A New Sexual Contract

A bold, accessible essay on the business of female desire in the age of empowerment.

Is women’s consumption of erotic services a form of empowerment — or a new version of the old patriarchal deal? Is paying the same as consenting? In A New Sexual Contract, Andrea García-Santesmases tackles one of today’s most uncomfortable questions: what happens when female desire enters the marketplace under the banner of freedom and choice. 

Drawing on cultural analysis and interviews with gigolos and other men who sell pleasure to women, the book explores a growing but rarely examined industry built around female heterosexual desire. Rather than treating these practices as simple role reversals, García-Santesmases shows how empowerment rhetoric can coexist with — and sometimes reinforce — familiar hierarchies of gender, care, and emotional labor. To make sense of this landscape, she identifies three recurring male personas — the Gallant, the Pornographer, and the Therapist — drawn from cultural narratives, industry marketing, and firsthand testimony. 

The book is structured as a clear, progressive inquiry. It begins by examining how empowerment discourse has reshaped intimacy and desire, then moves on to analyze the cultural fantasies surrounding the male sex worker. From there, it addresses one of its central questions — whether payment can truly guarantee consent — before opening a broader reflection on heterosexuality as an institution that easily adapts to neoliberal logic.  

A timely, debate-starting book that works both as cultural diagnosis and feminist intervention, connecting intimacy to politics and pleasure to power — without moralism, but with real stakes.