What if the solution to sexual harassment, assault, and the endless exhausting games of desire was simply... turning it off?
Sarah Chen didn't set out to change the world. She was just a thirty-two-year-old HR consultant in Palo Alto, tired of her married boss photographing her feet under the desk, tired of checking the news each morning for the day's tally of sexual harassment scandals. When her psychologist friend half-jokingly suggests chemical castration as a thought experiment, Sarah can't stop thinking about it. What if desire — the oldest, most uncontrollable force in human life — could simply be switched off? Voluntarily. Reversibly. For anyone who wanted out.
What starts as a support group in a rented library room spirals into something far bigger: Asexopolis, a real city built from scratch in the Nevada desert, populated by hundreds and then thousands of people who choose to give up their libido in exchange for a life free of harassment, jealousy, and obsession. Backed by a presidential hopeful, funded by tech billionaires who made their fortunes on porn and dating apps, and watched by a skeptical world, the experiment succeeds beyond anyone's wildest imagination — safer streets, explosive creativity, a cultural and scientific renaissance that Hollywood itself can't buy or destroy.
But utopias have expiration dates. As a second generation grows up never having chosen this life, as bodies begin fighting back against the chemistry meant to silence them, and as the black markets, the factions, and the federal investigators all come knocking, Sarah has to face the hardest question of all: was she building paradise, or just a very well-intentioned prison?
Told with the dark wit, biting social commentary, and razor-sharp momentum of a woman looking back at the movement she accidentally started, the novel is a provocative, funny, and deeply human novel about utopia, biology, freedom, and what happens when good intentions meet human nature head-on.