Dirty Words and Dirty People

Raise your hand if you've ever committed an act of writing.
Good. Now, raise your hand if you've ever tried to write about sex.
Good. Responsive group here this morning. Now, if you've managed to write about sex and not get uncomfortable or embarrassed, reach over with both hands and grope the person sitting next to you.
Still in your seat? Thought so.
The topic of sex is one of my greatest hurdles as a writer, and I know I'm not alone in it being an issue or finding it hard to surmount (hur hur). Sex hovers in the wings in my stories--the purr in your voice or the sheen in your eyes or the crooked little smirk when you wake up the next morning--but it never comes (ha ha!) front and center. It's a lot of things: shyness, embarrassment, the fear I'll turn into low-budget porn. But mostly, it's an issue of a paucity of terms, and the terrible, inescapable reputation of the sci-fi porn kids.
If you're here, I'm willing to bet you've heard of Laurell K. Hamilton. Even if you haven't, you've probably read a short story or two in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. If you want you can call it a byproduct of the nerd mentality, but the truth is that it is all too easy for genre fiction writers to let their narratives become utterly consumed by sex. Hamilton is one of the most egregious examples, seeing as how her main character has historically slept with over a dozen men in a single volume and needs to have sex to recharge her werelion superpowers or some such nonsense; but one of my most distinct memories as a child was reading my parents subscriptions to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and moving from prepubescent arousal to fundamental disturbance at the number of stories which featured graphic, in-depth sex scenes. I recall stories that were nothing but hardcore sex, with some level of sci-fi dressing put on them--the most egregious being a story set in virtual reality where a main character rewires their VR rig to think that their penis is a hand, so they can walk around and have people masturbate them. Yes. Really. It's an entire subgenre of so-called genre fiction: "People Fuck and Then Aliens Show Up". (or alternately, "People Fuck Aliens"; if fantasy, substitute "Shapeshifted Unicorns"; if urban fantasy, substitute "Vampires")

It is incredibly easy to fall down this slippery slope. I had to abandon a short story I wrote about five years ago when I realized that one of the climactic (ha ha!) moments involved my protagonist and his girlfriend having very graphic sex. Why? Because it was the easiest way to make the ghost possessing the protagonist present itself. I don't know either. So, I tend to be wary of addressing sex front and center, because it's too easy for it to go from an extended shot to a money shot.

And then...and then there is the schizophrenic train wreck that is the collection of American English terms for sex. I don't know if it's our Puritan cultural roots or just a lack of inspiration, but my native language, which I generally find lovely to work with, can't seem to find sexual terms that occupy a middle ground between the gynecologist's office and the poker table.

For instance, one of my favorite uncomfortable cultural minefields: the female genitalia. "Vagina" is generally accepted, but clinical; "pussy" is to some people totally acceptable but largely not; and the battle lines are ever more starkly drawn on "cunt". And don't get me started on the little romance novel kennings: there is nothing like the phrase "passage of love" to make me want to smash someone's face in with a hammer.

There is plenty of work being done to reclaim or co-opt terms--"cunt" in particular sees a lot of use among some people I know--but in the meantime, they remain either limp-wristed or charged, which means it's very hard to write a sex scene without devolving into either pretension or smut. Now, smut is all well and good, I mean, in many ways I'm a fan, but putting smut in the middle of a postmodern occult novel is like putting the opening of Metamorphoses in the middle of a detective novel--it makes sense with a little context, and it can be used to pull some interesting narrative stunts, but if used as a normal part of the narrative it can be jarring and abrasive.

It's no good acknowledging a hurdle if you don't make an effort to surpass it, and an effort, slowly but surely, is being made; but sex is a topic that I find very delicate, because it is a topic that I find very beautiful, and that makes the pitfalls involved in writing about it all the more spacious and harrowing. So for the time being, I have trouble writing about sex. I second-guess myself even more strongly when I talk about it than I do when I talk about anything else. I find graphic violence easier than graphic sex--a man can pistol-whip someone's face into a side of wet beef but I can't seem to capture a proper description for breasts. This probably says something about my cultural attitudes, but I feel best leaving that up to you. Call me postmodern if you like; but in the battle between smut and pretension, today's the day I let the latter side win.