Rising to the occasion: writing about sex

Sister Innocenta

I was recently chatting to a friend over coffee, for which he insisted on paying. He proudly announced that he had just received a royalty cheque from his publisher, and he couldn’t think of a better way to spend it than enjoying Beelzebub’s brew with the Innocent Sister. So, of course, we got on to talking about writing.

He confessed to me (happens all the time — must be the habit ...) that he’d decided to expand his repertoire and try his hand, so to speak, at a new genre — fiction for adults. His work was progressing fairly well, apart from one worrying aspect he wanted to discuss with me: Sex. In or out?

I drank deeply and set my cup down firmly. My horn-rimmed bifocals magnified the steely eyes I fixed on him as I asked him exactly what his problem was. After some serious displacement activity, which resulted in his royalty cheque having to fund not only the coffee but also the crystal sugar-bowl, he began nervously.

He knew his characters well, as friends. The plot developed daily in his head. Putting it all down on paper was easy, once he found the time between holding down a job, holding down a wife, holding up a child and holding onto a bond. Oh, and the wretched cats. The problem was that his characters — or at least some of them, at least some of the time, engaged in sexual activity. He was conflicted as to whether or not this should be included in his novel.

At first I thought he was motivated by concern for the privacy of these characters, with whom he had developed a closeness akin to friendship. But he dismissed this — loyal as he felt to his characters, the power dynamic was still clear to him. They were his creation; he could do with them as he chose, provided, of course, that he remained true to their essence. Of course.

The waitress finished sweeping up the shards and the delicately-coloured crystals of sugar, and a German couple shuffled up to the table alongside. Depositing armsful of shopping bags bearing expensive labels, they exclaimed delightedly how cheap everything on the menu was, and how they must definitely come again before returning to Germany. We winced. The waitress arrived with fresh coffee and my friend continued.

The truth was, he admitted shyly, he had written the passages reporting on the sexual incidents in the process of writing the rest of the story. However, on crawling into bed and reaching out toward his wife’s warm, sleeping body, he’d recoiled with horror. It wasn’t his characters he was afraid of exposing — it was himself! He leapt out of bed and rushed to his computer to purge his text of the shameful scenes. Relief flushed through his bloodstream and carried him back to bed.

Writing about his characters, describing their appearance and fleshing out their habits, personalities and contexts, he felt, was about them. As a writer one observes, analyses, synthesises and then creates. But writing about sex, one confessed. It wasn’t about them anymore, it was about you. The cappuccino foam clung to his moustache and his hands shook nervously. He looked at me beseechingly, waiting for the aha! moment to spark behind my eyes. I smiled encouragingly.

“So,” I began slowly, “you’re worried that your readers will ascribe the sexual activities, tendencies, proclivities or fantasies of your characters to you?” He blushed obligingly, but admitted it was a little more complex. “When you’re building up to some turning-point — a climax, if you must — and want to communicate just how passionate, how erotic the exchange was, you need to feel confident that the scene you sketch conveys just that. You don’t want some unmoved reader reaching the end of it and thinking, ’Is that the best you can do?’ and stomping off to make a cup of tea.”

What is at stake here, it appears, is not just the writer’s reputation concerning the ability to (re)create the erotic tensions, the passion and immediacy of the sex scene, but more essentially the ability of the writer to imagine it. It is not his skill as a writer that’s on the line, but his skill as a lover. Writing a sex scene that is in any way deficient may not detract from their literary reputation, but will almost certainly undermine the person behind the pen.

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but when it comes to sex scenes, men still whip out their penises to write with. Any shortcomings are just that — testimony to inadequate penis size — an accusation that no amount of literary recognition can assuage. How much easier, then, simply to rely on ellipsis and the imagination of the reader!

Do women writers of sex scenes share the same anxieties? Do men and women approach — and write about — sex scenes in the same way? I think not. Most pornography is written by men — which is hardly surprising, given that the consumers are mostly men. Pornography and erotica written by women tends to differ from that written by men, because women’s experience of sex differs from men’s. Women’s erotic writing tends to accentuate the sensual, evoking the immediacy of the experience. Men’s erotic writing tends to rely more heavily on stereotypic shorthand — witness the frequency of words like “pert”, “tawny”, “pouted” and the schoolboy conventions for naming the genitals.

Women writing about sex write about it in a more integrated way: rather than setting out to write a sex scene, they allow their characters to develop into it and to express themselves sexually in the same way they express themselves verbally, for example. The self-consciousness of the writer thus does not intrude to the same extent, and the concern of identification arises only to the extent that any narrator, any character or any incident in any writing is assumed to be autobiographical (to whatever extent).

Do I worry that my readers ascribe the sex life of my characters to their author? Not remotely. Though I cannot deny that being known as a writer of erotica and pornography has caused readers — particularly men — to look at me in a different way, and that in this respect I may perhaps be naïve. Indeed, the fact that my friend chose to discuss his “sexual inadequacies” (speaking literarily) with me was in no small measure due to his perception of me as a writer of flesh and body fluids — and thus a woman acquainted with sex. Men cannot discuss penis size with other men; but nor can they discuss sex with women.

And my friend — what was the outcome of his dilemma? Well, as I assumed, it boiled down to sexual insecurities, and I last heard he had put aside his writing to “expand his sexual horizons” and was last seen in a passionate embrace with an Angora goat.

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