Esmé Louise James is a British-born Australian sex historian, author, journalist, and TikTok user known for Kinky History, an online educational video and podcast series about the history of human sexuality, as well as an upcoming non-fiction book of the same name, set for release in October 2023.
James has written for outlets including Archer, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Conversation, being nominated for a Walkley Award for her work with the latter. James is based in Melbourne, Australia.
Career
Online
Since joining TikTok in 2020, James has acquired around 2.5 million followers on the platform as of February 2023.
James is best known for her TikTok series Kinky History, in which she explains and corrects misconceptions about historical human sexuality, with topics including the historical roots of kink, pornography, sex toys, fetishes, oral sex, and STIs. She created the series in 2020, having seen a university friend's art history TikTok series and wanting to discuss the research she had done for her PhD thesis. The series quickly gained traction, with the second video in the series exceeding 1 million views within a day. By September 2022, she was ranked in the top 1 percent of global TikTok creators, based on metrics of likes, shares, comments, and total view counts. As of February 2023, her TikTok channel had reached 2.5 million followers.
In early 2022, James and her mother, Susan James, announced a new TikTok-exclusive documentary series entitled SexTistics, which would focus on statistical research of gender, identity, and sexuality in modern-day Australia and was funded by TikTok, Screen Australia, and NZ On Air as part of their joint "Every Voice" funding initiative.
In August 2022, James gave a talk at TEDxSydney entitled "Writing kinky sex back into the history pages". Later in the year, she was nominated at the 12th AACTA Awards for an Audience Choice Award for Best Digital Creator.
In 2023, James launched a podcast version of Kinky History, produced via DM Podcasts. She has also appeared on podcasts including Jim Jefferies' I Don't Know About That and Triple J's The Hookup.
Writing
As a teenager, James self-published several novels before writing the novella Honeyflower and Pansy in 2012, which was initially picked up by US publisher Astrea Press, who signed the 17-year-old James to a five-year contract. The novella was eventually published electronically by Clean Reads in 2015, as was her second novel, The Awakening, in 2017.
James was one of the top 30 writers in the SBS 2020 Emerging Writers' Competition and was thus featured in the competition's anthology, Roots: Home is Who We Are. Her articles, poems, and short stories have appeared in the student publications Farrago, Lot's Wife, Judy's Punch, and Rabelais, and in media outlets Archer, Hecate, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Conversation. For her work with the latter, she and editor Patrick Lenton were jointly nominated for a 2022 Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism.
In November 2022, John M. Green's Pantera Press announced they had acquired the world rights to James' upcoming book, Kinky History: The Stories Behind Our Intimate Lives, Past and Present, and would publish it for an October 2023 release.
Education and personal life
James is a PhD candidate in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne's School of Culture and Communication. Her PhD thesis focused on the history of pornography and literary eroticism from the 1700s to the early 1900s. Her academic focus was initially on the history of religion before shifting to sexuality.
Prior to university, James grew up in the suburb of Mordialloc and attended Beaconhills College. She is the daughter of Dr. Susan James, an outreach fellow at the University of Melbourne's school of mathematics and statistics; the two have collaborated on Kinky History and SexTistics. James also has a disabled brother, of whom she is the primary caregiver. She and her boyfriend, Nicolas Muniz-Saavedra, began dating shortly before the COVID-19 lockdown. She is bisexual, having come out at the end of her undergraduate studies.
James has been vocal on a number of social issues. She attended a Melbourne-based abortion rights protest in 2019 and spoke at another one in 2022, held after the apparent overturn of Roe v. Wade in America.
Bibliography
Novels
Honeyflower and Pansy. Clean Reads (13 April 2015). The Awakening. Clean Reads (6 November 2017).
Non-fiction books
Kinky History: The Stories Behind Our Intimate Lives, Past and Present (August 2023, Pantera Press)