Sexual Freedom and Hedonism

Sexual Freedom and Hedonism is a way of imagining pleasure as compatible with commitment, provided partners communicate about desire and limits. Rebecca presents it as liberating and relationship-deepening, while Eva’s early response exposes how far that confidence is from her own experience; later, amid grief for Lieve, Eva begins to take up Rebecca’s language of freedom and letting go. The book does not make these positions interchangeable: one is Rebecca’s lived conviction, the other an outlook Eva is trying to use to understand pain and change.

Rebecca’s account of freedom

Rebecca explains that she and Steef go to Liberty on Saturday nights, when, in her view, the crowd is young and still attractive. Asked whether she has sex with other people and whether she feels jealous, she describes the first experience as potentially frightening but subsequent encounters as a release from ordinary reality into fantasy. Her account stresses choice: people do only what they want, and partners can agree in advance on how far to go and where their boundaries lie.

For Rebecca, those agreements are not merely rules that contain risk. Talking about fears and desires at the most intimate level is itself part of the appeal. She believes the experience gives a relationship new momentum and depth, and insists that neither sex with others nor even falling in love with others must threaten her relationship with Steef, so long as they talk and enjoy the experience together. Her confidence rests on communication and shared understanding, not on a claim that jealousy or vulnerability cannot arise.

Pleasure, experience, and self-invention

Rebecca’s ideas are connected to the life she says she led before meeting Steef. She describes her childhood on Ibiza, where her mother was more involved with full-moon parties than with raising her. From that upbringing, Rebecca says, she learned not to build expectations that might be disappointed, not to fear loss, and not to spend a short life in fear or dissatisfaction. She rejects fixed labels: a person might be a hedonist one day and a spiritual hippie the next, an earth mother or a sex goddess. In her account, courage is what allows these different selves to emerge.

Before Steef, Rebecca says, she moved from one high to another, travelling constantly and spending time with men and drugs. Sex also functioned as a means of exchange: it could help secure shelter, food, entry to expensive clubs, and drugs. She rejects the idea that this made her a prostitute, saying that she enjoyed sex. That insistence complicates any simple opposition between sexual pleasure and material need: in her story, sex could be both pleasurable and a means of getting by.

Her account is not uncritical of the men she encountered. Rebecca says many were secretly hostile to women and aggressive in bed, and that she preferred sex with women because she found them kinder, gentler, and more skilled. Yet, as she describes it, women usually lacked the money, power, or access to ecstasy and cocaine that men could offer. Her ideal of freedom thus emerges alongside an account of unequal resources and unsatisfying encounters, rather than outside those conditions. She says Steef saved her from a life like that of a street cat, as she puts it; meeting him marks a change in the direction of her life, without erasing the experiences that shaped her ideas.

Eva’s resistance and reinterpretation

Rebecca’s confidence initially makes Eva feel as though she comes from another planet. Sex sits near the bottom of her priorities; seeing a couple having sex on television can make her irritable. In her account, sex has become an unpleasant demand made by Peter, which she endures, and she admits to secretly resenting him for it. Her discomfort is therefore not simply a theoretical objection to open relationships. It is rooted in the condition of her own intimacy with Peter, making Rebecca’s apparent ease difficult for her to understand.

That contrast surfaces when Eva asks Rebecca why she is telling her all this, more irritably than she intended. Later, after the loss of Lieve, Eva gives Rebecca’s ideas a different weight. Rebecca suggests that Peter and Eva may have held too tightly to their imagined family, and frames what happens as a lesson in letting go. Eva recounts Rebecca’s belief that events happen for a reason: in that interpretation, losing Lieve and meeting Steef and Rebecca are connected parts of what the couple needed to learn. The narrative presents this as the meaning Eva is trying out through Rebecca’s philosophy, not as proof that the loss had a purpose or that grief can be settled by adopting one.

The body as a test of letting go

At the beach, freedom becomes physical and modestly comic rather than abstract. Steef jokes that everything is permitted there and urges Peter to take off his trousers. Peter answers that he can also keep them on, then stands, removes his trousers and underwear, and quickly sits again when Steef whistles. The exchange makes the invitation playful, but it also shows that entering an unfamiliar form of ease takes a first, exposed gesture.

After three Corona beers, Peter says, the nudity around him no longer stands out as separate bodies. He walks naked to the toilet like the other beachgoers and finds the experience freeing and a little rebellious, comparing the feeling to riding his motorbike. The shift is specific: he does not declare himself transformed, but finds that a feared situation feels less strange once he has entered it. The same beach gathering gives hedonism a broader setting. Steef describes cannabis as his daily means of relaxation, while distinguishing it from ecstasy at parties and occasional cocaine; the pleasure-seeking atmosphere sits beside, rather than simply proving, Rebecca’s claims about sexual freedom.

What the ideal promises—and what it cannot settle

Across these scenes, freedom means both permission and conversation. Rebecca’s defence of sex with others depends on partners discussing boundaries and sharing the experience; the beach scene, by contrast, depicts Peter’s bodily experimentation as a small personal step. Neither scene establishes that every couple will respond as Rebecca and Steef do, or that openness removes difficulty. The distinction matters especially because Eva’s initial experience of sex is marked by resentment, not shared pleasure.

The idea also carries two different kinds of promise. Rebecca’s account treats pleasure, self-invention, and intimacy as mutually compatible; her past shows that sexual activity could also be bound up with survival and access to scarce resources. For Eva, Rebecca’s outlook offers a way to question the old, conventional pattern of life and to make sense of loss, but that meaning remains an interpretation she is adopting. The book thus places hedonism beside grief and vulnerability: freedom may widen what people permit themselves to feel and do, but it does not by itself explain suffering or guarantee that intimacy will be untroubled.