Archives: sex writing

Partying with [not] Playboy, writing with BARE magazine

For reasons that require (I hope) no explanation, I’ve been reading a lot about sex lately. All kinds of things–poetry, feminist criticism, Medium articles of sex tips, and articles about consent and building a consent culture.

Lately I discovered this older but perennial “Top Ten Party Commandments” from…well, not actually from Playboy. The site is a parody. But as “the ultimate guide to a consensual good time,” this list isn’t just a joke.

And when I say perennial, I mean it–rules #2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 could just as easily be guidelines for Cunning Linguists. I mean, actually, they’re in the guidelines. It’s not often I get to be on the same page as (parody) Playboy!

Anyway, by looking up the source of Commandment #7, “Love All Bodies,” I discovered Skidmore College’s student-run erotic lit magazine, BARE.

I’m not sure if the magazine is still running (its Twitter account hasn’t been updated since 2014, its Facebook page since 2019, and its WordPress has ‘Fall 2015’ as a header). But like the ‘Playboy’ Party Commandments, its message is perennial–at least as long as people continue having and/or writing about sex, which I don’t see coming to an end anytime soon.

For instance, there’s so much good stuff on their prompts page–which I also feel might be a sister to the Cunning Linguists guidelines. Just check out these ideas from them:

• Write about any sexual feeling you have had – lust, desire, etc… and where in your body you feel like it stems from – avoid clichés – when you feel pleasure of course it radiates from your pelvis, but do you feel an uplifting in your sternum? Does the top of your head tingle?
• Have you ever felt angered by someone’s reaction to your sexuality? VENT! Write down your reasoning! This is your chance to make them aware, and help them understand!
• Have you ever felt confined by your sexuality? Why? How? Imagine the moment that you break free and what it would be like?
• What’s the best sexual experience you ever had? What’s the worst? Develop the context of the situation – characters, emotional background, setting – draw people into the story
• Make lists
• Write short sentences or very long, allow your sentences to communicate how you’re feeling in the moment you’re writing about.
• Write in diary entries
• Write a letter to someone else
• Make metaphors – writing about sex or sexuality does not have to be described in literal sexual terms – does sex make you think of something else? Use that action or moment to describe sex or your sexuality Ex: a tennis match, a flower blooming (very cliché example)
• Write instructions for someone else on how to do something sexual, or how live a certain lifestyle that you have experience with – Ex: ‘How to be a Lesbian at Skidmore, How to have a threesome with your two best friends’
• Write “a day in the life of” Ex: “A Day In the Life of a Trans Man”
• Write a conversation – via text, email, AIM or real dialogue that conveys something important – let the words speak for themselves
• Don’t be afraid to be funny, sex is funny, people respond well to funny
• Don’t be afraid of poetry – it doesn’t have to rhyme or be cliché – play with word choice, punctuation, alignment, and spacing. Make sure the words you use count because you will use less of them than you do in prose.

Do you ever see an idea you’ve been acting on for years suddenly put into words and feel ridiculous for not spotting it before? That’s my feeling when I read “VENT!” Yes! So much fruitful writing can stem from venting–from digging into your emotions, exposing them, telling the world, in the words of Kazuo Ishiguro, “This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”

Or maybe from the opposite of venting–if writing about the best sex you ever had is the opposite of venting? But there can be anger in pleasure, a sense of justice, and there can be joy in a good vent session. (In any event, I’m sticking a pin in a potential anthology call titled The Best Sex of Their Lives).

This isn’t just what I want to write but what I want to read, too. When I feel an energy, and urgency behind the writer’s voice, I lean in toward their story to listen more closely. When a story asks me how it feels, when it tells me something I thought only I had felt, it wins its way into my memory and heart forever.

Avoid clichés. Vent. What’s the best sexual experience you’ve ever had?

This is the way it feels to me. Does it feel this way to you?

I think this post is turning into a sort of found-poetry ars poetica.

What about you? Which of these would you like to write, or read? Do you have your own suggestion for a prompt or guideline? A rule? A party tip?

Maybe leave it in the comments. Or, although I’m not sure if BARE is taking submissions on these topics anymore, the New Smut Project certainly is. Or share it on your own blog, or in a story you submit somewhere else, self-publish. But share it.

The world needs more honest, thoughtful sex talk, and I’m always up for reading it.

(Bad?) Sex in Fiction goes Unrewarded

I write this post with a heavy heart.

The Literary Review reports that its would-be judges of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2020 have decided, after difficult deliberation, to cancel the prize for this year.

Their rationale: “The judges felt that the public had been subjected to too many bad things this year to justify exposing it to bad sex as well. They warned, however, that the cancellation of the 2020 awards should not be taken as a licence to write bad sex.”

While the intentions are merciful, I can say only–Alas! Crap! Come on, now! And other expressions of dismay.

The award is, after all, one of my best chances each year to sample some literary sex writing.

“But, T.C.,” you say, attempting to offer comfort, “isn’t that literary sex writing you’re now deprived of…bad?”

Well…sometimes.

And sometimes not.

Literature and sex are matters of highly personal taste. Put them together, and what one reader finds abysmal might leave another wondering where she can find the rest of the book.

So put me on the record: I’ve quite enjoyed some of the entries to the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.

Not the Morrisey one with the barrel-rolling breasts, of course. But…well, here’s the entire 48-minute episode of Smutty Storytelling where my cohost Betina Cipher and I discovered many (not all!) of the samples actually worked for us.

[In the interests of full disclosure, I must confess: when I tracked down the full books the nominated entries came from, I often enjoyed the books…but not as much, or in the same way, as the sex snippets seemed to promise. In fact, some of the sex turned out disappointing or boring in context. I had imagined surrounding erotic scenes for the excerpts, but it turned out the authors’ imaginations were rather different from mine.]

And on the other hand, perhaps I should be glad to see this “Award” stymied for a year. Because I don’t share its goal–“to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”

That last, bolded part in particular.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate tasteless sex. But one person’s tasteless is, well, very much to another’s taste. I’ve read and rejected what must easily be over a hundred “crude” sex scenes for the New Smut Project’s anthologies. And yet I’m sure some people might find my own writing crude, what with its frank talk of nipples and cunts and asses and people moaning as things are done to any of the preceding.

While I’ve cringed at my share of Bad Sex nominees, having read some of the entire books I don’t know if those sex scenes could justly be called perfunctory, and whatever their problems are, I really don’t think they’re “redundant.” The problem is often too much originality rather than too little. I’m wary overall of the idea that sex is gratuitous to write about.

And is that even the goal of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards? Confusion abounds–“honored” nominee Susan Choi wondered: “Is the award for bad sex writing? For good writing about bad sex? For making good people feel bad about sex? I can’t help but think it might widen my audience.”

Her interviewer continues: “She notes that the main difficulty of writing about sex ‘is the way people react to the fact that you’ve done so!’ “

Well said. For the record, without knowing it was nominated, I read Choi’s novel–My Education–and loved it. Especially the sex parts. Raven Leilani, author of the recent and widely acclaimed Luster and no slouch herself in the good writing department, agrees, considering it some of the best sex she’s ever read.

(It may not be tangential that Choi’s heroine is a bisexual woman, and her apparently controversial sex scenes involve raw, sticky, uninhibited expressions of lust with another woman. Uncomfortable to some? I’m certain. But not in a way that makes it bad.)

We can’t control people’s reactions to the sex we write, or to the fact that we write about sex at all. Though it’s probably predictable that “bulbous salutation”s, competitive vaginas, billiard-rack testes, and the word “cum” will cause cringing. For that matter, as the article linked in the previous sentence also observes, one of the reactions, post-cringe, may be to go out and write about sex better–the New Smut Project grew out of a series of conversations with my co-editor Alex Freeman that began with us reading and analyzing that year’s crop of Bad Sex nominees.

We observed two failure modes that might be instructive:

First, some of the sex involved treating one partner (usually the woman) like a blow-up doll, or at the very least as some obviously fictional construct. When Jonathan Grimwood wrote of how his narrator’s “fingers found both vineyards” and meditates on the respective vintages of the partner’s, ah, fore and aft passages, the fact that the lady’s reaction isn’t given (finding longer excerpts, I see she does eventually ‘shiver’ and ‘giggle with embarrassment’) create the bizarre mental image of her holding still for several sentences, patiently waiting out the analysis. It exacerbates the weirdness of the scene. And I mean, I’ve always found it surreal how women get forgotten in sex scenes. My partner observed how people will try to “Do sex at you” rather than “with you” and, yeah. Doing sex at someone is ridiculous. And the 2017 winner, which has a woman’s “face and vagina competing for my attention,” giving parts of her body more intention and autonomy than she has herself, is likewise–as the kids say–cringe.

On the flip side, some of the Bad Sex nominees–Susan Choi, as I mentioned, and I would argue Erri DeLuca as well–seemed to earn their “recognition” by writing a woman as too active in sex. To mainstream thinking, this is alien. DeLuca’s inexperienced young hero’s mindset is accurately depicted and, I’ll be frank, as a dominant woman I found his honest vulnerability and awe as his partner led the action to be quite, quite pleasant to read.

Given these patterns, maybe the ultimate lesson of these awards is what Julian Gough reports seeing on Twitter: “I’m never having sex with a straight man again.”

But no, that’s defeatist. I’d be the last to deny issues in many straight men’s sex game, but when DeLuca writes a (presumably straight?) man trying something different, he gets penalized too. And I don’t agree with the Tweeters that Gough needs to go on some kind of register. I find his case quite moving as he considers:

“So why do we write sex when we know it is risky? Because leaving sex out of fiction falsifies our picture of humanity. If fiction can’t address life’s most difficult, complex and interesting areas, then why write or read it?

“This is why I find the Bad sex award, at this point in its history, in bad faith. Its basic premise – that authors are adding unnecessary and lazy sex to increase sales – is not just wrong, it’s the reverse of the truth. The award very deliberately avoids shortlisting actual pornography or erotica and instead targets authors who are trying to be honest about desire and sex, however distasteful the results may be. It deliberately and successfully encourages the worst, and dumbest, misreading of fiction; the conflating of authors with their characters in order to publicly shame them.”

Again, well said! (It makes one wonder why these nominees of supposedly “bad sex” are so eloquent when they write about sex in fiction.) And I am an author of actual erotica, one who believes erotica is also a place to be honest about desire–while certainly not meaning all desires I depict are my own or that the characters are myself playing dress-up. Sexuality, sensuality, pleasure are part of our humanity (including ace people, whose capacity for intimacy and pleasure may be expressed in other ways–and who not infrequently, in my experience, enjoy reading erotic fiction). Erotica engages with and honors this fact.

And because these things called “sex” are so close to our humanity, it seems even more important to write sex well.

But to bring well-written sex into fiction, you must run the risk of receiving a Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Albeit not this year.

My final disappointment related to this award is that I’ve never been able to see its trophy, of which the Wikipedia description–“a ‘semi-abstract trophy representing sex in the 1950s’, depicting a naked woman draped over an open book”–tantalizes.

Oh, well. For now, I have some good sex to read and write about. I hope you have the same!