Erotica Made Me

Erotic fiction, more than any other genre, has the power to transform how we see ourselves.

I am as much myself within the pages of desire as I am at home in my own body. That took a long time. It took a library.

As a little girl, my mother read me Grimms’ Fairy Tales from a book she’d won in 1959 for a junior vegetable-growing competition. Years later the book became mine, along with the sense that romance, sweetness, and beauty were inextricably bound together the essential ingredients in the pursuit of love.

She was a literary snob that believed your bookshelf was a mirror to your soul and curated the shelf in my suburban bedroom accordingly. Charlotte’s Web, Trixie Belden, The Wind in the Willows. Each one a gentle nudge toward tradition, virtue, and pastoral charm. It was less a reading list than a performance of moral suggestion.

It wasn’t until years later, when we sat down to talk about what we were actually reading, that she braved the question: why do you read all that trash?

Beneath the snobbery was curiosity disguised as naivety and unfed passion cloaked in virtue and etiquette. For years she had been living in a sexless marriage devoid of intimacy. Her wants and needs no different to mine. This version of her started to make more sense.

When I was around eleven I wanted to know about sex.

I found her stash. Every week she went to the local newsagent and from under the counter collected a secret subscription, a series on desire and pleasure. Hidden under the winter woollies in her closet was an explicit guide to a healthy sex life. I squirrelled it out and read every issue cover to cover, crouched in the dark between her coats.

What I didn’t realise then was that the sexy smut she was using to reignite her marital fire had lit my pre-pubescent wanting fuse.

The Education I Actually Wanted

At fifteen I was escaping to an inner world where I could seek out variations on virtue.

I craved indiscretions and transgressions, the wilder and more shocking the better. I remember sitting in a hushed circle as my friends and I dissected The Clan of the Cave Bear, not exactly erotica, but the scenes of dominance, punishment, and survival asked questions we were not supposed to think about, let alone answer. When the film was released we were all fascinated about how those scenes would translate on screen. None of us were allowed to watch it.

Some of my girlfriends were stealing Mills & Boon from their mothers, swooning over the heroes. I could not escape the pre-text of monogamy that underwrote those texts. I already understood, instinctively, that I was attracted to many.

Early sexual scripts were full of mixed messages: be virtuous, sex is power, making love is a private act, have sex for fun, please him and also, how do I have an orgasm? Cosmopolitan was the permission slip. Anaïs Nin was what we now call aftercare.

At sixteen I lost my virginity and started a relationship with my body.

I wanted to know what sex really was, what it could be, what I wanted. I read The Joy of Sex and began to understand my body could talk. The Kama Sutra confirmed the body had a vocabulary I was only beginning to learn.

I sought out pornographic fiction too; a baptism of fire into the raw mechanics of lust, mostly unfiltered and unromantic. It offered climax but without context fell short. The bodies had no backstory. Pleasure was stripped of metaphor. I found myself interrogating the text the same way I interrogate visual pornography now: who gets kissed? Who consents? Who watches? What happens after? Where’s the story? It was not a moral choice, I chased anything clandestine. It just didn’t have the same effect as erotica. I still dabble when I want to get off quickly and need a clear run to climax.

Through the pages I taught myself what I wanted and what I didn’t. I acquired the language to express those wants, although vocalising them came later.

Back then a vagina was just one body part, but I had learnt there was a thread between my mind and pelvis that if thrummed carefully resonated deeper than the clitoral switch.

My Twenties: Erotic Capital

In my twenties I found Anaïs Nin properly.

Delta of Venus. Little Birds. The erotic short stories: lesbian erotica, Best American Erotica 1995, Susie Bright’s anthologies. With these authors I became conspiratorial. I knew I wasn’t alone in my thoughts. My fears and fantasies were normalised by other women.

Within those pages I found depth, intelligent expression, and ruin all at the same time. I shared the books with friends, lovers, and later my partner.

I developed erotic capital. The Second Sex gave me the intellectual framework. Tracey Cox gave me the practical one. Alain de Botton gave me permission to think about love as something that deserved serious philosophical attention rather than romantic surrender.

I learnt that sex appeal, vitality, and intelligence were currency that combined with novel ideas they could have political significance.

In my early twenties I moved through rooms with the complete audacity that comes with hard-won self-assurance. What I thought was support and collaboration, collegiality, was their way of humiliating me. They set me up. I knew I had a certain power but how that was exercised required a specific code I did not want to hack. It was the first understanding of the difference between sex and the erotic. It was in the boardroom I learnt about loyalty, hierarchy, self-preservation, and discernment.

I learnt about rejection, responsibility, and how my body could be both a wonderland and a wasteland.

Erotic intelligence was a superpower. More valuable than ordinary intelligence. More effective than emotional intelligence.

My Thirties: Shame, Explanation, and the Search

Insecurities seemed to be triggered after having children.

For more than a decade I sought the next iteration of myself, answers about how to raise well-adjusted people in a fast-changing world while remaining a woman who wanted things for herself.

Lessons in selfishness and selflessness.

I fantasized about getting off, getting away, escaping.

Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden and Women on Top confirmed a growing suspicion that my fantasy life was normal - vast, varied, and almost entirely unacknowledged, to date. Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying told me that a woman could want everything and be entirely right to. Story of O asked harder questions about surrender that I was not yet ready to answer but could not stop thinking about.

I returned again and again to the values that lived in a growing curriculum about sexuality, intimacy, desire, and attention. I turned to the powerful women who were living the lives I wanted to understand. I spent months in Bali to immerse myself in a culture of sensuality. Never content- always looking for the tension, the presence.

My Forties: The Reckoning

In my early forties I wondered if I was a feminist.

I turned to bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Germaine Greer, Naomi Wolf, Simone de Beauvoir. I wanted to understand the feminine in humanity and my place within it. These women gave me a political framework for what I had always felt, that the erotic was not indulgence but a kind of power. That a woman who knows what she wants and refuses to apologise for it is not a problem to be managed but a force to be reckoned with.

The memoirs arrived with force. The Sexual Life of Catherine M unapologetic, precise, a woman accounting for her desires without editorial comment or redemption arc. The Happy Hooker. Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, a woman dismantling her own life for a wanting she refuses to explain or justify, written in sentences so clean they feel like a verdict. Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behaviour. Melissa Febos’s Girlhood. Roxane Gay’s Hunger. Each one validating that my own refusal to perform my life for someone else’s comfort had merit.

Before sexology became a popular credential and I remain unconvinced it is founded in definitive science, though I’m not sure that matters, I read Shere Hite and Betty Dodson. Women who were asking the right questions before anyone had given them permission to.

Then I found myself asking a different question entirely.

Is it my mind or my body? Or both? And how do I get back to the place where that distinction stops mattering?

I had been there. That place where time, beauty, and form do not exist. Just presence. The erotic not as an act but as a state of total immersion, the self dissolved into sensation and attention simultaneously. I had felt it and lost it and wanted it back with an urgency that nothing else could touch.

I turned to Freud and then to Jung. Not for clinical answers but for the question beneath the question - the relationship between the conscious want and the unconscious pull. Jung’s archetypes gave me a language for the patterns I had been living without naming. Gilles Deleuze gave me something else entirely; the idea that desire is not about what you lack but what you generate. Not a hole to fill. A force that produces. That reframing changed everything.

Jack Morin’s The Erotic Mind gave me the equation I had been solving intuitively for decades without knowing it. Obstacles plus attraction equals excitement. Further illumination - tension is not the enemy of pleasure, it is the condition of it.

Eastern philosophy, tantra practices entered not as spiritual bypass but as a ritual of sustained attention. Rumi and erotic poetry shelved in my canon permanently, the body and the divine held in the same trembling line, indistinguishable from each other.

I read about Shibari, then encountered it. My wrists bound, weight surrendered, the rope doing what words couldn’t - locating me precisely in my body. This was where I started to learn about patience, calm, and attention. Surrender and trust. Every nerve awake. Time stopped.

Colette returned now with different eyes. A woman who aged erotically rather than diminishing. Who lived appetites across a long life without apology or explanation, she became a model not for how to write but for how to move through.

When shame and self-loathing closed in and they did, they still do I went back to the authors. Not for comfort but a kind of calibration. The women who had looked directly at the hardest parts of themselves and written without flinching. Ernaux. Gaitskill. Febos. Gay.

In my late forties I realised long held fantasies. Not all of them, but enough of them. The ones that had been waiting since 1997, since the Panthéon steps.

Over time I learnt that the ecstasy of pleasure lies in duality, there is no need to choose one thing. I learnt how to please and how to say yes and crucially how to say no without explanation. Erotica taught me discernment. How not to waste myself on the undeserving.

And perhaps most importantly it taught me how to love. Deeply, honestly, with unbridled passion, chaos, and mess. I understand myself and my limitations through intimate relationships that nourish and nurture. Only those who deserve my adoration receive it.

It has made self-help books almost unreadable. Without exception it is the genre I return to when my intellectual self says you are not enough. I always return to erotica.

It never lies to me.

Erotica has sandpapered me into someone I recognise. Not through sudden revelation but through slow uncovering, layer by layer, year by year, book by book. Removing what was never mine. Refining what always was.

That is the only metamorphosis worth trusting. The one that takes this long.

Now

I read vintage erotica, myth and psychology. I collect.

The themes have remained the same since I was eleven years old, crouched in my mother’s closet reading about desire in the dark. What has changed is the depth at which I can feel them and the steadiness with which I can hold them.

There is no rushing, no performance. Pleasure is more accessible and more deeply felt and it is shared. It is never transactional.

Erotica has shown me that there are multiple versions of myself that can coexist without contradiction. Memoir has confirmed that there is no obligation to conform to other people’s expectations of who a woman of my age, my history, my appetites should be.

I am as much myself within the pages of desire as I am at home in my own body. That took a long time. It took a library.

I am still building it.