Blog Tour Stop: Sex in the Title by Zack Love

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New York City, May 2000. The Internet bubble has burst, and Evan’s boss fires him with an email. The next day, his girlfriend dumps him, also via email. Afraid to check any more emails, Evan desperately seeks a rebound romance but the catastrophes that ensue go from bad to hilariously worse. Fortunately, Evan meets someone whose legendary disasters with females eclipse even his own.

To reverse their fortunes, they recruit their friends into a group of five guys who take on Manhattan in pursuit of dates, sex, and adventure. With musings about life, relationships, and human psychology, this quintessential New York story about the search for happiness follows five men on their comical paths to trouble, self-discovery, and love.

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“What’s SQ?” asked Evan.

“What’s that?”

“Basically, it’s your odds of getting laid. Everyone has an SQ. Just like everyone has an IQ.”

“I’ve never heard that term before.”

“That’s because I made it up.”

“That figures. Finally applying your actuarial skills to what really matters, eh?”

“Yeah…It’s an idea I had always sort of toyed with, but after I lost Yumi to my boss, I really began to develop and refine it.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I started obsessing over why she suddenly dumped me for him. And in the process of figuring that out, I developed the concept of SQ.”

“So how does it work?”

“Your Sexual Quotient is really just an attempt to quantify, on some absolute scale, how attractive you are to the opposite sex. In general, the higher your SQ, the more desirable you are.”

“So the higher your SQ, the easier it is for you to get laid.”

“Right. But your SQ determines a lot more; it effectively defines your bargaining position in a relationship. The lower your SQ, the more likely you are to be dominated by the person you’re with,” Heeb explained.

“You really think so?”

“Look at me. I always end up being the doormat because of my SQ. But if you look at models – male or female – they generally get away with demanding more and giving less.”

“So how do you figure out your SQ?” Evan asked, suddenly eager to compute his own Sexual Quotient.

“Well, your subjective SQ is how attractive you are to a particular person. And your objective SQ is just the average of all the scores you got for all of the people out there.”

“So how do I calculate my SQ for a particular woman?”

“It’s calculated the way you would calculate your personal income taxes.”

“How’s that?”

“Various facts cause you to take deductions from the total, although with taxes you want the deductions and with your SQ you obviously don’t. Because the lower your objective SQ is, the fewer women you attract, and the less picky you can be. And that’s a bad thing. And for anyone who wants to marry a Jew, it’s a disaster.”

“Why?”

“Because there are only about fourteen million Jews in the whole world, which leaves about seven million for each gender. So let’s say I’m willing to date any Jewish woman who’s twenty to forty years old. That leaves me with a choice of about two million women in the world. And if we assume that half of those women are already taken, I’m left with a million eligible women roaming about six billion people. And, chances are, the million that’s not taken is not taken for a reason.”

“A million?”

“Yeah. And if you want to get really precise, we need to shave off at least another three hundred thousand, because I can’t date any Chasidic, Orthodox or even Conservative Jews.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I’m compatible only with bagel Jews.”

“Bagel Jews?”

“The ones who are Jewish culturally but not religiously. Which leaves about seven hundred thousand.”

Zack Love graduated from Harvard College, where he tried to create a bachelor’s degree in Women. With the bachelor portion of that degree in hand, he settled in New York City but – to afford renting his bed-sized studio – found himself flirting mostly with a computer screen and stacks of documents. Determined not to die a corporate drone, Zack decided to sacrifice sleep for screenwriting, an active social life, and Internet startups offering temporary billion-dollar fantasies.

To feed his steady diet of NYC nightlife, he regularly crashed VIP parties in the early 2000s and twice bumped into his burgeoning crush, a Hollywood starlet. But – much to Zack’s surprise – neither of those awkward conversations led to marriage with the A-list actress. Zack eventually consoled himself by imagining fiascoes far worse than those involving his celebrity crush. In the process, he dreamed up a motley gang of five men inspired by some of his college friends and quirky work colleagues. And thus was born Sex in the Title. But the novel is not autobiographical: Zack never had his third leg attacked by any mammal (nor by any plant, for that matter). In fact, keeping his member safe has been one of Zack’s lifelong goals – and one of the few that he’s managed to accomplish.