The case for sluttier writing
Why we should experiment with more sex (scenes)
The other day I was reading “Bad Sex Blues” by Lev Raphael. Lev’s points are straightforward:
There aren’t many sex scenes in literary fiction / magazines;
Even well-versed authors suck big time1 when writing sex scene
Lev's got a point there - most sex scenes are perfunctory at best, cringeworthy at worst, and it's even hard to find them (unless one is brave enough to delve deep into the erotica bookshelf). But if he tackled the how, I'd like to humbly speculate on the why.
We're seeing a rise of purity culture.
I mean, it's nothing new, and it hits the internet as much as it does real life, sometimes with hilarious effects2. Don’t be mislead by the term pure by the way - purity culture is bad.
Of course its tendrils strangle in writing as well. For the longest of times sex has been outlawed from the mainstream and (unsuccessfully) tucked away under the umbrella-term “erotica”.
It's not that sex scenes are hard to write3. Sex scenes aren't harder than, let's say, action scenes. But it's easier to place the latter in one's work rather than the former.
After all, while being arguably more toxic, I can incorporate 100 casual fist fights in my fiction and nobody would bat an eye. If I did the same with 100 casual sex scenes, however, my work would likely be tucked away in a hidden corner of the bookstore.
So there's already an imbalance at play here: much like real sex, if you can't practice, chances are you cannot get better at it.
Labels and genres are not in the writer's toolkit. They are in the marketer's. Marketing involves two main components: appealing to your desired target audience and avoiding controversy.
Of course, they will tell you this is in everyone’s best interest. We want to keep our children from reading about bulging members and dripping parts, sure. But this could be easily achieved with a content warning.
The fact is, while sex and the interest in sex are all but niche, the path of least resistance is to swipe them under the rug. I challenge you to find an erection in any YA book4 and then think of how boys in that age bracket live.
Now do the same for any genre. I, for one, know a lot of fantasy worlds where heroes don’t fuck. Let me rephrase, nobody does. I guess people really do sprung up behind cabbages.
I’m being a little facetious, of course. Maybe we don’t see this happening because it’s not relevant. We don’t expect the character from a story to go to the bathroom an realistic number of times during the day. Yet, not writing sex leaves huge5 potential mostly untapped, and ultimately makes the literary world poorer.
I will admit, it can be cringy. I didn’t need to know that Murakami has a fetish for small, perfect ears6. But I’d take that every day over the sanitized, barbie-smooth fiction that marketing companies would want us to read.
While reading Consultancy Blues, a friend of mine noted that there was quite an erotic undertone, even if most of the short stories in the book aren’t meant to be erotica. If anything, sex there lends itself to various genres: horror, cyberpunk, magical realism, surrealism, and science fiction to name a few.
But I like to think that this is me taking my own advice before preaching on Substack.
So, let’s write more sex scenes. And who cares if they’re embarrassing, sloppy pieces of misshapen prose. They do get better, and they can be extremely fun.
Marketing people can wrap their heads around ‘hem later.
Enjoyed this throbbing post? How about
Or even a dose of
To thank you for reading thus far, here’s a little audio snippet of “THE DARKNESS WHERE”, from Consultancy Blues.
The voice is raspy, yes, but in my defense I have a cough.
No pun intended
Noted, they might contain 'hard' and 'soft' parts
Honorable mention, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother mentions “an erection so hard it could cut glass”. The wiki page for the book states that ‘many consider the book too serious for being YA’. link
Humungous.
Go look it up. Most books (19q4 and Kafka on the shores at least) mentions ears.