Rough draft page count: 40/100
Deadline: September 2024
Good evening. I am reporting to you live from Denny’s, where I am the only patron in the building. Two hours ago, I was kicked out of Starbucks (where I was also the only patron) after having written the word “clit” in my thesis and pondering whether or not I should take it out. The barista man who kicked me out of the building was on the other side of the table and could not see what I was writing in six point font when he kicked me out, but I do still feel like I was kicked out as a consequence of my behavior. This is just like when I was eight years old and I stayed up past when my parents told me to go to bed so I could see the new episode of Digimon, and when one of the guys from Digimon died, I had assumed it had been a punishment for my disobedience.
When I got a chance to speak with my favorite living author, I asked them how they wrote such great sex scenes. They told me to let myself know everything that I know about sex, but nobody knows everything about everything, and I am gay. Tonight, I am writing my first sex scene between a man and a woman (?!), which is a big deal because I’ve never really curious about what’s going on there.
I took some time out of my workday to text my friends who knew the most about sex between men and women to ask them what they wanted out of a sex scene. I have one friend, a sexual Olympian if you will, who has so much to say that she said she had to get her thoughts in order before she texted me back. I have legally changed my name to Carrie Bradshaw. Here are some things they enjoy that I have never thought about:
Reverse cowgirl position
Maintaining eye contact during penetration
Lots of sweat (yeah people do tend to mention that)
Having him flip her around (makes sense)
My research is still skewed female at the moment, so I’m giving any heterosexual man unlucky enough to find this on Substack the right to say whatever he wants in the comments. Feel free to make me regret asking this question.
I don’t even remember what else I was writing about this week. I’m out of the horrific exposition zone (as soon as I finish this sex scene), and it’s only taken ~30 pages. Now we get to hit the open road most literally, and I’m excited to have my characters traveling. I have also been living by their schedule, which means staying up until past 3:00 AM and waking up before 8:00 AM most days. If nothing else, I suppose this is method writing. My day job is going so poorly that I’ve worked 9 days in a row and the agency is angry at the account manager who is destroying everyones’ lives.
What’s the maximum amount of times you show say “clit” in a paragraph? By virtue of mentioning it once, it feels like you have enough substance for a whole paragraph,. I’m thinking of reading Baldwin and reading the words “he grabbed his sex” over and over again (or at least it felt that way). How do we stop language about sex from being tonally laughable? It can only be too serious, too unserious, too explicit, or too avoidant.
I think this is why literary fiction can tend to write very descriptive, but not explicit sex scenes. They’ll describe every part of the act but the physical specifics of the sex itself. But this does work for my brain. I read “he grabbed his sex” and find it laughable and outdated, and see “clit” and think it unserious. Leaving the unsaid unsaid can be effective, but I am also finding it evasive and cowardly.
Now about queer sex scenes: depictions of queer sex have always been strictly divided into the Madonna/whore complex. I think there may have been a time in the 20th century American big city gay scenes where the strong emphasis on explicit material in bookshops and cinemas led to an outside perception that gay people were inherently hypersexual. At the same time, high culture was full of pieces about open closet queers who were recognizable to queer readers, yet also illegible enough that authors could claim plausible deniability in a court of law. Charges for public indecency and sodomy were/are real.
I think high culture and pop culture are both currently overcorrecting for past depictions of queer people as hypersexual. Until these past two years, I felt that graphic depictions of queer sex were disrespectful because queer people (mostly men) have to fight against the image of being hypersexual or predatory. The first lesbian sex scenes I was written had a clear “narrative purpose”: getting the main character ready and relaxed enough for DIY artificial insemination. I felt I had to respect my queer characters, but I couldn’t articulate what that meant or what it was rooted in, and “respecting” my queer characters meant no meaningless sex. When I recently read Sadie Graham’s “Beautiful Queers, Where Are You?”, everything clicked. In response to Sally Rooney saying that she had “too much respect” to depict her queer protagonist having sex, Graham quipped, “this is of course what every lesbian wants to hear: that one simply respects her too much to admit to having sex with her in public.”
Considering the amount of posts responding to the question where have all the male writers gone, I’ve also been thinking of depictions of masculinity and whether or not the industry is in a state of overcorrection there as well. Literary publishing allegedly prioritizes the following regarding gender roles in the current market:
Femininity is to be complicated and challenged
Masculinity is a problem to be fixed
Couldn’t you reverse these two statements?
Masculinity is to be complicated and challenged
Femininity is a problem to be fixed(actually nobody says this)
Are these two statements saying the same thing?
Femininity is to be complicated and challenged
Masculinity is to be complicated and challenged
Does current literature really depict masculinity as a problem to be fixed? Or do men see complicating or challenging masculinity as an attempt to fix masculinity? There tends to be a growing sentiment among female writers that femininity does not accurately depict the experience of womanhood. Conversely, more male writers seem to express the sentiment that masculinity is secretly an accurate depiction of manhood. Has that come full circle to men pigeonholing other men again?
But I am a woman writing a cast that is 80% men for the first time, and I am constantly considering whether I am attempting to fix masculinity. My main character is so conflicted about his own gender and unable to articulate it that he sometimes feels like an unrealistic depiction of a man. What does that mean? He is theoretically a fantasy and realistically a nightmare. That perception flips depending on the crowd he’s surrounded by at the moment. I guess it’s all in perspective.