I’m not sure I trust anybody whose algorithm hasn’t shown them at least 20 reels of 20 different people dancing to Tinashe’s viral single ‘Nasty Girl’ in the last month. If you strain your ears hard enough, you might even hear the catchy ‘I’ve been a nasty girl’ hook—probably a trick of your mind but ever-present nevertheless. The hit song has taken Instagram by storm and reels shipping people who “match each other’s freak” have been popping up on every corner of the app. Bound by unfavourable circumstances, you could say that Aditya in Jab We Met (2007) matched Geet’s freak by entertaining her absurd demands. Performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay walked from opposite ends of The Great Wall of China to meet in the middle—a grand display of their love and eventual separation that could be deemed “matching each other’s freak”. The boy who pined over me for two years and ran away after discovering my extensive collection of erotic books on female desire failed to match my freak. He thought I “knew too much about sex” and it scared him off. I was better for it.
Explicit expressions of female desire are often shunned and seen as crude and vulgar unless they come from a place of subservience. Ironically, the boy who was alarmed by my “provocative” literature had always prided himself on his virile bravado. Desire is a quintessential part of longing—a sentiment that permeates much of women’s literature. Why do we shy away from that which is so fundamentally human? Below, we curate a list of 10 erotic books centring female desire and longing that subvert the male gaze. Here, characters reclaim their sexual agency without the compulsion of performance that often accompanies sex itself.
Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin
An anthology of short stories dripping in debauchery, Anaïs Nin began writing Delta of Venus in the 1940s for a wealthy private collector. He demanded that she only write crude, loveless erotica, devoid of poeticism. Frustrated, Nin initially acquiesced but hatched a plan to get back at her client using satire. She made caricatures of the male characters in the short stories, depicting them as so deeply feral with sexual hunger that it made them appear laughably animalistic. In refusing to let go of her poetic voice, Nin takes you into the cloistered world of bejewelled dancers with sad eyes, Parisian refineries and a confrontation with the obsessive nature of desire.
Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz
Cultural provocateur Eve Babitz never ran out of tales to tell about her frivolous life in Hollywood but my favourite one is this: she once played chess entirely naked with none other than the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, an image which was immortalised in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In Sex and Rage, Babitz fictionalises herself as Jacaranda Leven, a young woman who waltzes through Los Angeles and New York with magnetic charm, casually having affairs with rockstars who would go on to become some of the most important artistic figures in history. In a life embellished with drugs, sex and glamour, Jacaranda realises there is something fundamentally amiss: herself. Through compelling tales of sexual recklessness, she comes to define what she means to herself and what the world thinks of her in return.
To Hell With You, Mitro by Krishna Sobti
Also known as Marjaani Mitro, this book traces the life of Sumitravanti (Mitro), the sexually uninhibited middle daughter-in-law of the patriarchal Gurudas family, who challenges her disrespectful husband when he fails to satisfy her sexual desires. She justifies her needs and emphasises that if the roles were reversed, any man in her situation would have been sympathised with. In a country like India that views marriage as a transaction, women like Mitro are expected to repress their sexual appetite despite it being an innately human want. Refusing to resort to infidelity, she shuns all the unwarranted ridicule that comes her way, claiming her agency with respect.
Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Beginning with sex in a dark basement with an assortment of dildos lying near her and her lover, the gender-fluid artist Harry Dodge, this memoir soon pivots to a confession right after the words ‘I love you’ fly out of Maggie Nelson’s mouth during sex. Just before the law enabling homosexual unions is revoked in California, they marry as an act of political protest. Soon after, Maggie becomes pregnant with a sperm donor while her partner simultaneously gets top surgery. Through an unexpectedly erotic string of revelations, the author comes to terms with motherhood, her partner’s gender-fluid identity and what desire means in the context of a sexually ambiguous relationship.
A Handbook for My Lover by Rosalyn D’Mello
Declared by the author as autofiction, this epistolary memoir follows the life of a young woman in love with a photographer thirty years her senior. Written as a series of letters that were never sent, she writes about her rapturous affair with love, longing and candour. Initially deeply criticised by Indian readers for its explicit nature that discusses masturbation and menstruation, the book has since found a dedicated fanbase among women who know what it’s like to be feverishly possessed by desire. What has now been termed an erotic memoir by publishers was once a way for Rosalyn D’Mello to come to terms with the complexity of her lover’s feelings, accepting the beauty in the abstraction of their relationship.
The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector
The Book of Pleasures, also known as The Apprenticeship, traces the relationship between Lóri, a young school teacher, and her romantic affair with a philosophy professor. Through Lispector’s lush, poetic prose, the reader is immersed in Lóri’s emotional awakening as she navigates her haunting relationship. In Lispector’s writing, passion and eroticism transcend metaphysical boundaries, plumbing the depths of desire.
Lihaaf by Ismat Chughtai
Published in 1942, Lihaaf is one of the most important pieces of queer literature to have emerged from the Indian subcontinent, for which Ismat Chughtai was tried in court. The story is narrated from the eyes of a naive child who is sent to stay with her aunt Begum Jaan to learn ‘feminine etiquette’. Except each night, Rabbu, the aristocratic family’s maidservant, takes on the role of a masseuse under a quilt, beneath which lies Begum Jaan. The young girl watches her aunt each night, trying to make sense of their nocturnal sessions, which she comes to understand as illicit. Eventually, she is frightfully haunted by a confrontation with her own desire, realising that she, too, might be a deviant hiding under a quilt.
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
“Very early in my life it was too late,” the nameless French girl begins in her confessional stream of consciousness. Having spent her entire life in poverty and misery, begging her mother to love her the way she did her brother, the protagonist had always been powerless. One day, she notices a Chinese millionaire observing her from afar, trembling in desire at the sight of her. This was her chance. They immediately embark on a sordid affair that they know will eventually end in death and doom, but they can’t stop themselves. It is to be understood that this is a work of autofiction that Duras wrote at 70 in a drunken stupor, yet, her words unfailingly pierce your heart, excavating something incomprehensibly human.
Panty by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay
This novel begins with the protagonist chancing upon a stranger’s underwear in her new apartment, the mouldy stain on it indicatively female. What would elicit a feeling of disgust in most was received by the protagonist as a sense of companionship instead. Later that day, she gets her period and does not have spare underwear with her. To the reader’s horror, she slips into the mouldy underwear instead. From hereon, the protagonist launches into a series of darkly feminine contemplations, wondering what the other woman must be like. Is she suffering from the same societal impediments as her? Does the bane of womanhood unite them? Dubbed ‘India’s Elena Ferrante’, Bandyopadhyay’s unputdownable novel helps women articulate that which they have always longed to, but failed.
New Animal by Ella Baxter
The protagonist reveals visceral accounts of her sexual escapades to explain that she is having sex—lots of it—as a means of escape from her sadness, one that she fails to understand. The book begins with her in bed with a man who is pretty much a stranger, and once she’s done having underwhelming sex, she’s off the next morning to her job as a makeup artist for a mortuary where she plans her next hookup. Riddled with sexually explicit scenes where the protagonist tries on various hats (like when she skips her mother’s funeral to experience being a dominatrix), Baxter takes us through the life of a possible nymphomaniac who is just running away from grief.
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