The Case For Sextasy

Why Smut Makes Me Feel Good, and Not Just in That Way!

I was only fourteen when I read my first sexy book. The cover art, an old-timey grey castle that peeked over a rolling green hill, did not prepare me for the bodice-ripping contents of the story. I had flipped through the pages with lazy hands, my interest and imagination only slightly piqued at the description of lairds and maidens, of swords and dungeons in fourteenth-century Scotland. I was sitting on the brightly polished red stoep outside my too-loud home and ignoring the too-many chores that awaited me as I read. The couple in the story grew closer, exchanging smouldering looks and then lingering touches. I began to fidget. I would nervously look up from my book, sure that someone, an adult, would sense my transgression and catch me in the act. When their third kiss, the real one, with bites and breaths and moans progressed, I slammed the book shut.

Only to crack it open again, desperate to know what would happen next. I mean, I could guess what happened next, but surely Johanna Lindsey wouldn’t actually write it out? Surely, she would very subtly imply the sex, like when the camera cut away from the kissing couple on a bed to softly focus on a single burning candle in Days of Our Lives. But she had. She had actually written about erect nipples, wandering fingers and dampening underwear. I checked the coast once more, eyes shifting about, palms sweaty, and my mouth dry. I had never seen it go this far, and I was scandalised. Horrified. Intrigued. By the time the red-headed heroine had her first orgasm, I got up to pace.

You see, I had borrowed three library books for the month-long school holiday, and A Gentle Feuding was my third read. Bryce Courtenay’s Power of One, an epic story of a white South African boy set in the 1930s, had horrified and ultimately inspired me. It featured racism, poverty and boxing. Things that I, a young black South African girl with a special interest in our Apartheid history, knew a surprising lot about.

Knocked out by my nunga-nungas, the third instalment of Louise Rennison’s Angus Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging series, made me snort with laughter at the British teenager’s outrageous antics with a grumpy cat and cute boys from New Zealand (hilariously dubbed Kiwi-a-go-go-land by the main character). Although I didn’t always understand the foreign, late-nineties British lingo, I knew all too well how exasperating parents could be, how much they just didn’t get it.

The fact that I liked the first two books did not surprise me- I loved reading. I had already been through the early J.K. Rowling (ew) and C.S. Lewis adventures. Stephen King and Dean Koontz had terrified me; James Patterson’s action-packed books had excited me, and Meg Cabot and I were like old friends. Not to mention the English class set readings that I unironically enjoyed, and the sometimes boring but always important books that I read as part of a small book club that my friends and I were part of. I was true to the reading thing, not new to it.

As I paced that day, heart hammering and desire low in my belly, I was ashamed. I already knew, knew it in my bones, that I really liked this book. I liked reading the sex scene, liked the fact that it went on for pages and pages, describing everything to the reader. And why should a fourteen-year-old virgin with no boyfriend or boy -friends feel that way? Why did I not only finish the book, but re-read it twice more before going back to school? Was I one of those boy-crazy girls, doomed to early pregnancy and a bad future? Was I a whore? Shame made me pace my grandmother’s stoep like a criminal. But it was not enough to make me quit.

Back in boarding school, with no dishes to wash and unsuspecting adults who nodded approvingly at me and my books, I read more erotic fiction. I went from Johanna Lindsey’s historical romances to contemporary romances and paranormal erotica. I discovered and then fine-tuned my preferences: No significant age gap, no cheating, slow-burn, second-chance romance, enemies-to-lovers, single-dad-trope, single-mom-trope, and on and on. You would think that consensual adults would be a foregone conclusion, the only kinds of erotic fiction out there, but it is unfortunately not, and I had to learn the hard (disgusting) way. Still, I read, I read it all with the zeal and enthusiasm that I should have directed to real-life friends and family. To school, if we’re being honest. My hormonal teenage self was hooked. And at thirty-one years old, I still am.

As I reflect on the many books, short story compilations, and online fan fictions that I have read, I am taken back to that fateful hot summer day, and I think I finally have the answers to my questions. I think I experienced something bigger than being naughty and nervously reading phrases like, "her molten, moist core”. On that day, I met a version of myself that wanted things. That was allowed to want things. I discovered a small, private pleasure that day- not just taken out of my own circumstances and thrust into a new world, but one of unadulterated, female pleasure.

When I read sexy books, I don’t have to remember that I am, in fact, a South African woman who must contend with gender-based violence. Or that I am a millennial who cannot afford to save any money. I don’t have to be smart, or brave or rich or wise to earn a good time. I can let myself desire, truly desire, without the limitation of real-life circumstances. And for a few hours at a time, I choose that hedonism.

So please excuse me if I indulge my thirteen-part brooding vampire saga or Illyrian High Fey Lord (IYKYK) fantasies. I will annotate them, recommend them, and defend them in group chats.

Because somewhere on a red stoep in the summer heat, a fourteen-year-old girl learned that wanting was not a crime. That pleasure did not automatically spell ruin. In this world. In these words, I can have it all.

In a world that asks women to be careful, cautious, small, in these pages, I get to be hungry.

-Samu