Ariel Levy is an American journalist and author, who has been a regular writer for The New Yorker since 2008. She has also written for countless big-name publications including The Advocate, Vogue, and The Washington Post. Her fame has doubled since the release of her 2017 memoir The Rules Do Not Apply, which was a New York Times Bestseller.
Born in Larchmont, New York in 1974, Levy was raised in a Jewish family and attended Wesleyan University. She was hired by New York magazine in the late 1990s but didn’t become a regular featured writer until 2008. She writes primarily about sex, sexuality, and gender among other feminist women’s issues. In 2005 she released her first book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, an exploration of female sexuality in the modern day and its relation to feminism and the progression of women’s rights and equality.
In recent times, Levy has been applauded for her bravery and honesty in writing The Rules Do Not Apply. The memoir details a downward spiral in Levy’s life as she went from a happily married mother-to-be to suffering the grief of miscarriage, her wife’s alcoholism, having an affair, and the end of her decades-long relationship. After years of reporting other people’s lives, she said it was an opportunity for her to do the same; “It’s my truth, it’s not my former spouse’s truth, not my mother’s truth, just my truth, but the exercise of trying to tell that truth as precisely as I possibly could I found very exciting.”
She remarried in 2017 to John Gasson. When asked where her “lesbianism” went in marrying a man after a woman, she replied, “Oh, it didn’t go anywhere! I’ve always been bisexual. It’s all in there cookin’ away.”
Though Levy never had a public “coming out”, she detailed her feelings on her bisexuality in her memoir,
People sometimes tell me that they’re baffled by bisexuality: they are convinced that having sex with women is totally different from having sex with men. But it isn’t. No more than having sex with anyone is totally different from having sex with anyone else.