Maybe We Can Talk About It

Iris Kim interviews Katie Simon about “Tell Me What You Like: An Honest Discussion of Sex and Intimacy After Sexual Assault.”

By Iris KimSeptember 4, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Gender & Sexuality

DESPITE THE EXPERIENCES brought to light as part of the Me Too movement, I rarely encounter stories about how survivors learn to navigate sexual intimacy post-assault. Narratives about survivors often halt their stories at violence and trauma. After the assault, the media flattens victims into “broken” people incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure. There is widespread failure to acknowledge that after a traumatic sexual encounter, survivors must somehow move forward into the sex that follows.

Katie Simon (they/she) has dedicated their career to addressing these erasures. When I found Simon’s writing, I was slowly reentering the dating pool and desperate for practical guidance on how to avoid a minefield of triggers. At The Lily (The Washington Post’s former gender and identity publication, discontinued in 2022), Simon published articles that wove their experiences with her reporting, including pieces for partners supporting their loved ones through sexual trauma and about the varied sex lives of survivors. As I built a lasting trust with my own partner, I relied on Simon’s words to open up conversations about how pleasure and trauma would coexist in our sex life.

In Tell Me What You Like: An Honest Discussion of Sex and Intimacy After Sexual Assault, Simon expands on their reporting, blending memoir with dozens of survivor interviews. The book goes beyond conversations about PTSD to focus on “post-traumatic growth”—or how survivors discover sexual agency despite and because of the violence they’ve endured. It offers survivors like myself a manual of helpful suggestions, a fascinating window into a range of survivors’ sex lives, and a deep dive into the sexual challenges Simon faced. Ultimately, though, what Tell Me What You Like offers is hope: beyond the pain of sexual trauma, shared stories can and will expand to include self-discovery and growth in sex and intimacy. It invites us to imagine sexual safety and pleasure together.

Simon and I spoke in August, shortly after the book’s publication in July.

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IRIS KIM: What was missing in pop culture or other media that made you want to write this book?

KATIE SIMON: I noticed for many years that anything that touched on sex after sexual assault tended to stop at the point where survivors were reconnecting with their bodies and reaching an embodied sexuality. But when I talked to survivors, their primary concerns were usually about having sex and building relationships with other people. The research out there on this was outdated—it would only include straight cis white women, or it might pathologize being queer. Very few of those limited resources dove into what it’s like to have sex with another person: What is it like to have sex with a partner? How do you navigate that? What’s the communication like? What’s the form of consent that you might use? I wanted to capture the reality of how people moved through healing and coping: the whole messy in-between of how real people actually approached relationships.

A number of Me Too memoirs have been published, but your book blends reportage and memoir. What inspired you to take that different approach?

When this book was just a seed of an idea, I knew that, as just one person, my personal experiences of sex after sexual assault were pretty limited. I knew it would be a lot more powerful to represent a variety of experiences and have them be in conversation with each other. A personal memoir would also have been powerful, but I think having a chorus of voices is what makes this book so helpful to readers.

Sometimes, people around you are not very prepared to talk about this topic. People you expect to lean on turn out not to be supportive. So, this book is almost meant to be a group chat of different survivor perspectives; it’s designed to mimic what social support might feel like in your personal community.

 If there was a group chat of all the people that you interviewed for this book, I would absolutely need to join.

I think people might assume that the book is too heavy or negative for them. But most of what the survivors shared with me was post-traumatic-growth-oriented. A group chat with these survivors would probably be positive, uplifting, and specifically insightful. They’re giving examples of exactly what’s helped them, and there might be things that people aren’t aware are options for them, because they’re not represented in the media or in the movies. Suggestions like kink or BDSM, or even methods to press pause to have a conversation during the middle of sex—it’s about being exposed to different healing and sexual options. Survivors have gone where many people are not forced to go. They’ve had to interrogate how their sexuality can work for them and how to reclaim, rebuild, and grow after sexual trauma.

 I was in awe at the number of survivors that opened up to you. Getting anyone to talk about sexual intimacy, let alone survivors, is so difficult. How did you build that trust?

It helped that I’m a sexual assault survivor and I’ve been publicly writing about it for years. But  I also had several instances where somebody would contact me and say that they’d love to be included in the book, [but] then they’d ghost me. Rather than being disappointed, I just saw it as part of the process; this subject matter is really difficult to talk about.

There aren’t many similar projects out there that interview survivors about sex. There wasn’t anything that they could look to as an example. So anyone who spoke to me really had to trust me completely.

You interviewed a range of survivors who identified across spectrums of race, sexuality, and religion (to name a few).

I thought it was important to represent as many people as possible, because sex after sexual assault isn’t a conversation that’s been covered in pop culture or media.  I was very invested in not only representing diverse identities but also representing diverse experiences. That could mean different experiences of trauma, or different sexual experiences and sexual interests. I was amazed that the book ended up being about 50 percent queer survivors, because I didn’t specifically seek that out.

Throughout the book, you and other survivors offer solutions—like sex education and healing in community. What was a common solution that was mentioned?

One of the most interesting things that I learned was about how survivors disclose their trauma history and state their needs by using examples from pop culture or media. One survivor specifically used the docuseries Surviving R. Kelly to tell a longtime partner, “Something similar happened to me, I’d love it if you could watch it.” I found that if survivors are able to share their story or ask for what they want while also using examples of others, it validates them and normalizes their experiences. Since then, I’ve focused on writing about intimacy so that somebody can use it to tell someone, “Hey, I read this paragraph that you could read. I struggle with this and maybe we can talk about it.”

You mention that you decided not to include many “subject matter experts,” because survivors themselves are the subject matter experts. Can you tell me about how you came to that decision?

 There aren’t really that many subject matter experts on sex after sexual assault, period. Therapists are not specifically trained in it, and researchers are not receiving funding to research it. It’s like a mysterious black hole … When I first started working on this in 2017, it was a no-brainer to stick to people’s true stories. When the research out there is half-formed, it’s not ultimately that helpful.

It’s clear that Tell Me What You Like is written for survivors. But are there other audiences that you had in mind?

Survivors definitely benefit from this book. But partners and loved ones of survivors would learn a lot from reading it. It tackles intimate perspectives about issues that might be coming up during sex—and offers the shared language to talk about it.

I’ve also seen therapists really responding to this book. They’re telling me both that they’re reading it to gain more knowledge and that they’re giving the book to patients as a resource. They’ve recognized that it’s a blind spot for them, since many of them didn’t study this themselves. They’re glad that someone else did all this qualitative research and put it in a shareable format.

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Katie Simon (@katiewsimon) is a sexuality journalist and author of Tell Me What You Like: An Honest Discussion of Sex and Intimacy After Sexual Assault (2025). They have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, The Cut, Tin House, and elsewhere. Katie studied creative writing at New York University and University of East Anglia, as well as narrative medicine at Columbia University and human sexuality at the Kinsey Institute. They are the co-founder and curator of Close Read, Dame’s sex-positive book club. Katie is innovating on sex after sexual assault through research, therapist trainings, and bolstering partner support. They live in Texas with their dog, Babka.

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Featured image: Photo of Katie Simon by Liz Moskowitz.