The Challenges of Writing About Sex

As we all know well, sex sells and that as much as anything else is probably why it looms as large as it does in a lot of fiction.

But how exactly to write about it, or even more difficult, how to depict it, is a challenge for writers.

Early last year, Literary Hub, staged a single-elimination style tournament for "literary sex writing."  Such prose, I observed at the time, evidently stands in sharp contrast to ordinary old sex writing and as such, may be considered a high-minded, as opposed to a prurient, activity.



The organizers chose sixteen passages about sex from four historical periods and employed a panel of judges to chose among them. You can discover the somewhat curious result here.  Curious? Well, yes. Because there is little if any of what most people would think of as "sex" in the winning passage.

Now, Lit Hub has returned to the topic with an article entitled "The Evolution of Sex Writing" by Amanda Arnold.  It focuses on a recently published book called "Future Sex" by Emily Witt and contains some observations writers might do well to reflect upon.

"Now that sex is widely viewed as not simply about orgasms and reproduction, but instead illustrative of how one relates to gender, fetishes, power, and institutions, the challenge comes in describing all of those relations," Arnold says.

"Future Sex" is not a work of fiction, but rather "sex-culture research" -- the sort of material writers of fiction presumably need to be aware of if their stories are placed in contemporary settings.

To be fair, Witt isn't the first person to have taken a stab at looking into activities once or even often viewed as immoral or threatening to social stability and she freely acknowledges that, citing in particular Gay Talese’s 1981 book "Thy Neighbor’s Wife" as a model. In both cases, the authors learn at least in part by participating. What does that imply for authors of fiction, one wonders?

Even more interesting is the notion that exotic and transgressive sex ultimately doesn't bring much in the way of satisfaction.

The following falls near the conclusion of Arnold's Lit Hub article.

"Future Sex considers something far more shocking than polyamorous marriage or webcam girls. What feels most revolutionary in Witt’s book is the admission that she, a successful and nominally liberated woman, still craves that heteronormative ideology of love and partnership—and even more so, that desiring this sort of logical 'end point' doesn’t necessitate that you’ll get there."

This, one might argue, is hard-wired genetics having to do with the preservation of the species. Being a bit boring, it is perhaps as challenging for writers of fiction -- those who want to sell books, anyway -- as "literary-worthy" depictions of sex acts.

So let's jump to the conclusion. Here is Arnold quoting Witt:

“I came to understand that sexuality had very little to do with the sex that you actually had . . . ” she [Witt] writes. “A futuristic sex was not going to be a new kind of historically unrecognizable sex, just a different way of talking about it.”

Or reading about it? Much fiction, and certainly the sort that sells the best, is escapist in nature. To paraphrase Walt Kelly (of "Pogo" fame), "I have met the future and it is the present."