Erotica in India and the rise of agency through imagination

The first time Shreya Punj (she/her), an Instagram content creator and the head of e-commerce at HarperCollins India, stumbled upon a sex scene, she was in class seven. She was flipping through a Sidney Sheldon novel she wasn’t supposed to be reading. “The thrill of reading something forbidden drew me in. It felt naughty, exciting, and strangely adult,” she recalls. “Today I read erotica when I’m in a reading slump; it’s immersive and entertaining without demanding much effort.”

Coming across erotica in India, for many, is that moment of illicit curiosity—finding something that stirs both imagination and arousal—marks the first time sexuality feels affirming, not cautionary. It’s not a classroom lecture or a moral science chapter introducing desire, but a tattered paperback borrowed clandestinely, a Mills & Boon taken from an older sister’s shelf, or a comic strip tucked between the homemaking columns of regional women’s magazines. In the digital age, that first encounter might also happen on platforms like Wattpad, Archive of Our Own (AO3), Tumblr, or Reddit, where young readers can stumble upon erotic stories, fanfiction, or serialized tales that spark imagination and exploration.

Those quiet encounters were from where modern Indian erotica would later sprout and culminate decades later, in internet-age icons like Savita Bhabhi, the digitally rendered housewife who became a symbol of both empowerment and censorship in the late 2000s. India’s relationship with erotica has always been one of tension and tenderness: repression breeding curiosity and shame, giving rise to secret explorations of pleasure.

Shreya points out this hypocrisy: “We live in a country that has sculptures of people having sex on temple walls, and yet you’ll be shamed for admitting you read erotica.” Publicly, sex—or any discussion around it—is repressed, but privately, it’s devoured. India’s porn consumption is among the highest in the world, yet most adults will hesitate to admit that they’ve ever read or watched something explicit. 

Finding safety and community through eroticain India

Erotica, in many ways, thrives precisely because of this repression as it becomes a private rebellion: a soft, secret act of self-acceptance in a culture that still sees desire as dangerous. Mainstream pornography, with its aggressive gaze and focus on male pleasure, rarely leaves space for women to explore desire safely. Erotica, by contrast, gives women the wheel. “Even when women ‘submit’ in popular heterosexual erotica like Fifty Shades of Grey or Mills & Boon, it’s still about their pleasure,” explains Shreya. “Reading it can feel like removing your bra at the end of the day! A quiet exhale.”

For many readers, erotica is about more than just sex—it is about agency. The act of reading allows them to explore what excites them, without performance, judgment, or physical risk, which is particularly important for women and queer folx. Karishma Swarup (she/her), an Indian sexuality educator based in Boston, agrees: “Unlike mainstream porn, erotica doesn’t depend on visual spectacle or rigid gender roles. It’s accessible to anyone with a pen and an imagination. That freedom allows for stories and characters who are invisible in mainstream media.” Readers can picture bodies that look like their own or not at all as the desire portrayed isn’t prescribed, but co-created between the writer and reader. Moreover, erotica is more than just a tool for arousal. Karishma sees it as a “sexual imagination lab” for societies that failed at sex education. “It’s not escapism, but it’s how people learn what they like, what turns them on, what consent feels like. It’s where they practise articulating desire.”

While pornography monetises voyeurism, erotica nurtures participation by way of the platforms it exists on. On Wattpad, Archive of Our Own (AO3), and Kindle Unlimited, readers and writers build iterative stories together. “Serialisation (of erotica) keeps the imagination alive,” Shreya explains. “You get immediate feedback, you grow with your audience.” On these platforms, serialisation allows stories to evolve with reader input in the comments section, while spin-offs and fan fiction let other creators explore alternate perspectives or continue narratives. This turns erotica into a dynamic, community-driven conversation. Erotica, then, is less about fantasy as an exercise practiced in isolation, and more as a conversation in a community with shared interests.

Erotica as self-exploration and agency for women and queer readers

For Yash (he/him), a 20-year-old gay man from Mumbai, that conversation often begins with himself. “I like reading smut because of the detailed descriptions. It allows me to imagine the scenes with myself in them or explore how I’d like things in real life,” he says. “Since reading is a personal experience, erotica helps me merge fantasy with self-reflection.”

Digital platforms make these explorations more accessible. “I mostly read on Wattpad; it’s where you find queer stories that would never make it to mainstream publishing or cinema,” adds Yash. In India, where queer intimacy is still either erased or sanitised on screen, erotic fiction opens up new worlds of queer desire. “Reading queer smut made me realise how limited its representation is in films. Erotica shows the emotional and sexual sides of queer love that no Indian movie dares to.”

For T (she/her)*, a 34-year-old woman from Mumbai, erotica became a refuge of a different kind. She was first introduced to fanfiction through a friend and fell into the world of boylove stories (a.k.a. BL), a genre that emerged from Japanese manga that focuses on romantic and sexual relationships between masculine characters. “I’ve always been a hopeless romantic, and these stories offered both romance and erotica. They became an escape during tough personal times, providing angst, happy endings, and wild sexual adventures when real life felt stagnant.”

T’s experience reveals how erotica can be both emotional and arousing, acting as a bridge between longing and fantasy. “BL fan fiction is mostly written by women, which preserves emotional intensity and makes me feel seen. It allows me to experience desire vicariously, especially since my own romantic and sexual life hasn’t always been satisfying. It’s a space where the female gaze is central.”

Meanwhile, for Yash, erotica became a quiet classroom of self-discovery. “Reading erotic stories helped me discover kinks I didn’t know I had. Before erotica, porn was my only reference, which is often purely entertainment (and not meant to be imitated). Erotic fiction, however, presents desires without judgment, normalising and validating what I like.”

T echoes this sense of learning through imagination. “Even though I’m straight, reading queer fan fiction helped me understand aspects of sexuality that formal sex education never covered, like topping and bottoming, or the nuances of emotional care in sexual relationships,” she says. “It gave me empathy and insight into lives and desires outside my own.”

Exploring consent and emotional intimacy in Indian erotica

The oft-serialised nature and length of prose in erotica create space for scenes that go beyond the act itself. Readers witness conversations before and after sex, moments of foreplay, negotiations of boundaries, and explicit aftercare, all plotted out and articulated between characters. Unlike mainstream pornography, which often jumps straight to the act with little to no dialogue or exploration of relational dynamics, erotica foregrounds the emotional, communicative, and consensual dimensions of intimacy. This allows readers like Yash and T to learn not just about sexual acts, but about consent, care, and emotional nuance in these relationships. “BL stories felt refreshing because men were shown as emotional, affectionate, even offering aftercare,” says T. “It was the soft side of intimacy I hadn’t seen anywhere else.”

And yet, both Yash and T acknowledge the hidden side of this private pleasure. “I don’t engage with others about what I read,” admits Yash. “It’s a personal space. Seeing fantasies and dynamics openly written made me realise my desires aren’t strange, but that they’re shared and valid.”

T feels similarly but adds, “Initially, I was open about reading erotica, but social taboo and the permanence of the digital footprint online made me cautious. Women exploring their sexual desires online is rarely supported, so I keep my reading private.”

For Karishma, one reason erotica thrives online is its low-risk, text-based nature. “It allows readers and writers, especially from marginalised communities, to explore desire anonymously, without fear of societal judgment or harassment.”

The invisible labour behind feminist erotica

What often goes unacknowledged, though, is the invisible labour behind these spaces of pleasure. The female gaze—and the emotional, narrative, and community labour that sustains it—has long been treated as a kind of “third shift” in the workplace: unpaid, uncredited work that women and queer creators pour into online spaces out of passion rather than profit. Whether it’s writing fan fiction, moderating forums, or building safe corners of the internet for erotic self-expression, this creative energy fuels entire digital ecosystems that are rarely recognised as work that can be monetarily incentivised.

As feminist media scholars have noted, much of this creative economy begins as care work—stories written to make themselves and others feel seen, to imagine tenderness where mainstream culture shows aggression, to offer emotional aftercare where porn offers none. Yet, as platforms grow, that labour is often co-opted by the very systems that once ignored it. Tech companies and AI tools now mine the same fan fiction archives and online erotica forums—spaces largely built by women and queer communities—to train language models capable of generating explicit fiction at scale.

The irony is striking: for years, erotic writing by women was dismissed as indulgent, unserious, or “not real art”. Now, the same impulses and story structures are being automated, branded as innovation, and monetised by technology. As recently reported, ChatGPT and other AI tools are being consciously steered into the world of erotica, an arena once considered taboo. In a sense, AI’s entry into erotica is a mirror held up to decades of gendered creative labour: invisible, emotional, and community-driven until it becomes profitable.

For Priyanka Mookerjee (she/her), founder and CEO of Moonkind, a platform democratising erotic storytelling through AI-driven tools, the question of who the audience is and how they engage with erotica has always been central. “Storytelling, especially erotica, is one of the best ways to discover yourself,” she says. “Reading about situations you’ve never experienced allows you to engage with your own desires and unexplored aspects of identity. It’s introspective in a way that even social media or tech-mediated interaction can’t replicate.”

This insight guided Priyanka’s approach when building CleanDirty in 2023, India’s first fast-monetising digital erotica platform. Unlike the ad-hoc and potentially unsafe spaces online, CleanDirty curated content with both pleasure and safety in mind. Writers were encouraged to fully explore their fantasies, whether grounded, meet-cute encounters or deeply emotional queer and neurodivergent narratives, but always within ethical boundaries, such as explicit consent and stringent age compliance. Priyanka emphasises, “The platform succeeded quickly because audiences support quality, safe, community-oriented erotica.”

Yet, as Sakshi (she/her), a young erotica poet, highlights, the act of publicly sharing such work is not without risk. Writing erotic poems allows her to explore emotions such as anger, desire, disgust, passion, and safely experiment with expression. But the response to such labour is also gendered, often tinged with vulnerability. “When I tried making my poems public, I faced assumptions, especially from men, who conflated reading my work with my personal availability [for them to project their desires],” she says. “Most of my audience, however, appreciates the writing for its imagination and emotional intensity.”

Her experience underscores a persistent tension: the invisible, unpaid labour behind women’s and queer creators’ work is often met with harassment or dismissal when exposed to wider audiences. Online platforms can amplify creative voices, but creators must navigate boundaries carefully, balancing visibility with safety. Still, Sakshi finds validation and connection in her community: “Readers say my work is spine-chilling or spicy. It shows that [independently-published] erotica can build a small, appreciative community who enjoy imaginative exploration without needing mainstream recognition.”

“These platforms have democratised access and creation,” explains Shreya. “Writers can reach audiences directly, receive feedback, and even monetise without traditional gatekeeping. The readership skews heavily female, giving women a rare space to explore pleasure and agency on their own terms.” However, while anonymity helps, shame is deeply ingrained in the social DNA of the public as desire is shunned even as adults indulge privately. 

How AI and technology are reshaping erotica in India

Priyanka’s latest initiative, Moonkind, builds on these lessons. By introducing AI-driven storytelling tools that accept multimodal input—whether it is text, audio, or other media, in any language—Moonkind seeks to democratise erotica. “Our goal is intersectional representation,” says Priyanka. “We want stories to emerge from a wide variety of creators, not just those with socio-economic privilege or formal education. Technology shouldn’t replace the female or queer gaze, but should amplify it, help it reach new audiences safely, and preserve the ethics of the spaces where these narratives have always thrived.”

In doing so, the platform addresses the positionality of its audience: who gets to see, respond to, and participate in erotic storytelling. Where earlier internet spaces often reflected privilege or invisibility, through Moonkind, Priyanka is attempting to centre access, consent, and agency, ensuring that erotic writing remains both personal and culturally resonant.

Yet the story doesn’t end there.  AI models, including text-generation tools, now produce erotica informed by the stories women and queer creators have freely shared online for years. While this can expand access and experimentation, it also raises critical questions about recognition, consent, and ownership. The imaginative labour of writers, often invisible and uncompensated, now runs the risk of being harvested (without compensation) by algorithms.

While AI can amplify voices, it must not erase the creators themselves. The ethics of consent, authorship, and community are central as these stories didn’t exist in a vacuum. They emerged from people reclaiming their own desires and narratives, often in defiance of social norms. Any technology that touches that work has a responsibility to honour it.

For readers and creators alike, erotica continues to be a space of agency, imagination, and learning. In a culture that frequently polices desire, erotica remains both rebellion and refuge. It reminds us that pleasure is not a commodity to be consumed, but a human experience to be explored: ethically, creatively, and collectively. And as technology grows more capable of shaping and amplifying desire, the challenge is to ensure that it serves the very people whose stories built the world of erotica in the first place: the writers and readers who’ve long laboured to claim space for the female and queer gaze.

Curated by Gaysi Family