Erotica Liberates Women More than Romance

Romance novels are traditionally linked to the trivial, the mundane, to be made fun of as cheesy, but they are inherently political in the way they deal with love. They portray female self-fulfilment as a reward for longing, rather than giving into their urges, made clear through the achievement of stability through love. In a way, they are written to comfort women by domesticating desire. Where romance ends in resolution, safety, marriage, and tidy arcs, erotica lingers in tension and uncertainty. How many women in romance novels are irremediably written for men, even by women? Think of One Day or Normal People — if they decide to live their lives, they are punished (spoiler alert), end up miserable or die when they achieve love or have to suffer to get the ultimate goal. In Friends, Rachel has to abandon her dream job going to Paris to end up with Ross. The way the female protagonists in romance movies always have to be flawed or need to have character development — they are initially confused, selfish, forgetful and better themselves once they settle for love.  

Erotica, on the contrary, suggests women will save themselves through desire and curiosity. It is literature that lets women be whole and move away from the categorisations, from the spectrum of purity culture to porn culture. Let me be clear: When I talk about erotica, I’m not referring to Wattpad stories. I’m referring to how, in feminist circles, a literary approach of desire through erotica can question our links to creativity and our inner selves. Jung called eros “the principle of psychic relatedness” — the force that makes life feel alive. Without it, we go numb. In fact, most women misunderstand eroticism entirely. We’re conditioned to think it’s about sex, or something to be commodified, but eroticism isn’t about sex at all; it’s about power, and how we relegate our inner senses to meaning, creativity, beauty, and our unknown natural instincts (I would recommend reading Women Who Run with the Wolves). 

Historically speaking, erotica foregrounds bodily pleasure and agency, offering women a textual space to claim economic, sexual, and intellectual independence and is linked to literary traditions such as courtesan autonomy or libertine memoirs. It fits into the part of the desire that can’t be explained or excused through a moral lens. Delta of Venus by Anais Nin treats sex as something beyond empowerment with the idea of pleasure as a philosophy. It is not radical through sex, but the honesty of women’s desires because it provides an ode towards how women partook in their sexuality, as it wasn’t always shameful. In ancient Sumeria, erotic rites were part of spiritual life, where nadītu— priestesses— were autonomous and sexually active women. They were economically independent, and their bodies were not scandalous. Women held erotic authority through many mediums (such as dance, lineage, or spiritual leadership). As sex was not separate from the divine, nudity then was not condemned as obscene or blasphemous with ties to Christianity, as in Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. In Nymphomaniac by Lars Von Trier, for instance,  his Sadean journey transgresses the misconceptions of nymphomania and is unsettling, as the visual experience moves sensuality and desire beyond the prosaic limits established in the normative society of the Madonna/ whore complex. It is not about exhibiting a shameful, repressed sexuality but asserting pleasure for the sake of pleasure. 

How do we know that what we desire, when attained, will be fulfilling? Desire suggests its object will provide a sense of eternal oneness, the merging of two half spheres under Plato’s Symposium. In Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson, the realisation that it is not the finding and fulfilling of our desires that makes us human, but rather the puzzling discovery that, upon fulfilment, you peer in and find that there’s still a hole. Carson states: “The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbols never perfectly match. Eros is in between.”

In Written on the Body, Winterson offers a version of love that revels in physical minutiae and imperfections to ask the question of how well we can know another through their body. In an anthology of short stories, the narrator is unnamed, and what remains are the parts of the body and not the relation of the protagonist through power dynamics, may it be race or class. Girls are objectified with their bodies and fed with erotic content before they even realise what desire is like, and it shapes the collective imagery. By not assigning the object of desire through a gender, she explores how close we can come through adoration and physical intimacy with another person. In a culture that promotes hookup culture and casual sex to the point of desensitisation, erotica needs to be genderless for women to partake in more confident practices. In her ‘Poetics of Sex,’ she explicitly revives Sappho’s lyrical perspective to celebrate a lesbian body, using intertextuality to position Sappho’s poetry as a foundational feminist erotics. From her to Anaïs Nin’s bravery with a blunt, witty and honest style combined with imperfect, morally grey protagonists, they foreground women’s interior sexual consciousness, blending literary style with explicit desire. Unlike the romance of conventional novels, Nin’s work treats erotic encounters as sites of self‑exploration rather than plot devices that serve a male‑centric love arc.

Illustration by Abigail Svaasand