Sex after Sexual Assault

by Simon, Katie

• ISBN13: 9780806542768
• ISBN10: 0806542764
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780806542782
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2025-06-24
• Publisher: Citadel

Summary

If you’re a sexual assault survivor, you may experience decreased trust, anxiety, powerlessness, and depression, all of which can naturally impact your sex life and your sexual experiences. You may feel dissociation, panic attacks, physical pain, flashbacks, fear of partners, or other understandable side effects of trauma. Where do you go from here?

Sex After Sexual Assault offers normalizing stories of survivors who experienced a diversity of healing experiences, a gateway to safety, reclamation, and power.  A collection of true stories from survivors of diverse backgrounds, this book presents the obstacles and setbacks survivors frequently encounter while pursuing a sex life after assault. It addresses the often difficult layers of healing that accompany reestablishing a vibrant sexual life - trauma triggers, self-pleasure, embodied consent, disclosing trauma history to partners, and handling dating, sexual regret, break-ups, and more—including issues that survivors are sometimes too afraid or ashamed to ask about.

This is the overlooked intersection of sex and sexual assault, that portrays the full landscape of what sex looks like today, through the lens of sexual assault survivors’ own experiences.

With hard-won insights and strategies shared by survivors and distilled research findings that will offer comfort and encourage readers to navigate their trauma and cultivate vibrant sexual encounters and relationships, SEX AFTER SEXUAL ASSAULT is a much-needed, survivor-defined resource for today’s generations.

Author Biography

Katie Simon is a sexuality journalist and sexual assault survivor.  She holds a BA in Creative Writing from New York University’s Gallatin School and a MA in Biography and Creative Nonfiction from the University of East Anglia, the UK’s top creative writing program. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Lily, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Tin House, The Rumpus, Health, BUST, Lifehacker, Business Insider, The Independent, Women's Health, Hippocampus, among others. He work is included in the anthology Anatomy of Silence. Katie earned a BA in Contemporary Storytelling at New York University, an MA in Biography and Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of East Anglia and studied Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She was also a student in the Memoir Incubator at Grub Street in Boston, MA. Learn more about her at KatieWSimon.com.