Nothing Natural is Jenny Diski’s 1986 debut novel, first issued in hardback by Simon & Schuster. It follows Rachel Kee, a depressed single mother, into a sadomasochistic affair with Joshua, a charming, domineering man who appears for rough sex and vanishes for months. The New Yorker classed it among S&M books; critics and feminists fought over whether its cold psychology was honest fiction or a betrayal of women. For readers who track literary BDSM—not lifestyle manuals but novels that use power exchange as moral weather—the book remains a sharp, uncomfortable 1980s artifact: desire without community ethics, dominance without safewords, and a plot that veers toward real-world atrocity.
Synopsis
Rachel has been withdrawing from the world, still marked by a disastrous childhood. Her father abandoned the family; her mother slid further into madness; Rachel was removed and placed in foster care. When she meets Joshua, attraction is almost immediate. Their relationship settles into a grim pattern: he arrives, they enact rough sadomasochistic sex, he disappears for long stretches. Rachel’s isolation and depression make his intermittent intensity feel like weather she cannot control—classic literary Dom/sub asymmetry without modern negotiation culture.
Eventually she begins to question the arrangement, especially after reading about the kidnapping and rape of a young girl. A composite sketch of the suspect looks uncomfortably like Joshua. That turn drags the novel out of private erotic pathology into public crime horror, forcing the reader to sit with the possibility that the captivating sadist is not a fantasy partner but a predator. Diski is not writing a flattering portrait of “kinky dating”; she is writing obsession, damage, and the terror that private rough sex might share a face with real violence.
Reception and Controversy
Kirkus Reviews praised the book as “an S-M novel with soul” and “effective, absorbing fiction.” The New York Times was colder, calling it “uninspired,” arguing Diski “lectures rather than lets the reader experience,” and that she fails to warm Rachel’s “cold bones” so readers might see their own desperation in her. The Washington Post framed the novel as a “sad day for feminism,” attacking the depiction of Rachel and Joshua’s dynamic and half-joking that the reviewer would almost trade back Title IX and Justice O’Connor to ensure no reader finished believing women degrade themselves “the way the women of this novel do.”
Critic Anthony Thwaite branded it “the most revolting book I’ve ever read.” The feminist magazine Sisterwrite banned Diski from publishing with them. Those reactions map the mid-1980s sex wars: SM representation in women’s literature could be read as liberation candor or as collaboration with misogyny. Dr. Doris McIlwain later noted that Diski uses characters’ “failure to show proper feelings” and “unlikely continuances” to underline the plot’s monstrosity—especially once Joshua’s shadow includes child rape. Scholarly conversation continues in volumes such as Nadal and Calvo’s Trauma in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2014).
Reading It as BDSM Literature (With Warnings)
Unlike romance D/s that ends in collaring and healing, Nothing Natural offers intermittent sadomasochistic contact as symptom and trap. Adult kink readers should approach it as dark literary fiction, not as endorsement of disappearing-top relationships or of any blurring between consensual SM and sexual crime. Shelve it under literary SM and controversy, far from beginner consent guides. It will not teach you to scene safely. It will show how a 1986 literary public reacted when a woman novelist refused to make sadomasochism look healthy, sisterly, or safe.
