Culture | Full steam ahead
Erotic writing is becoming more explicit
Gardening metaphors are out. Other things are very much in
Illustration: Julia Dufossé
Feb 27th 2025
START WITH the nipples. The lover does in “Mistress and Mother”, a steamy romantic novel from the 1990s. Though, since it was written three decades ago, they are not always called “nipples”. Instead, the author also discreetly describes them as “little buds”.
Other erotica from this era has a similarly hearty, horticultural air: in another novel, the paramour enjoys his lover’s “rosebuds”; in a third, he moves lower to her enfolding “petals”. In other books there is swelling, blooming and, of course, “seed”. The aim is oblique eroticism. The overall effect is of an unexpectedly energetic gardening catalogue.
But eroticism is changing. Open “Onyx Storm”, the latest romantasy book (a genre that blends romance and fantasy) by Rebecca Yarros, and things are rather clearer. Hardy perennials are out. Words like “hard” are in—as too are words including “cock”, “fuck” and “straddle”. And people are buying it. Sales of erotica are booming: thanks to pre-orders, “Onyx Storm” had already been on Amazon’s bestseller list for 19 weeks by the time it was published in January. After release, it shifted almost 3m copies in a week. It sold faster than any novel in America in the past 20 years.
There is now a vast variety of erotica available, including cosy erotica (knitwear is torn off), Austen erotica (Mr Darcy has assets even more impressive than £10,000 a year) and fairy erotica. There is even erotica featuring—readers may wish to brace themselves—physicists. These titles contain such explicit lines as, “Your dissertation on liquid crystals’ static distortions in biaxial nematics was brilliant, Elsie.”
Sex is not entirely novel for the novel, as readers of E.L. James and Alan Hollinghurst will know. But it is more frank and frequent. “The spiciness seems to be increasing,” says James Daunt, chief executive of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, two bookshop chains. Look at the corpus of English fiction and the word “nipples” has doubled in frequency since the year 2000, while “orgasm” has quintupled; use of the word “clit” is 14 times higher (see chart).
In some ways this is unexpected. It was once assumed that erotica was a male pursuit and that its appeal was not merely the sex but the sin. Obscenity was legally defined in Britain in 1868 by a judge called—in a detail no novelist would dare attempt—Justice Cockburn. “Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography”, wrote Bertrand Russell, a philosopher, “is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young.” Obscenity laws were relaxed in Britain in the 1960s in the wake of the “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” trial, but the illicit thrill remained.
The world has changed since then. The moralists have faded. Whatever hold the patriarchy had on publishing has waned. Yet the sex remains, and it is women who are driving it. Most of these books are being written, edited and published by women. They are bought, in vast numbers, by women. The novels are promoted by women on social-media platforms, particularly TikTok, using hashtags such as #Spicybooks and #Steamyreads, then appear on Amazon with the phrase “TikTok made me buy it!”, which sounds less like an endorsement than a defence.
As the interest in #Darkromance shows, this sex is not all nice. In Ms Yarros’s books, the hero pins the heroine violently to the floor in wrestling matches; in the romantasy novels of Sarah J. Maas, who has sold almost 40m copies, faeries do things that would make Tinker Bell blush.
What has driven this is new digital formats, such as audiobooks. (Ms Yarros and Ms Maas dominate those charts, too.) The e-book has been especially consequential. It is discreet—no one can see what you are reading on a tablet. And it lets authors self-publish cheaply, as Ms James did in 2011 with “Fifty Shades of Grey”, a story of sadomasochism. It was later republished by Vintage, but romance lovers retained the habit of reading books digitally.
Authorial autonomy online means it is “impossible to police” what goes into books, says Hal Gladfelder of the University of Manchester. The ubiquity of internet pornography means that even to try to do so would feel “ridiculous”.
In one sense this new generation of erotic prose is more realistic than what came before. Floral analogies are out; proper body parts are in. But in another sense, it is not remotely realistic. Everyone is gorgeous; names like “Xaden” and “Aetos” dominate; most characters have remarkable powers, if not superpowers.
In Ms Yarros’s books, the hero and heroine, who are long-term lovers, can creep into each other’s minds, where they find each other thinking hot thoughts in an italic font, such as “How do you want me to take you?” and “You’re astounding” rather than, as might be the fear, “Did I switch the tumble dryer on?” or “It was definitely your turn to take the bins out.”
It is easy to smirk, but writing about sex is tricky—as a trawl through the back catalogue of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards shows. The now-defunct prize, which ended during the pandemic, was set up in 1993 by Britain’s Literary Review to “highlight and gently discourage redundant, poorly written or unnecessarily pornographic descriptions of sex in fiction”. Given that the contenders in its final years included such phrases as she “offer[ed] her moist parts to my triumphant phallus” and her vagina was “slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey”, perhaps the discouragement was too gentle.
Part of the difficulty in writing about sex is what Julian Barnes, an English writer, called “the naming of parts”: “At the basic level, he put his what into her—or indeed his—what?” “Boa constrictor” is probably best avoided, but, as Mr Barnes observed, almost all terms are tricky. “Where between the Latinate and the Anglo-Saxon do you pitch it?”
Being biological can be as bad as being too oblique, as a contender for the Bad Sex award in 2019 clearly showed. “I have 8,000 nerves in my clitoris,” explained one character. “Your penis gets by on 4,000.” (Such a pronouncement would leave most lovers unsure whether to take notes or take flight.) At times characters seem to be enjoying sex as little as the reader. In a nominated work of 2019 a character, in a moment of high passion, “screamed as though [she] were being run over by a train”. The reader can only sympathise.
Most winners of the prize were, unsurprisingly, men: the male gaze does not always improve male prose. But the internet is changing the balance of power in fictional sex, just as it has in actual sex. Male misbehaviour is called out by such things as the “menwritingwomen” Reddit thread. (John Updike—the “penis with a thesaurus”—features heavily.) A popular parody pokes fun at a man writing a woman’s morning: “Cassandra…breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.”
Eroticism always “reflects what is going on in society at the time”, says Sharon Kendrick, a popular British romantic author. In the liberal 1970s, literary lotharios were in fashion. The arrival of the AIDs pandemic in the 1980s brought on a period of “sexual fastidiousness” and heroes who had one true love (and a condom).
The new generation of erotic prose may be easy to mock. But it is reflecting a society in which women can often get precisely what they want. That should give any feminist a bit of a thrill. ■
