‘Sex writing feels less cringe now’: are we entering a new era of erotic literature? | Books

‘Sexual liberation must mean freedom to enjoy sex on our terms, to say what we want, not what we are pressured or believe we are expected to want”, writes Gillian Anderson in the introduction to Want, the collection of essays about sexual fantasies she curated.

It’s not a new idea – in fact, Want is being marketed as an update of a similar title that came out in 1973, Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden. But it is still clearly one that strikes a chord: Anderson’s book, in which 174 women anonymously describe their imagined sexual encounters, became an instant No 1 bestseller when it came out last month. A lot of this particular book’s success can of course be attributed to Anderson’s fame as an actor, and the fact that her own sexual fantasy appears anonymously in the collection. But there seems to be a renewed energy in sex writing elsewhere, too: the Erotic Review relaunched as a print magazine earlier this year, while dating app Feeld has just published the first issue of its new literary magazine AFM (which interchangeably stands for A Feeld Magazine and A Fucking Magazine).

“I think we’re living on the cusp of change in terms of general societal views on acceptable sexual behaviour and what’s deemed normal”, says Lucy Roeber, editor of the Erotic Review. Though the publication has been going since 1995, it had been online-only for 14 years until Roeber, along with deputy editor Saskia Vogel and graphic design company Studio Frith, relaunched it as a biannual print title this year. The magazine that once counted Boris Johnson as a contributor now wants to include “more diverse and inclusive explorations of desire”, with “the explicit aim of moving away from the male gaze”. Eighty per cent of the contributors to Roeber’s second issue, which came out this month, are women, while 35% are LGBTQ+.

“It’s just a bit of a rebalance,” Roeber says. “The reality is that the male heterosexual gaze has been so pervasive in writing for a very, very long time.” Her only literary frameworks for desire when she was younger were the “glib swagger” of writers such as Henry Miller and Martin Amis, or books such as Jilly Cooper’s Riders, which she says is “filled with other issues, frankly”.

“To have more breadth is really important” for those figuring out where their own expressions of desire might fit into the world, Roeber says – though stresses that she does “want to publish all voices” in the magazine. She is however still “very interested in the heterosexual male writer’s voice” suspecting that it has been “slightly quietened by things like #MeToo”.

“The sort of assumptions that Susan Sontag was challenging in 1967” – in The Pornographic Imagination Sontag argued that the literary canon needed to expand to include literature that was explicit – “are really still there” in some areas of literary publishing, Roeber thinks. There is a “fear of peddling pornography – although in 2024, that accusation’s a bit mad because society is completely saturated in porn.”

AFM is also wanting to challenge assumptions about sex writing. Describing itself as “a dating app for the curious”, Feeld has become the go-to app for exploring polyamory and kink. After member research revealed that a large proportion of Feeld users had creative interests or professions, AFM was commissioned aiming to “feature members in their own voices”, its co-editor Maria Dimitrova says.

So 50% of the contributors in the first issue are app users, including acclaimed author of The Water Cure and Blue Ticket, Sophie Mackintosh, whose piece is about the history of celibacy. She has always really appreciated the way Feeld has “created spaces, online and offline, where there’s room for people to think and write about sex and intimacy in ways that feel radical and thoughtful”, she says.

She thinks one reason why writers and editors are so interested in exploring “this very primal, physical aspect of being alive” at the moment could be a reaction against “a world where technology can both isolate us and bring us together”.

Sex writing also “feels, frankly, less cringe than it used to be years ago, when it mainly felt like the territory of the Bad sex award”, Mackintosh says.

The Literary Review’s prize – which interestingly hasn’t been awarded since the 2020 award was cancelled – was set up in 1993 by Auberon Waugh, for “otherwise sound literary novels” that contain “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature”.

While the award is supposed to be funny – at least for those who aren’t shortlisted – “it’s also incredibly limiting”, Roeber says: its existence might put people off writing about sex altogether. The Erotic Review is considering starting a prize that is “almost opposite”, she says, “celebrating really good writing from many different angles that explores what desire is”.

And there certainly seems to be an appetite for what Roeber and her team are offering: they have printed more than three times the amount of copies of its second issue than they did with their first, after the initial print run of that issue sold out in five weeks.

In these new approaches to sex writing “there’s a sense of empowerment and play, of the freedom of thinking outside of scripts that, socially, have made up how we think about sex and desire for a long time”, Mackintosh says. “It feels less heteronormative, more centred on discovery, on community, more fun generally.”