So much is revealed by a sex scene

I recently heard of a writer who, daunted at the thought of writing a sex scene for the first time, said: “I don’t know what troubles me most, the thought that people might think this is my sex life, or that I’d like it to be my sex life.”

Writing about sex is hard, because it’s extremely difficult not to be self-conscious about it. And it’s so easy to fall into major cringe.

But what people often forget is that not all sex on the page is there to turn you on. Erotic writing is, naturally, and all sex in romances is there to up the emotional ante – and to turn you on.

Outside of those genres, sex can do all sorts of things in fiction. It can make us laugh. Bridget Jones leapt instantly to mind here. Hers wasn’t very explicit sex, if I recall, but involved granny-panties and a piece of loo paper stuck to her leg (or was it her bum?)

Apart from that, sex scenes give us such an intense glimpse into a character’s most intimate life, when they’re usually not guarded. So a scene like this can be a wonderful aid to “showing” and developing character.

Sex scenes can give us insight into characters’ insecurities, fears, cruelty, emotional reserve or commitment-phobia. They can explore our society, what it’s become and how we treat each other.

The example that occurrs to me here is Nial Griffiths’s Kelly and Victor, which contains the cruelest, most disturbing sex scene I’ve ever read. (I certainly hope Griffiths doesn’t wish that to mirror his own sex life, or I hope I never meet the man.)

Anyway, while we’re on the subject, I see that Jonathan Littell recently won the seventeenth annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for The Kindly Ones (Chatto & Windus).

The judges did praise it as “an ambitious and impressive novel”. But he won the award on the basis of the following passage:

Her vulva was opposite my face. The small lips protruded slightly from the pale, domed flesh. This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon’s head, like a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks. Little by little this silent gaze penetrated me to the marrow. My breath sped up and I stretched out my hand to hide it: I no longer saw it, but it still saw me and stripped me bare (whereas I was already naked). If only I could still get hard, I thought, I could use my prick like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody. But my cock remained inert, I seemed turned to stone. I stretched out my arm and buried my middle finger into this boundless eye. The hips moved slightly, but that was all. Far from piercing it, I had on the contrary opened it wide, freeing the gaze of the eye still hiding behind it. Then I had an idea: I took out my finger and, dragging myself forward on my forearms, I pushed my forehead against this vulva, pressing my scar against the hole. Now I was the one looking inside, searching the depths of this body with my radiant third eye, as her own single eye irradiated me and we blinded each other mutually: without moving, I came in an immense splash of white light, as she cried out: ‘What are you doing, what are you doing?’ and I laughed out loud, sperm still gushing in huge spurts from my penis, jubilant, I bit deep into her vulva to swallow it whole, and my eyes finally opened, cleared, and saw everything.

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