Follow-up: Sex in Literature

Last month I wrote a post called Sex, Lies and Literature in which I took a look at the why sex has been such a popular theme throughout literary history.

Today, I came across an interesting blog post on the Guardian Unlimited The Blog Books section that got me thinking about this subject again. But instead of asking the why question, I’m more interested now in the how question. More specifically, is it possible to write a sex scene in a literary piece of fiction without blowing it (pardon the expression)? To get you thinking about this, here’s what Lee Rourke said in his post Literary sex is such a turn-off:

When novelists try to make their sex scenes literary, when they try to orchestrate each moan and groan into the book, wasting all that time trying to create the perfect scene, trying to make it seem believable, they fail miserably. The literary approach to writing a decent, believable sex scene is the most embarrassing thing about contemporary literary fiction today.

I do agree with Mr. Rourke that when novelists try to describe "each moan and groan" it can become a bit much. I often find myself flipping through the pages to find where the scene finally ends hoping to get on with the novel.

But I don’t think a long, drawn out sex scene in a novel, by itself, is what makes the sex scene so bad. There has to be more to it than that. And indeed, there is. Mr. Rourke goes on to criticize Michel Houellebecq’s work because of the novelists penchant for bad sex scenes. It’s in these sex scenes that Mr. Rourke finds, what I think, is the problem with literary sex today:

For Houellebecq the sexual act is always mechanical, always from one point of view, never complicated, never mawkish and all parties are complicit: women never say no and men always rise to the occasion. It is bad sex. It is clichéd sex. It is wholly misogynistic in practice and point of view. Because of these faults, these annoying fissures of self-referential knowing, these bathetic scenes seem completely real. Even though sex does not happen like this in our lives – misogyny is abhorrent to us – yet, still these passages seem real to us.

In other words, it’s always the same old thing. The woman submits. The man always fulfills his "manly" duties. If you have read one sex scene like this, then you have read them all. Of course, if you try to go the other route by making the sex scene some crazed creative writing experiment, Mr. Rourke will find fault with you as well – and I don’t blame him.

Have we gotten to a point in literature where sex just fails to serve a purpose other than to hopefully arouse the reader? I’m not sure if I, or anyone else for that matter, can answer that question. I can say, however, that from my experience while reading novels, the best sex scenes are always the ones that are short and to-the-point and leave most of the imagery to your imagination.

When I’m reading for pleasure (which is just about all the reading I do these days), I want a sex scene to somehow move the plot forward. There are a variety of ways this can be accomplished. But "sex for the sake of sex" in literature is, well, porn! Does a sex scene have to have a deeper meaning within the context of the novel (i.e. symbolism, metaphor, etc)? Possibly. A deeper meaning can be found in just about everything if one looks hard enough.

I think I have written myself into a corner because sex is such a large topic with such broad implications that it’s hard to really examine closely in a single blog post. I hope you don’t see this as me backing down from a tough subject, I just don’t want to bore anyone with endless drivel about one small part of literature as a whole.

So I’ll pose the question to you: How can sex be written so that it moves the plot forward and still adds something to the novel? Is sex so overused today that any sex scene in a novel is a cliche`? Don’t be shy, leave a comment and let us know what you think!

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