Romancing the Fantasy: #Booklove TikTok has been credited with encouraging young readers to #booklove through its BookTok community. However, the BookTok “trend for ‘spicy’ (i.e. sexy) books has led to fears children may be reading titles with adult content” (Knight). To ascertain the tenor of the adult content in these sexy books, we analyse a popular BookTok novel known for its spicy sex scenes: A Court of Mist and Fury (ACOMAF), a novel by Sarah J. Maas, the “reigning queen of romantasy” (Grady) and “mortal queen of faerie smut” (VanArendonk). Positively, Maas’s novel includes extended erotic scenes that both represent and invite female arousal and desire. By depicting the female protagonist's body responding enthusiastically to her lover's touch, these scenes counter concerns about problematic gender ideologies contained in mainstream pornography and challenge how female sexual desire and agency have been minimised historically. Problematically, however, the novel reinforces a heterosexual romance script that says once a woman finds her soul mate, she has no need to tell her lover how she wants to be touched because he knows exactly how to please her sexually. We argue that while the female protagonist expresses her desire and experiences sexual pleasure without shame, the articulation of this desire occurs as internal narration rather than external articulation to her lover in the storyworld, which weakens the potential for the novel to model a love literacy that highlights self-agency as part of self-love and sexual desire. Love literacy includes learning how to make distinctions between eros, romance, and pornography. Akin to sexologists who advocate for porn literacy for young people (Woodley et al.), our concept of love literacy is part of a much-needed expansion of our understandings of what has often been assumed or implicit: a view of love and sexual relationships as being natural, rather than socially constructed (we’ll know the right person / the right time / they’ll know what I want and need, and so on). Making such distinctions lies in understanding that our moral imaginations create and are created by the texts we read (Boyd). This understanding includes, rather than excludes, a recognition of the felt sense that is unique to every individual, a reading through the body that includes the awakening and recognition of desire. The distinction between art and porn can be fine (Bray, The Question). One distinction that has long been drawn is between visual art and pornography – currently contested in manifestations of #MeToo protests, with millennial feminist activists at the Louvre covering female nudes with #MeToo graffiti (France24). Another distinction lies in definitions of what is erotica and/or what is pornography, and their connection to writings about love. The origin of the word pornography stems from writing about prostitution, while the word erotica comes from eros/love. Romance refers historically to stories written in the romanz language originally connected to fairy tales, also called wonder tales and often told by women; it now denotes love and/or erotic stories. The word fantasy comes from the Greek phantasia – an image or perception that includes picturing oneself. Euphemisms like “sensual”, “steamy”, “hot”, and “spicy” have long been used in the romance genre. Today, lines are even more blurred by the emergence of a new genre, a hybrid of romance-focussed fantasy novels and a new word that appears to have emerged via TikTok hashtags: romantasy. Female Sexual Desire: Mixed Messages In her book Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski proposes that while young people think they know a lot about sex, what they know a lot about is what their culture believes about sex, rather than sex itself. Despite the deconstruction of sexual interactions that has taken place in the last decades, messages concerning sexual desire remain outdated and most adults and teenagers still absorb their content. Nagoski suggests three powerful messages, all exhibiting double standards for men and women: 1) the moral message; 2) the medical message; and 3) the media message. The moral message, still the most powerful for women, depicts the paradox between treasuring virginity (safe keeping your body for the man who will love you) yet being desirable, an impossible standard because “if you are sexually desirable, you are, by definition, unlovable” (Nagoski 159). Texts depicting this so-called “ideal” position of female desire have influenced Western thought since at least the Victorian period and may be summarised in William Acton's infamous words: “women, if ‘well brought up,’ are, and should be, absolutely ignorant of all matters concerning [sex] … ‘the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’” (Acton in Everaerd et al. 103). A more recent medical message – that women's desire, arousal, and orgasm are biologically analogous to men’s – derives from the work of researchers in sexuality in the last century, many of whom want to recognise and offer parity between the sexual man and woman. However, if a woman’s sexual response or quantifiable sexual desire does not follow men’s, then she is seen as dysfunctional, leading women into another double bind. Enter message number three to the rescue: the newer, media message, which presents sexuality for all genders as unlimited. If one is not engaged in multiple orgasms, uncountable sexual positions, volatile and explosive sexual responses, engrossed in pornography, or sexually interacting with gendered and non-gendered others, then one is atypical or is missing out! Representing Female Sexual Pleasure Mixed messages internalised by society vis-à-vis female sexual...

This study sought to synthesise evidence on the sources of sexual knowledge and information and relationship with sexual attitudes of cis men. From a review of existing literature, five categories were obtained from 11 studies and grouped into three syntheses: (1) sources of sexual knowledge and information, (2) sexual attitudes and (3) the relationship between sources of sexual knowledge and information and sexual attitudes. Sex research relation to sexual knowledge and attitudes of cis men is scant across the globe. Men desire reliable sexual information despite peers and online media being more readily available with consequences for sexual attitudes that impact on sexuality of men. We posit that research, sex education, sexological practice and policy intervention are necessary to avail knowledge that provides reliable sexual knowledge and information to men for safe sexual decision making.

Sources of sexual knowledge and information among men have impact on quality of their sexual literacy and decision making. Sexual knowledge impacts on sexual attitudes, which underpin sexual behaviours and in turn impacts the sexual health outcomes of men. A cross-sectional quantitative survey was used to assess the sources of sexual knowledge and information among 484 Kenyan adult men aged 18–54. Data analysis was performed with STATA-16. Results showed that 79% of men learned about sex from school-based sex education, 75% and 72% from peers and mass media respectively while healthcare professionals (35%) and parents (28%) had the lowest influence on sexual knowledge and information. Understanding men’s sources of sexual knowledge and information that informs their sexual decision making can influence sexuality education planning and sexological practice policies targeted to out of school youths and older men. Hence, appraising formal peer educator’s knowledge could provide transformative sexual and reproductive health support services to men.

Are there ladies and gentlemen in the 21st century? Do we need them? In the 20th century, lady became particularly unpopular with second wave feminists, who preferred ‘woman’. Gentleman was seen as similarly politically incorrect: class, race and culture bound. Following previous research on the word lady, we explore here some current evocations and debates around these words. We consider how the more casual, etymologically gendered term ‘guy’ has been utilized for men and women, and how it functions to reflect and obscure gender. While the return of the lady might be considered a consumer fad, a neo-conservative post-feminist backlash, or nostalgia for an elite ‘polite society’, it also offers an opportunity for a deeper discussion about civility as part of a broader conversation that is gaining impetus in the Western world. Politeness is personal and political. Whilst evidence for a comeback of the gentleman is limited, we critically consider the re-emergence of the lady as reflecting a deeper desire for applied sexual and social ethics. Such gender ethics have global, social and cultural ramifications that we ought not to underestimate. The desire for a culture of civility is gaining momentum as we are increasingly confronted with the violent consequences of a culture without it.