Since Fear of Flying, a confessional tidal wave has washed in all manner of sex memoirs by women. Mary Karr’s Cherry and Kerry Cohen’s Loose Girl have taken up the coming-of-age theme. Others have been ready to map the less visited boroughs of sexuality. But the strange thing is how far we haven’t actually progressed beyond Jong’s first book. Memoirs like Toni Bentley’s The Surrender (an entire volume devoted to the cosmic joys of anal sex) and Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart (tales from her life as a dominatrix) have staked out extremes with an unflinching lack of inhibition. Yet as Nin serves to remind us, flaunting naughty behavior can prove less frankly courageous than it at first appears.

What right now feels daring but also timely, I’m discovering, is this: to forget about trying to prove some sort of risqué bona fides, and to focus instead on all that interior whirring. The consensus that female lust is normal and real has been a long time coming—so long that any acknowledgment that our desire is adulterated by doubt can still seem anti-woman, or anti-sex, or anti-sexual-woman (or just a downer). The challenge that the new group of memoirs converges on is to show otherwise: to get at what feels true, which is that the endless internal oscillation that happens during sex needn’t sabotage our sexual experience, much less our autonomy. If questioning can’t be part of expressing female desire, that is a diminishment.

Television has turned out to be an unlikely proving ground for this kind of subtle, uncomfortable narrative of desire. In Girls, Lena Dunham has dramatized the ambivalence in her Jong-like blurring of the lines between autobiography and fiction. Critics have clucked over the self-abasing love life her character, Hannah, leads with her bossy (yet somehow incredibly hot) on-and-off boyfriend, Adam. But Dunham’s gimlet-eyed tracking of Hannah’s explorations—the horny, flushed confusions; the stumbling, self-conscious attempts at dirty talk—is a real feat of narrative truth-telling. Dunham shares the memoirist’s goal of capturing just how equivocal yet irrepressible female sexuality is.

If the point is to find adventure and plot—and truths about desire—not in what the author did but in what she felt and thought while she did it, outré territory in the realm of sex memoir gets redefined: the memoirist needn’t have sex at all. In The Art of Sleeping Alone, her account of a period of celibacy, Sophie Fontanel, an editor at French Elle, never gets much beyond flaunting her renunciation. She doesn’t merely refuse sex, with all its chaos and pain and glory. She also turns away from detail, sensation, story—her refusal is all that the book offers. But for Nicole Hardy, a Seattle writer raised in the Mormon Church to believe that the man she married would be the only man she would ever sleep with, a life without sex is in no way a stunt. It has been her fate, which she explores with acute curiosity in Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin, a memoir about her sexless years as an unwed Mormon woman, and her quest to lose her cherry after she quits the Church in her mid-30s. She has shut down her responses for so long that every date presents minefields. The simplest touch—her new boyfriend putting his arm around her—disorients yet also animates her senses:

I turned quickly when I felt a hand grazing my bare shoulder, beyond the strap of my tank top—thinking someone was playing that game: touching my right shoulder, hiding to my left. I felt myself blush, realizing it was Scott … How long will it take, I wondered. How long for my body to become unsurprised … ?

In a hypersexualized culture, surprise like Hardy’s works better than even the kinkiest sex could to remind us of how complex our own appetites are, and how incongruous our responses can be. We’ve surely all felt flickers of startled ambivalence, but maybe brushed the moments aside. Hardy brushes no feeling aside; her skin is attuned to every touch it receives, and her brain goes after the words that might begin to pin down the response.