I Was Sick of the Internet, So I Started a Sexy Book Club

If you’d told me back in February, when I posted a simple callout on my Instagram story — “if I were to start a club where we read erotica across eras, who would join?” — that I’d be starting what is now, essentially, a business, I wouldn’t have believed you.

Ditching the algorithm

I’d been feeling fed up with the online world, my social media feed a curated hell just for me, mapping out all of my anxieties, insecurities and fears in one fast-paced and brightly lit realm available at the touch of my fingertips. I didn’t want to see any more plane crash headlines or mystery virus discoveries or extremely thin women labelling their flat stomachs as a ‘glow up’. Where was all the realness? All of the actual art?

I found myself craving simpler times. The days when I would read books about forbidden romances and dream of my very own version, or the nights I’d scroll through posts from my favourite bloggers, feeling a deep connection with the rawness with which they wrote about their coming-of-age discoveries.

It felt to me that the openness with which we first treated the internet — as a place to be ourselves when we didn’t feel accepted in the real world, a place that opened up opportunities for jobs, love stories and endless accessible knowledge — had dissipated. What we were left with was noise. Our very own curated corner of noise, trying to convince us to spend money while simultaneously giving up any shred of hope in humanity.

Discovering Black+White Magazine

Thankfully, I found myself at a pub in the countryside a week after this harrowing crisis. A pub that happened to have a room stacked with copies of Black+White magazine.

Never heard of it? I hadn’t either. But the covers were striking — bold, high-contrast photographs of some of the world’s most iconic faces: Grace Jones, Uma Thurman, Drew Barrymore, Monica Bellucci. As I flicked through its pages, I was surprised to see them filled with erotic photography, naked portraits so beautiful they made my jaw drop. They were artistic and filled with movement, some taken on film, others in New York loft apartments. At first, I assumed the magazine was from the UK or US. But then I started recognising Australian celebrities: people who were famous during the years the magazine was printed, from 1993 to 2007, up-and-coming stars from the casts of Neighbours and Home and Away, actors who starred in shows like The Secret Life of Us. This magazine was… Australian? And it was packed with boundary-pushing photography, art, film and music. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen anything like it.

I spent the entire night reading as many copies as I could (just ask my boyfriend!), addicted to the feeling of consuming authentic art, of learning the names of artists and photographers and writers through a platform that was not the goddamn internet.

And then, I had an epiphany. I wanted to create a space that captured some version of this feeling, one where we could learn and talk in real life. One where conversations around desire and sex could actually thrive, rather than be censored, shadow-banned or packaged into something palatable for an algorithm.

The sexy inspiration

What really spoke to me was a passage in the magazine that referenced the Marquis de Sade, the scandalous 18th-century writer who gave sadism its name. They mentioned one of his texts, The 120 Days of Sodom, which I’d never heard of before. And that got me thinking: what else don’t I know? How many people had written about sex before me? How many had attempted to unpack the nuance of sex and all of its hidden meanings through writing and art?

This question gave me hope. It reminded me that entire histories had been written before the internet existed and validated this idea that my work, my interests and my inspiration didn’t all have to come from — or be created for — this digital machine. There was an enormous archive of people who had been thinking about the same things for centuries: desire and shame, pleasure and power, monogamy and infidelity, fantasy and repression. The language might have changed, but the questions weren’t particularly new.

I set out to read as much sexy literature as I could. And I invited people to come along with me.

The book club, which I aptly titled (sexy) book club, ironically went viral. I got hundreds of messages from people wanting to join. We now have a community of members across Melbourne, Sydney and London and host events every six weeks. It’s kind of become my life. And everyone wants to know: why is this such a thing right now? Not only smut and sexy literature, but in-person events built around reading and talking about it?

Why (sexy) book club?

 

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I really believe that many people were getting to the same place I was. Exhausted by the online world, by its repetitive sorrow and competitiveness and inauthenticity. As a society, we’re becoming more open than we’ve ever been, especially when it comes to topics around sex and pleasure, but we’re also living in a space that is strangely controlled. By relying on our phones to communicate and social media to educate, we’re relying on platforms that ultimately don’t belong to us. We live in perpetual fear that our account might get taken down if we flash a nipple, while simultaneously having access to more information about sex, identity and relationships than any generation before us. We know more, we’re exposed to more, and naturally, we want somewhere to actually talk about it.

I think people are not only craving real human connection, but need it. As humans, we need spaces where we can feel free to explore ourselves, ask the questions we actually want answers to and challenge our own ideas. And, especially with the rise of AI-generated content, there’s something increasingly precious about doing that in a room full of actual people. A book club asks you to read something slowly, form your own opinion and then sit across from someone who may have interpreted it completely differently. There is no algorithm deciding which opinion you should hear first. There is no comment section rewarding the most inflammatory response. You simply have to talk to each other.

And as for smut and sexy literature, it’s always been a thing. From the scandal of Fanny Hill in the eighteenth century and the barely contained desire running through Jane Austen, to Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus and the enormous Mills & Boon romance machine, women have long used books as a safe place to explore the things that can feel complicated to talk about in real life: sex, love, grief, longing, fantasy and desire. Literature lets us try on feelings and lives without necessarily having to live them. We can want the terrible man, have the affair, abandon our responsibilities, submit completely, take control, fall disastrously in love or simply be impossibly horny. And then close the book and return to our actual lives.

Read more: Why erotic romance is booming by Jade May.

Rediscovering the erotic

Perhaps that’s part of why smut feels particularly potent right now. For all the sexual imagery we encounter online, there is something oddly unerotic about the way we live on the internet. Desire is increasingly filtered through dating apps, adult media, algorithms and endless choice. We can know almost everything about someone before we’ve even met them. We can watch their stories, find their ex, see where they went on holiday in 2019 and decide whether they’re compatible with us without ever actually looking into their real, blinking eyes. There’s very little room left for mystery.

Books give some of that mystery back to us. They make us wait. They let attraction build over hundreds of pages. They give us yearning, anticipation and fantasy. All of the feelings that can be difficult to manufacture in a world built around immediacy. And perhaps that’s why yearning itself seems to have returned to the zeitgeist. We live increasingly isolated, online lives where dating can feel transactional and intimacy strangely elusive; books filled with aching desire and escapism offer almost the exact opposite. They give us somewhere to feel everything intensely again.

Book clubs take that private experience and make it communal. Sex is still one of those subjects where we can convince ourselves that whatever we desire, fear or wonder about must be uniquely strange. Reading about it reminds us that someone else has thought it; sitting around a table and hearing twenty other people admit that they have too makes it feel human. That, to me, is the real appeal of (sexy) book club right now. It isn’t just that people want to read more smut. We want somewhere to put our phones away, somewhere we can dress up, drink a cocktail, sit across from one another and talk about the messy, embarrassing, thrilling parts of being alive.

Want to get involved? You can follow (sexy) book club on Instagram here. You can sign up to be a part of the club here.