Warning: This article contains content of a sexual nature
Whether it’s Nicole Kidman’s new film or explicit podcasts, sex by women, about women and for women is booming — and the hotter, the better.
Marianne Power still struggles to believe that she’s written such a racy memoir, let alone sent it out into the world. “I’m an Irish Catholic schoolgirl — and not the fun, naughty kind, but the everything-is-a-sin kind. So for me to be writing about sex was terrifying,” she says. “I was waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats thinking, ‘What are you doing?’ I still am, actually.”
In Love Me! One Woman’s Search for a Different Happy Ever After, published last month, 46-year-old Power confronts her lifelong fears about commitment, relationships and sex, via tantric workshops, polyamory, “sologamy” — self-love — and, eventually, five days of the greatest sex of her life, which she details with humour and explicit honesty.
“But while I worried that I would be causing embarrassment to friends or family, what I didn’t worry about so much was that I would be mocked or crucified in the press for being a woman writing about sex,” she says. In the event, it was quite the opposite — an extract from her book was even printed in the Daily Mail.
If confirmation were ever needed that sex — at least on the page, on podcasts and across popular culture — has gone stratospheric, that smut is now stellar and talking dirty is no longer taboo, then Power’s pithy memoir of midlife sexual empowerment splashed across Middle England’s bible is surely it.
At least, that is, sex by women, about women and consumed largely by women. And it’s pulling profits too. Last month, 30-year-old Alex Cooper, host of the podcast Call Her Daddy, signed a US$125 million ($203m) deal with SiriusXM, doubling what she earns from Spotify.
Cooper launched the podcast in 2018; it’s now the fourth most popular podcast in the US, and Cooper has more than three million followers on social media and commands a celebrity fanbase including Paris Hilton, Camila Cabello, Gwyneth Paltrow and Christina Aguilera, all of whom have appeared on the pod.
She regularly shares the details of her patented “Gluck Gluck” oral sex technique, and episode titles include Secrets to Great Sex, Faking Dirty Talk and Birthday Sex.
“The number of women who tell me, ‘Thank you for making sex sexy again,’ " says Cooper. “I’m trying to make people feel good about themselves, confident about themselves, excited about sex.”
Not everyone sees this as a positive though. Cooper tells an anecdote of a woman she met at a recent dinner party, who had been told by her boyfriend’s friend, “Oh, I hate Alex Cooper and I hate Call Her Daddy. Alex Cooper has made women so confident.”
Cooper can’t take all the credit. In their podcast Brown Girls Do It Too, Rubina Pabani and Poppy Jay delight in winding up British Asian men with their talk of “my big fat Asian vagina” and having sex during their period. “Asian women like sex. We think about sex as much as anyone else does. We just don’t talk about it,” says Jay. “I don’t even know what the Bengali word for sex is.”
And Rayna Greenberg, 39, and Ashley Hesseltine, 41, founders of the sex toy company Vibes Only, host the podcast Girls Gotta Eat, in which they discuss “demure BJs”, and ask, “Are bushes back?”
Sex is making a comeback on screen too, with Nicole Kidman’s explicit Babygirl one of several risque films to premiere at the Venice Film Festival last week. “This is one woman’s story… told by a woman, through her gaze,” says Kidman, who plays a powerful chief executive who cheats on her husband with a young intern.
Meanwhile, in a month that is being dubbed “Sextember” by the book world, this week saw the high-profile publication of Want, a collection of anonymous women’s sexual fantasies curated by Gillian Anderson. An homage to Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking My Secret Garden, published in 1973, Anderson read thousands of submissions and even contributed her own, though she admits, “I kept putting it off and putting it off. I’m not a prude by any stretch and I can say any words out loud. But writing it down? I got really uncomfortable.”
Her contributors, however, did not hold back: Want includes a fantasy about finding a young priest willing to perform oral sex in a church (“and is not afraid that his God might punish him”).
Also hitting shelves (perhaps slightly higher ones) this month is Submit, the secret memoir of a submissive, written by a woman calling herself Sonnet, and colourfully detailing her life as a middle-class professional who gets her kicks by being caned and humiliated by strangers.
Meanwhile, the fiction hit of the northern hemisphere summer, seen on sunloungers from Miami to Milos, has been Miranda July’s novel All Fours, the story of a perimenopausal mother who fakes a road trip across the US and holes up in a motel for weeks, where she mainly masturbates about a much younger man who works at the local car rental company, before having an unhinged sexual encounter with someone else entirely, a scene the author Kate Weinberg reports having to read “with a fire extinguisher beside me”.
Times have changed — and fast. In 2018, author and journalist Stephanie Theobold published her memoir Sex Drive, an account of her own real-life journey across the United States, following the break-up of a 10-year relationship, in a bid to reconnect with her body and sexuality. Described “as a sort of Thelma & Louise meets Eat, Pray, Love road trip”, it was, she feels now, too soon. “It was really hard to get any serious reviews for it.” But, earlier this year, “I got an email from my publishers to say they were going to republish it, because now is a great moment for masturbation, apparently.”
Literary agent Rachel Mills confirms that 2024 is “the year of sex publishing”, though most of this year’s racy books were commissioned back in 2022, when, she says, “People were re-evaluating their relationships in and after lockdown — wondering, ‘Do I want to be in this family? Do I want this relationship?’ "
She also believes it’s an ongoing outcome of #MeToo, “in which we were really forced — happily — to re-evaluate notions like victim-blaming and slut-shaming. So women are therefore feeling more comfortable opening up about their desires, in a way that until pretty recently, you would just get called a slut. And then it would be your own fault whatever happened to you.”
Former Downing Street aide Cleo Watson’s latest bonkbuster, Cleavage, is a Westminster-set romp featuring several unashamedly sexually voracious female characters, including Jess, an ambitious young lobby journalist with a penchant for fetish clubs, and Natasha, the deputy prime minister who, in one scene, stashes a vibrating egg somewhere security would never think to check, during a transport committee hearing.
“I basically thought, ‘How would I like to be?’ " says Watson. “When I was growing up, the discussion we had as teenagers was, for goodness’ sake don’t be a slut, but also don’t be a prude.
“Jess and Natasha don’t have baggage; they don’t feel shame about their sexuality. They don’t worry, ‘Is someone going to talk about me behind my back, or show it to someone if I send them a picture?’
“They actually act in a way that I spent my whole time trying to stop male MPs from acting,” says Watson, who worked for Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings.
Cleavage, published in June, also features a storyline in which canny Conservative strategists use people’s porn preferences to help predict voting behaviour. As research for the book, Watson (necessarily) watched a lot of porn “and one of my discoveries was that the For Women category on Pornhub is very well produced and features proper storylines. Some thought goes into it.” Which, she thinks, may help partly explain the boom in sexy books. “Women don’t necessarily want to see balls-out humping straight off the bat, but we do want to indulge in well-made stories and fantasies,” says Watson.
This is also evidenced by the rapid growth of audio erotica — story-based audio porn, narrated in the second person, which allows the listener to easily insert themselves into the action.
There’s Dipsea, a story-based erotica app started by millennials Gina Gutierrez and Faye Keegan, Emjoy, a “sexual wellness app”, which has audio stories alongside meditation and mindfulness exercises, and Coral, an “intimacy app” focused on information and education. The most high-profile, however, is Quinn, founded by 27-year-old Caroline Spiegel — sister of billionaire Snapchat founder and Mr Miranda Kerr, Evan Spiegel, 34 — which bills itself as the “Spotify of porn”.
Featuring thousands of stories, tagged for taste from “vanilla” to “degradation”, Quinn, 80 per cent of whose users are female, and whose revenue grew by 440 per cent last year, is proving a hit with Gen Z listeners, and pulling in celebrity collaborators. Fleabag’s “hot priest”, actor Andrew Scott, recently voiced a series for the app as Robb the Protector in The Queen’s Guard.
Spiegel also has a theory as to why sexy books, podcasts and audio erotica are so appealing to women, likening the difference between watching and listening to porn as being “like when you read Harry Potter or you listen to the audiobook and the full world exists in your mind’s eye… And then you watch the movie and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s how it’s supposed to look.’ " She thinks, “What a shame. The most visual experience you can have is the one you create yourself.”
But is this current boom in libidinous books, podcasts and other cultural products simply reflecting changing sexual attitudes, or is it also shifting the needle of norms?
Lisa Taddeo’s book Three Women, an intimate narration of the desires and sexual proclivities (including adultery, polyamory and sex with one’s high school teacher) of three real, ordinary women whom Taddeo interviewed across eight years, was a literary sensation when it was published in 2019. Just five years on, Taddeo does not believe the book would land with the same impact now. “I think it would be different — so much has come after it, it might even feel a little old-fashioned,” she says. “But I can be happy about that because of what Three Women did to help change the landscape.”
Molly Roden Winter feels similarly about her memoir More, the story of her open marriage — in which she has sex with men who are not her husband, but all with her husband’s blessing — which was published earlier this year. “I think even in the eight months since More came out, it’s become increasingly normalised,” she says.
“I don’t know that being a human being has ever changed much,” she continues. “But I think culture tells us what are the acceptable parts of being a human being and what is OK to talk about and admit to. And for women and especially for mothers, I think what’s new is that this moment is allowing women to own their sexuality differently.”
Roden Winter was a high school English teacher, has been married for 25 years and has two sons aged 19 and 22. Her mother did suggest she might want to publish anonymously. “But it was so important for me to stand behind my life choices and say, this is what it looks like. I’m a real person, with a real life, and I’m pretty normal. I am not on the fringe.”
Yet, while there is seemingly no end to our appetite for female-driven filth, the same cannot be said for men. Tony Pletts, 63, also wrote a memoir about opening up his marriage — he and his wife now live with a third partner, a woman. He had an agent and the support of several prominent feminist writers, including Monique Roffey, whose novel Mermaid of Black Conch won the 2020 Costa book of the year.
“I was told [by publishers] that it was ‘brilliantly written’, ‘surprisingly moving’ and that, ‘It deserved to be published,’ " says Pletts. “But nobody would publish it.”
There’s an economic reason for that, says Mills: “Women buy more books.” A whopping 80 per cent of all fiction is bought by women, and while men do buy non-fiction books by other men, they are largely autobiographies, by politicians/sportsmen/former members of the SAS.
“I think one of the unfortunate side-effects of #MeToo has been that some men are ashamed or scared of their sexuality or are very concerned about doing something that’s wrong or unwelcome,” says Marianne Power. “I don’t think there are many men who would write openly about their sexuality at the moment, but I would love it if they did — it would be better for all of us if this could become a two-way conversation.
“As women, we’re so lucky that we have so many people who are talking and writing and expressing on every issue of life — from motherhood to money, as well as sex — in very open, honest, unvarnished ways,” she says. “Maybe that will one day come for men too.”
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London
