This chapter, concerned principally with Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998), looks in detail at the focus on sex that arguably first drew attention to Houellebecq's work and made the author so notorious. The chapter surveys the evidence for Houellebecq's alleged sexism or misogyny but argues that, in fact, the focus in his work is largely on individuals deprived of sex or excluded from the sexual sphere and that, from this perspective, the world of sexuality appears singularly oppressive. Houellebecq's world is populated principally by single people, but they are not so much ‘young, free and single’ as ageing, trapped and alone. His novels constitute so many portraits of sexual frustration, depression and desperation, sometimes giving rise to violence, self-harm or criminal behaviour. The chapter goes on to show how the apparent ambiguities of Houellebecq's discourse on sex are largely due to his style which is marked by a mix of genres, shifts in tone, complex narrative voices and a persistent ‘flattening’ effect that make it difficult to situate authorial intention. Above all, Houellebecq's narration is marked by a distance that we might identify as posthumanist in the sense that it takes a broad-scale, evolutionary view of human behaviour, but also, in Les Particules élémentaires, as properly posthuman, since it observes the peregrinations of humanity from a point situated beyond the demise of our species. In a final section, this chapter notes that way that Houellebecq's sexual description is always closely bound up with discussions of political economy. His novels provide a particularly astute portrayal of contemporary white-collar working life and his depiction of the stresses of this lifestyle, their link to clinical depression and their ruinous effect on social and sexual relationships is supported by recent research in sociology. Houellebecq's early novels, and related works, build a theory of what we might call the ‘economisation’ of sexuality (which appears as the corollary to a certain sexualisation of the consumer economy). In places, this early work appears to hint at a politics of radical refusal of the leading ideology of liberal individualism that makes this culture possible, and the chapter ends by considering why such a refusal is never entirely clear or conclusive in Houellebecq's work.