5 books on love, sexuality and feminism to add to your spring reading list

This is the saucy spring reading list you’ve all been waiting for. We’ve put together five empowering novels on topics exploring love, sexuality, and feminism for your reading pleasure. Like Jonny, they are all about respect, choice and equality while taking us on a journey of sexual self-awareness.

The days are getting warmer, which means more time sitting by the pool, on the beach, or in nature, with a good book in hand and that vitamin D on our skin. (Oh, and don’t forget the sunscreen gang, we are all about protection here). We hope you’ll find these stories courageous and intelligent, like the authors who wrote them while making for the perfect spring reading.

Nothing But My Body by Tilly Lawless

Nothing But My Body is an auto-fiction novel structured around an eight-day train of thought journey of an unnamed queer sex worker from Australia, experiencing messy breakups, sexual encounters with clients and intimate interactions with friends and strangers. Written as an unfiltered dialogue of the protagonist's inner thoughts and desires, this stream-of-consciousness writing style has you slipping into the character as if you’re seeing through her eyes or there in the room, witnessing the events first-hand. This incredibly raw, emotive and thought-provoking story celebrates queer community, questions romantic love, and breaks the stigmas around sex workers.

Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey Into the Heart of Desire by Tracy Clark-Flory

Tracy Clark-Flory takes us through a darkly humoured memoir that navigates what it’s like for women to find love, sex, and power in a world with contradicting messages on sexual freedom and expectations. From being on adult film sets to attending orgasmic meditation retreats and fetish conventions, Clark-Flory combines stories of her career as a sex journalist with her coming-of-age experiences, highlighting the conflicting truths of her own desires shaped by the male gaze, societal pressures and gender norms.

My Body by Emily Ratajkowski

Emily Ratajkowski is a celebrity, model and actress who bravely and honestly shares what it’s like to be a woman and an object of desire in a male-driven world and the frequent mistreatment of women she has experienced first-hand. As someone who was launched into fame at the age of twenty-one, dividing people with her unapologetic and self-empowering nudes, Ratajkowski discusses our culture's commodification of women. She points out the unhealthy obsession with and disrespect for women’s sexuality in a perverse and problematic industry and intelligently articulates her story to shine a light on the blurred area between consent and abuse.

How We Love: Notes on a life by Clementine Ford

Clementine Ford, a feminist icon and bestselling author of Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys, reveals a deeply personal and unfiltered portrayal of love in all its shapes and forms. A truthful and honest telling of the complexities of love and all the ugly parts we rarely reveal, Ford openly narrates her life story with transparency and fortitude. She writes chapters on loss, heartache, motherhood, and sexual and platonic relationships, all in a way that is joyful, heartfelt, tender and undeniably relatable. This novel makes us look at all the ways we love in a new light and gives us the courage to continue to experience love over and over again, despite the emotional risks involved.

The Ethical Slut by Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton

Defined by the authors, the term slut means "a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you." The Ethical Slut has been showing people how to live a successful polyamorous lifestyle in a fair and honest way for over 20 years. This is a guide with tips, strategies and open discussions, with chapters looking at consent, handling different conflicts or situations, scheduling, communication, emotions, non-binary language, sex styles and etiquette. In this third revised edition, the authors include new content addressing nontraditional relationships beyond the polyamorous paradigm with interviews, tributes, updated terms, and new topics such as sex work and asexuality.

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