Contemporary erotica is typically a genre of submission, satisfying the urges of its mostly female readers to get lost. A woman may lose herself in tales of breeding or bondage to get reamed by Prince Charming, the plumber or the domme. After the romp, life returns to status quo. No matter how hard the fantasy, most erotica is soft. It peddles in heartstrings and happy endings.
For four years in the nineties, I wrote a similar kind of “happy ending” smut, cycling through all the kinks of the era. I, too, inverted Prince Charming and peddled in loss, churning out text that amounted to naught. After four years,, I realized that I needed to employ this incendiary language for my own purposes. I started to write girls with the urge for confession, not escape. I was sure that all this female moaning had to mean something. If there was no dick in her mouth, what would she say?
In all the books I’ve written, I haven’t been able to adequately answer that question.
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Cue 2020. Luster by Raven Leilani is published to great acclaim. In a winding story about a young Black woman having sex with an older white married man, Luster provoked not just with its humour and brilliant turns of phrase, but in its commitment to rendering sex in the service of Kunstlerroman. Soon after Luster, Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service arrived, a queer novel waxing philosophically on vanity and dick, featuring pages-long scenes of hot and awkward threesomes. Then, Shmutz, Felicia Berliner’s tale of a Hasidic teenager on the cusp of arranged marriage as she discovers pornography—spurring heady, lights out self-exploration on repeat.
Finally, I thought, the smart ones are writing about sex, fiction explicit and packed with thinking. In other words, the “sex masterpiece” had arrived.
Of course, there’d been smart, woman-authored books featuring sex for years. I am thinking of the work of Paula Bomer, Wendy C. Ortiz, Phoebe Gloeckner, Julie Doucet, Catherine Millet and Virginie Despentes. And a whole generation before them—writers working in and out of erotic memoir, fiction, and critical work, like Diane di Prima, Kathleen Collins, Kathy Acker, and Ellen Willis—I’ve read them all. But what felt new in this cultural moment was how sex was being represented as both explicit and inextricable from thinking. Sex for sex’s sake. Sex stuck with the mind.
I was sure that all this female moaning had to mean something. If there was no dick in her mouth, what would she say?
This new sex writing—pro-cerebral, emotionally hardcore—opposes the inevitability of women losing themselves. It is not filled with boxes of kinks to tick off. It resists hashtags and Bests Of. It ignores Fifty Shades. This is not about pounding out pages to reinstate the status quo. This is literature created to hear the sluts speak.
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“Don’t you know men are dangerous?” Eve chides Olivia on their first meeting in Acts of Service after Olivia tells her that her boyfriend wants to fuck Eve. Throughout the novel, Eve is a cheater. She loves women, but she wants the sexual freedom of a man. The narrative keeps us close to Eve’s strutting, lusting swagger as she tests the limits of her own ego when Nathan, the object of her desire, is accused of workplace impropriety. Eve continues to fuck him nearly unscrupulously because she understands that having sex is her most natural way to be.
Things are even more complicated for Raizl, Shmutz’s heroine. Transgressing her Hasidic upbringing by sneaking a computer under her sheets, Raizl pierces her own consciousness in the libraries of pornography. “While she watches bodies on the screen, her own body vanishes, but as soon as the video ends, her thighs and hips are present again, heavy, her skin tight.” The story tracks Raizl’s undoing through therapy, family, and sexuality as she returns night after night to encounter the screen. “Following the woman in the video, Raizl spits on her fingers and reaches through the coarse hair to find what’s exposed online and hidden on herself.”
Edie in Luster is also wrapped up in self-discovery after moving in with her lover Eric and his wife Rebecca, a couple with an adopted black child who they want Edie to bond with. The story’s thrilling set-up, which involves shoving and rollercoasters, moves into suburban territory after Edie and Eric make love. Edie considers “the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope.”
As different as these three novels are, their revelations are intertwined.
“I was no longer bounded by the old parameters,” believes Eve as a free sexual agent.
“The whip is as necessary for the woman’s pleasure as the lull between the lashes,” says Raizl, in thrall under her sheets.
“I call him daddy and it is definitely not my fault that this gets him off so swiftly that he says he loves me,” reveals Edie, in a moment of control.
I have a secret, the erotic narrator says, but it’s not a secret anymore.
If literature, generally speaking, immerses us in other lands and consciousnesses, erotic literature, in parallel fashion, shunts us directly into bodies. It’s a kind of ingenuity to be both writing and reading inside someone else’s body, to become intimate with their tastes and perversions and disgusts. Seen this way—as the inner life of a character’s bodily desire—the complex function of erotic literature is penetration, a provocative inversion of brain and gonads.
Why should a novel only reside in the mind?
Unlike genre erotica, erotic literature—no “a”—traffics in both good and bad sex. There is almost always an admittance of negative thoughts in the sexual realm. Edie tells us of her warped ovaries, Eve has panic attacks after cheating, and Raizl’s repeated self-hatred is real. Realism, in these texts, functions as the shadow side of ecstasy. Narrators often walk the queasy line between horror and arousal, between the worst thing happening and the best thing happening for them in bed. This form of erotic literature (as a feminine art) is a “messing with the pipes” kind of practice. It’s about mixing “high” and “low” language, making use of porn’s tricks, and hosting queer, outside views of sacred or closed spaces. In my case, writing erotic literature has been an urge to participate in traditionally male spaces like religion and pornography. I need to break in, root around, leave a mess.
My characters fuck, but they’re stifled. I want them to feminize headlessness.
For Raizl, the revelation is that therapy is a “porn of the self.”
For Eve, it’s encountering her own appetite; the realization that her body was “made for this.”
For Edie, it’s the primacy of her own vision over the strictures of class, race, and sex. “I mix my paints,” Edie tells us near the end of the novel in front of her lover’s naked, posing wife. “Deep, quaternary colors, rust, ash, dirty turquoise, and then I take her face into my hands and pull her mouth back with my fingers so that I can see her teeth.”
At the end of the day, Luster says, there is just Self and Art.
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In a chapter titled “Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex” in Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative (2023), writer Melissa Febos lays out why and how more writers should be writing better sex. After completing her provocative memoir Girlhood (2021) about expunging patriarchal narratives embedded in her consciousness, Febos says that her life and her work changed for the better. “To the extent that it has been possible,” she writes, “that mission has inestimably improved my sexual life as well as my writing about sex.”
For better or worse, contemporary erotica houses a never-ending repository of occasionally thrilling human sexual practices. I’m just glad that literature is no more running from it.
She continues: “The most meaningful way to awaken to any truer story of your own life is to surround yourself with people and works of art that are also interested in this project. It has also turned out that, for me, writing itself is a primary means of liberating my own mind.”
So I surround myself with this new glut of writers on sex and I’ll expect more to join the liberation movement (alongside the cri de coeur of Darryl by Jackie Ess, Sally Rooney’s tradwife sex scenes and Polly Barton’s edging and nudging of porn.) In the meantime, I am not trashing genres that give readers joy. For better or worse, contemporary erotica houses a never-ending repository of occasionally thrilling human sexual practices. I’m just glad that literature is no more running from it.
The private will push its way into the public in this new erotic literature. Sluts will walk and fuck freely in the world. We will hear what they think, what is churning inside.
There’ll be more Darryls, more Eves, more Raizls and Edies.
In a cultural landscape of increasing sexual conservatism, the “idiotic erotic” should be bursting at the seams.
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Yara by Tamara Faith Berger will be published by Coach House Books on October 17, 2023.
