In her memoir, “Slutever,” Karley Sciortino concentrates not on the pain caused by sluttiness but on the pleasure it has brought her. Photograph by Michael Nagle / NYT / Redux

“Unwifeable,” a new memoir by Mandy Stadtmiller, begins and ends with the same scene. A single woman in New York—who describes herself as having been, for the duration of her adulthood, “a living don’t”; who, having given up alcohol and cocaine, has claimed indiscriminate sex as her “favorite escape-the-moment drug”—is lying in bed with a handsome near-stranger. Going through the motions of seduction, Stadtmiller writes, involves switching “into a character I can do on cue: the Slut.” Making her voice “as breathy and helpless as possible,” she asks the man, “Do you want me to touch myself?” But the man—who, we know by the second recounting, has since become Stadtmiller’s husband—refuses to play along. “What’s this thing you do, where it’s like you’re doing a show?” he interjects.

For Stadtmiller, to be a slut is, by definition, to play a slut: to act out a character in order to attract attention and love. A sexual-assault survivor—at fifteen, she was raped by a distant relative—Stadtmiller learned early on how to turn her vulnerability into what she assured herself was a strength. “Instigating sexual chaos provided me with the perfect excuse for my inability to save myself or learn from past mistakes,” she explains of her years of sometimes anonymous, often destructive, and always detached sexual encounters, which, she convinced herself, were part of a “vague empowerment narrative”: “See that fiery burning wreckage? I did that. That was me.” At nearly forty, she writes, “I considered myself unwifeable. And I liked it.”

The modern slut originated with the post-sexual-revolution rock groupie in the sixties, and has held cultural sway since then, through the powerfully libidinal Madonna in the eighties, the self-consciously carnal Courtney Love in the nineties, and the fictional but influential “Sex and the City” vixen Samantha Jones in the early two-thousands. All of these figures openly expressed sexual desire and agency as part of a trajectory toward freedom, but their unrepentant sexuality also often contained something like its opposite—a need for love, the possibility of an emotional unravelling, and, always, the potential for reform. The slut’s beckoning could also read like a dare or a seduction, as if to say, “Help me be good, Daddy.” Stadtmiller, like the icons of sluttiness before her, was allowed the sexual privileges of the white, middle-class woman, who, for all her emotional suffering, is relatively unburdened with the pressures of respectability politics. Before meeting her husband, Stadtmiller, following the path of voracious sex as empowerment, “wasn’t just a self-destructive exhibitionist whose crippling neuroses manifested in navel-gazing narcissism and random acts of implosion,” she writes. “Instead, I told myself I was a feminist.”

Starting in the mid-aughts, Stadtmiller worked as a journalist in New York—first as a reporter for the Post, often on the first-person single-girl-in-the-big-city beat, and then later at Jane Pratt’s women’s Web site, xoJane, during the height of the personal-essay boom. In the early-to-mid-twenty-tens, she commissioned and edited confessional stories from the likes of Sydney Leathers, known for sexting with Anthony Weiner, and the Duke undergrad turned porn star Belle Knox, and herself wrote sex-themed or otherwise sensational pieces like “Today Is National Coming Out Day, and I’m Coming Out; Ask Me Any Invasive Sexual Question You Like,” “I Don’t Think I Can Have Casual Sex Anymore Because the Power Balance Shifts So Dramatically,” and “I Wet the Bed Last Night After Spending the Weekend Recreating My Childhood in Psychodrama.” In these posts, Stadtmiller recalled traumatic episodes from her past, like her rape, her failed first marriage, and her fraught relationship with her well-meaning but difficult parents, and also documented her sexual encounters as an unattached career woman in New York. In the pivotal passage that bookends “Unwifeable,” Stadtmiller’s future husband, objecting to Stadtmiller’s “show,” tells her, “Nothing is wrong unless it’s untrue.” But isn’t the constant excavating of trauma while on deadline in the clickbait era another kind of prison? Stadtmiller’s personal essays, she writes, were essentially performed for attention or money—they were, in other words, slutty. At xoJane, Stadtmiller laments, “every bit of my personal pain becomes commodified and packaged.”

Stadtmiller is a sure, easy writer, and her plight arouses sympathy, not least because she doesn’t attempt to make any of it sound pretty, or better than it was. But it’s hard to forget that many of the experiences that she churned quickly into blog posts for money are some of the same ones that she is retelling in “Unwifeable,” a book that is framed as—finally!—an act of true unburdening. She writes, “I will go deeper until I find out what I am really made of.” Compared with the xoJane posts, “Unwifeable” has a downbeat, reflective tenor. But, of course, this newfound honesty-via-monogamy is its own kind of performance. And who’s to say whether letting go of performance is even possible at all?

A couple of years ago, I started to notice that women, usually young and conventionally attractive, were advertising Venmo or PayPal or Amazon links on their Twitter and Instagram bios, asking men to send them money or gifts. What they were willing to give in return was rarely specified. In an article last year, one young woman wrote about how she asked men to send her five dollars on Tinder to “see what happens,” with a winking emoji. Once she pocketed the money, she unmatched the men on the app, making it impossible for them to get a “return” on their “investment.” Whether explicitly or not, such payments are framed as a kind of restitution for society’s long-standing power imbalance. “Horny men are desperate,” the subhead of the Tinder scammer’s essay summed up, and a commenter on the article responded, “The fact that any of us were giving it away for free at any point in time is the real crime.” Another recent pop-culture figure who orbits this new brand of empowerment is the young reality-TV personality Lala Kent, who, on the Bravo show “Vanderpump Rules,” has often bragged of the powerful oral-sex skills that make a happy lackey of her man, an older suitor who keeps her in Chanel bags and Range Rovers. And, on the podcast “Red Scare,” the actress and podcaster Dasha Nekrasova recently said, only half-jokingly, “If you feel disappointed by the corporate feminist promise, I made up a new kind of feminism called ‘Venmo feminism.’ . . . Because of the rampant sexual harassment in our society, it’s not really safe for women to have a job . . . so, in retribution, all gainfully employed men should just hop on Venmo and make things right, and just redistribute the wealth, if you will . . . and in return I won’t call anyone out, and I’ll stay relatively hot.”

In “Slutever: Dispatches from a Sexually Autonomous Woman in a Post-Shame World,” the author, Karley Sciortino, also concentrates not on the pain or humiliation caused by sluttiness but on the pleasure and material gains it has brought her. Sciortino is a sex columnist for vogue.com; a host of the show “Slutever,” on Viceland; and a self-proclaimed slut. For her, sex isn’t about politics; it’s about getting off. That what makes you orgasm is often inextricable from power—that, for instance, one of the sexual partners Sciortino especially desires, Malcolm, is a wealthy dominant in a Tom Ford suit with cultural cachet and a “stupidly expensive watch” who casually objectifies her as another luxury object in his arsenal—is acknowledged, but not especially probed. Such imbalances are just the conditions of the world in which women live.