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Touch: Sex, sexuality and sensuality ★★★
Compiled by Tiffany Kagure Mugo and Kim Windvogel
Kwela Books, R260

Sex. At once complex and simple; freeing and caging. It is beautiful. It is dark. For some it is sensual, experimental, primal, a portal to a world of close intimacy and tender love; for others it’s an act of destruction.

Touch: Sex, sexuality and sensuality is the outcome of a lockdown project undertaken by Tiffany Kagure Mugo (author of Quirky Quick Guide to Having Sex) and Kim Windvogel (author of They Called Me Queer) with the purpose of providing a platform for different narratives and voices.

The narratives unfold as personal essays, conversations the writers have with themselves and even as poems written by more than 30 contributors across the divides of gender, sexual orientation and politics.

Some contributions are fun and terribly sexy. There’s Uvania Naidoo who writes about masturbation and sharing her squirting with a partner for the first time.

Windvogel includes a personal narrative about sexual experiences with different partners. “These experiences, and those I omitted, fold into my sexual endeavours like perfectly whipped cream and here I have served the creamiest parts of myself to you.”

Other contributions are a touch sadder, and sometimes marked with the letters TW (trigger warning) to warn the reader of parts that contain graphic details of rape, assault and drug use.

Jamil F Khan writes about finding pleasure in sex after your introduction to it was in the form of rape; and Siv Greyson writes about a correlation between depression and a low sex drive.

Touch is current and relatable. There is mention of living through a Covid-19 lockdown with various partners and with the reality of online sex and references to familiar places in SA.

Above all, Touch is real, it’s raw and it offers deeply personal accounts that will leave you laughing, choked up and possibly ready to explore your own sexual narratives.