There’s been a very unsexy boom in coronavirus erotica

The coronavirus pandemic and subsequent quarantines have radically changed many people’s lives – from their workplaces to their mental health, living situations, friendships, and maybe most interestingly, their sexual endeavours. Whether that means tuning in to virtual sex parties in lieu of the real thing, similarly taking affairs online, or doing away with both and turning to homemade sex toys instead (although Pornhub would really rather you didn’t). It’s relatively unsurprising, then, that the erotica landscape has been significantly altered by COVID-19 as well.

Ever since the world went into lockdown, authors of erotic fiction have been churning out tales that revolve around the new dynamics and situations we’ve found ourselves in during quarantine. A brief scroll through Wattpad (an app that hosts plenty of NSFW stories, among other short fiction and fanfic) yields a few examples with titles such as “Stuck In Quarantine”, or “lock down with you”, while on Amazon there’s Covid-69: An Erotic Coronavirus Quarantine Story (an inspired title, TBH).

“I don’t think there’s anything explicitly sexy about the pandemic itself,” one author, Ian Snow, told the Guardian back in July, “but any extreme situation is going to bring about fascinating experiences to explore in terms of sexuality.”

“Add in isolation, boredom, and plain physical need to the mix, and you’ve got a recipe for some pretty hot stories.”

The erotica produced during lockdown doesn’t just revolve around the new or altered human relationships the pandemic has brought about, however; some also personifies the virus itself, or casts the abstract concepts arising during coronavirus as more… unusual romantic interests.

As suggested by the title, this is the case in M. J. Edwards’s Kissing the Coronavirus, a 16-page ebook listed on Amazon. “She was supposed to cure the Coronavirus. Instead... she fell in love with it,” reads the summary on the cover, set against a backdrop of a woman embracing a muscular man who’s completely green (for some reason) and covered in spike proteins.

Also listed on Amazon is the timely, 36-page book The Physical Manifestation Of Washing My Hands Gets Me Off by the prolific, tongue-in-cheek erotic author Chuck Tingle, who’s additionally published a 34-page story about a man’s relationship with a “sentient gay face mask”, which doubles as a rebuttal to anti-mask conspiracy theories.

It goes without saying that the reactions to all of this coronavirus erotica are pretty polarised, with some readers asking WTF they just read, and others just happy to go along for the ride. “I don't know whether to give this 5 stars or 1 star,” reads one review of Kissing the Coronavirus on Goodreads. “Don't get me wrong, this book is awful. Absolutely horrible. But in the best possible way. It is exactly what I wanted it to be.”

Either way, erotica authors are just as entitled as Netflix (which just premiered the trailer for its socially distanced series) to take inspiration from the pandemic, aren’t they? At least someone is finding a silver lining, and we’ll have plenty of topical reading material in case of a second lockdown.