beauty:

The point is not that we are always foolish to reward beauty, but that we often do so unconsciously and unreasonably. Even if there are rational reasons to see beauty as hale and gainful – and these are complex judgements – we do not behave rationally. We have an immediate and intuitive reaction to someone’s good looks, and this regularly overcomes our intellect. It is more a lurch and a hunch than a choice.

Some readerly pleasure may be available here, but the observation is too basic to bear such repetition.

The chapter on masturbation features the subtitle ‘On the banality of jerking off’, and that is an accurate summary of Young’s argument: masturbation is banal, the Christian condemnation of it is overdone, and ‘wanking is nothing to be ashamed of’. This might have been worth writing a few decades ago.

Young might have considered whether masturbation, particularly in the absence of other sexual encounters, represents a missed opportunity for the sexual ‘conversation’ he prizes, where ‘feelings of togetherness arise from the fluency of the dialogue’. He considers it as part of the larger sexual life of people who ‘enjoy tender lovemaking in the morning, then a quick pull in the evening’, but what about those who ‘pull’ in the morning and evening and rarely (or never) do anything else? Are they missing out on something important, even vital, or is it all just the same? Masturbation also retains some of the stigma associated with perceived ugliness, poverty, and social ineptitude. Does philosophy have anything to say about that? Young pits several of his arguments against ‘conservative’ ideas. Conservatives are critical of prostitution because ‘the profession liberates noxious female lust’. Conservatives also despise women and all things feminine, he adds, and they regard the vagina as a festering and weeping wound. So much for them. Immanuel Kant is one such conservative, according to Young, yet among Kant’s noteworthy contributions to moral philosophy is the idea that we should treat people as ends rather than means. Kant’s hostility to sex springs partly from a belief that we are always objectified when we indulge in it. Does this make anti-objectification a conservative moral principle?

Young depicts a theoretical seduction by a nonbinary lover and then prescribes the appropriate response: ‘And perhaps I kiss off that lipstick and pull off that coat and – suddenly their ambiguity is not ambiguous at all. If I cringe or laugh at them, and forget their wit and cute nerdisms, I am wrong: ontologically, but also morally.’ This mirrors the experience of reading On Getting Off, which poses as an alluringly ambiguous prospect (hot and chaotic sex fused with cold and controlled philosophy), yet when we kiss off that lipstick and pull off the coat we’re left with dreary moral instruction.