Sex Writing

What We Talk About When We Talk About

Writing Sex (with apologies to Raymond Carver)

When I began writing sex stories circa 1979, there was no such genre called women’s erotica, or even just erotica, unless you count the ubiquitous Anais Nin. I called what I was writing exactly what I and everyone else I knew had always called it: pornography. Later, in the mid-eighties or thereabouts, Pornography versus Erotica became a hotly debated issue that I found irrelevant and tedious. None of the definitions of these supposedly opposite genres made sense to me, and I continued to call it, with delighted defiance, porn. I did this for a long time, until I and everyone else had become so bombarded by the term erotica that it eventually came tripping off my lips.

By the mid-nineties, when sex anthologies had grown into such a booming cottage industry that it had sub-genres like sci-fi, vampire, horror and fetish erotica, I had to concede that the term pornography was insufficient–but so was erotica. In my introduction to Herotica 5, I addressed the need for an expanded vocabulary, and coined the term ero-lit for what I and most of the writers I knew were doing–but it never caught on. Nor have any other new nouns been adopted to describe the multiplicity of fictions that erupted once we had permission to be sexy in print. For lack of a snappy word, I’ve been going with the somewhat cumbersome but precise phrase, sexually explicit literature.

Some dictionary terms may be useful:

Erotica: Literature or art intended to arouse sexual desire.

Pornography: The presentation of explicit behavior, as in photography, intended to arouse sexual excitement.

Sexual: Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of sex, the sexes, or the sex organs and their functions.

Explicit: Expressed with clarity and precision .

Literature: Imaginative or creative writing, esp. of artistic value.

Of course, different dictionaries offer different definitions; the anti-porn crowd went orgasmic when they discovered the root of the word pornography comes from the Greek term for female slaves, enabling them to loosely translate pornography as writing about female slaves or prostitutes. Half the anti-porn philosophy is based on this detail.

I’ve been known to frequently say, The Sex is not the Story. That’s because the longer I wrote and edited sex stories, the less inclined I was to select those that were thin on plot and characterization, no matter how ragingly hot they were. My favorite stories are those in which sex is an essential or even central factor–but never the entire story. If there’s a drawback to this approach, it’s that I sometimes forgot the primary purpose of sex stories.

I wasn’t always such a curmudgeon – it’s just that by the time I’d read thousands of submitted sex stories, not to mention re-reading, editing and proofing hundreds of accepted ones, it began to get old. I was once a naïf whose heart beat wildly to racy passages; now it’s a rare story that turns me on. In fact, if on first reading a story affected me, it usually meant automatic acceptance—as long as it also met my minimal requirements for plot and character.

By the time I edited my last anthology to date, I’d gotten to the point where I sometimes skipped the sex scenes altogether until seeing if I liked the plot. It’s easier to fix a sex scene than to breathe life into another writer’s characters. Or patch up an implausible plot. Or create a plot where none exists. Or–the one thing that simply can’t be edited into shape–bad writing, period.

These are the kinds of things I talk about when I talk about writing sex–stories in which the sex drive informs the characters’ behavior, and where sex fantasies and fetishes lead them into situations that make for a good read. Stories in which the sexual dimension of life is placed front and center, without obscuring other facets of life and relationships. Exploring, via fiction, all aspects of human experience, without deleting sexuality–or any other areas of human interaction.

It’s not that mainstream fiction never includes sex; almost every writer dabbles in the hot stuff at some point, though usually in a more subtle way than in explicit fiction. A few great writers, like Isabel Allende and Philip Roth, even write explicitly. (John Grisham, one of the wealthiest writers in the world, makes it a point of honor to never, ever write sex—a revelation that made me lose the modicum of respect I once had for him.) The key difference is that, in porno land, sex is the prism through which we choose to explore the human condition. We’ve discovered it’s a medium that yields up interesting psychic and psychological insights—and, by the way, we do want to get our readers off.

I’m not saying that sexually explicit literature is superior to either erotica or pornography–or even, for that matter, to smut (defined, in dictionary land, as to make obscene). My purpose in clamoring for better terminology is simply in to be linguistically precise.

Before I start coming off like the William Safire of smut—he bores me to death—I’d best conclude these ruminations. My purpose is merely to spark readers’ thought processes, and I hope I have. What words do you use when you talk about writing sex? Do you talk about writing sex? If not, why not? All points of view welcome.