There’s something exciting about a man who’s never seen a woman naked before.
The Story of Nalini tells the tale of such a man. Isisinga, raised in the forest by his monk father, is so virtuous that Sakra, the king of the gods, grows envious. Unable to bear the jealousy, Sakra calls on the king of Kasi to break Isisinga’s virtue, so his spiritual power fades.
The king puts a woman up to the task. As men often do, he betrays his flesh and blood — in this case his daughter Nalini — to please another powerful man.
Intended to be a moral tale, this jathaka story unwittingly crafts erotica for the female gaze.
Let’s get down to what I liked about this story. Nalini may be a princess to her father, but to me she’s a queen. She’s methodical, focused, and doesn’t beat around the bush. She ditches the ministers as soon as she can. Why hang out with men who remain mum as she’s reduced to a sexual pawn?
She strips as soon as she enters Isisinga’s cave temple, telling him her vagina is wounded. Isisinga, never having seen a vagina before, is touchingly concerned. Not realising she’s a woman, he carefully explores her folds with his fingers (we love to see an attentive man), guided by her instruction (I too can’t resist choreographing a man’s fingers).
He then pronounces his remedy — a poultice of medicinal herbs. Nalini is impatient. She doesn’t have time for random greenery fanning her bush. She urges him to enter her with his penis, assuring him that it’s the best medicine. I agree, sometimes that’s just the cure.
Ditching the uncles, freeing the nipple, and directing the play, Nalini takes back the agency stolen from her.
You’re probably confused with this foreplay of an old jathaka story, when the promised action was a review of Sinhalese smut in the internet age. Well, it’s because Nalini’s story is timeless — helping me understand my frustrations with today’s erotic writing. Her story isn’t meant to be erotic. But I can re-read it so, because I love the power she seems to derive in her pursuit of the taboo.
Crudely speaking there’s two types of erotica: the trashy Fifty Shades of Grey type, and the literary sort, think Anaïs Nin.
If it wasn’t clear from my perverted musings early on, it’s the literary sort that really does it for me. Literature where sluts speak — pro-cerebral and emotionally hardcore — is what gets me off. But on the really desperate days, even the B-grade smut will do. Though readers can get lost in a loosely connected plot, it’s still better than porn.
All this smut is in English. Sadly Sinhalese smut online — even the stories with literary pretence — just don’t get my juices flowing. The genre abounds with tropes that break cultural norms and reflect social frustrations: sex-less arranged marriages and traditional, tired power dynamics like teacher-student relationships. But they’re one-dimensional. More on this later.
Thankfully, like men on Bumble, there is an exception: stories of homoerotic boys’ love, called BL in net-speak.
Tender boys’ love smut
Korean-inspired BL literature blew up on the internet in the last decade because women found themselves enjoying fantasies of sex between equals. This seems to be true for Sinhala BL stories too. The relationships vary from story to story, but the core remains the same: tender. Both lovers are intent on giving pleasure to each other, as opposed to taking it on a one-way street.
Perhaps this trend is also a testament to the creeping Korean influences in Sinhalese culture, from Korean ramyun, to BL stories, to Sinhalese erotica writers fashioning their pen names after K-pop singers.
At the moment, one of the most popular Sinhalese erotic BL stories on Wattpad, the go-to platform for amateur writers, is “Hemadoli”. This romance, between a cricketer and a ruggerite from Kandy, has over 800,000 views and around 50,000 likes.
JeoNikky, the story’s author, has a special gift for drawing in themes of culture and tradition — like the notion of a karmic bond. Hundreds of comments accompany each chapter, with readers vocally yearning for the next if the writer — who appears to be a woman — gets late.
No Sinhala smut for women
Critics also believe there’s another psychological reason behind women enjoying BL smut. BL doesn’t trap women in unequal and oppressive heterosexual power dynamics.
Perhaps that’s why I didn’t like Kasun Madhawa’s “Biyagulukama”, a popular, ongoing erotic series circulated through a Telegram channel. Sanduni, a housewife, hooks up with her personal trainer. Her husband’s too busy working. She eventually becomes a sex toy for her trainer’s friends too. The frustration behind sexually-incompatible arranged marriages is only touched on, and the depictions of sex didn’t really do anything for me. Possibly because the writer, a man, keeps reducing Sanduni’s feelings around sex to shame.
