How to Write Sex Scenes Without Shame
(Content warning: This essay includes some explicit sexual language and situations.)
Most of us, whether we like it or not, have an erotic life. It’s a part of the human arrangement. Our sexual drive is primal, often overpowering. It causes us to think things we’d rather not think, to behave in ways we know to be destructive, to harbor wants that will remain unrequited. It’s a source of tremendous vitality, occasional transgression, and consistent imbalance. For this reason, humans have devised various systems of thought that seek to stigmatize and even criminalize our sexual impulses. (I’m looking at you, organized religion.) These efforts are, let’s face it, a testament to the power of our libidinal urges.
(How to Write a Sex Scene Like Nobody Is Watching.)
Given all this—how much sex matters to us, how much joy and risk it awakens, how much it reveals about us—the question I wish to pose to my fellow writers is this: Why the hell aren’t you writing more sex scenes? Aren’t you curious about such a fundamental aspect of the people you’re writing about? Can you really know them entirely if you don’t know their kinks?
Alas, writers are subject to the same hang-ups as the rest of the population. We, too, have been told—by our parents, our teachers, our pastors, and our government—that sex is dangerous, profane, and, above all, private. We know that our characters fantasize about sex and worry about sex and have sex, but all this thinking and feeling remains governed by a collective code of silence.
In publishing, this silencing used to be enforced through blue laws. These days, the means of suppression are subtler. If we dare to write about sex explicitly, our stories will be deemed “erotica” and relegated to the red-light district of literature. I say this as someone whose stories have regularly appeared in the Best American Erotica anthology. Frankly, I should wear that as a badge of honor. But the very fact that there is a Best American Erotica—as differentiated from Best American Short Stories— underscores my point: A story can be about sex, or it can be about the inner life, but it can’t be about both.
I myself fall victim to this mindset. In my essay about building round characters, it did not occur to me, until just now, that I failed to pose the following questions: What is your protagonist’s relationship to sex? What was she taught about sex, and by whom? What are the formative moments in her sexual history? How much does she think about sex? What sort of partners, if any, does she seek out? What sort of sex turns her on, or frightens her, or both? How much does sex represent pleasure? How much does it represent power? How much punishment?
I could go on and on here. Answering every single one of these questions would help us better understand our protagonists.
So let’s just say it: The biggest problem when it comes to sex scenes is that they never get written. They never get written because of our own inhibitions and because, to one degree or another, we suffer from performance anxiety. This is why writers so often skip from the part where the lovers are fumbling out of their clothes to the part in the morning, where the lovers are sipping some symbolic fluid—bitter coffee or sweet pulpy orange juice—their rude parts (and their hearts) safely tucked away.
This pressure obtains even when we do muster the courage to write sex scenes, and it leads to all the mistakes associated with pressure: unnecessary similes and metaphors, needless obfuscation, genital euphemisms, histrionics that wind up feeling imposed by the author instead of experienced by the characters.
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But what if we removed the pressure for our sex scenes to be sexy? What if we freed ourselves to write about sex as we actually experience it, which is, yes, sometimes sexy, but also: doubt-choked, distracted, guilt-ridden, angry, sorrowful.
This is why I write stories with graphic sexual content. Not because I’m a pervert, or wish to embarrass my relatives, but because I want to place my characters in emotionally dangerous situations. The point isn’t to undress them, or gawk at their gyrations, but to explore what they’re thinking and feeling in the midst of such a vulnerable activity.
It feels especially important to break the silence around sex because that silence has helped preserve, and even promote, a patriarchal and heteronormative power structure that essentially erases the erotic experience of women, gay people, trans people, old people—anyone who isn’t a straight dude.
This includes the profound risks that such groups incur. For most of human history, gay and trans people have had to suppress their identities and sexual urges or risk their lives. Women were considered marital property. In the world of pornography, they still exist largely as carnal chattel, slaves to male domination and gratification.
And for all the lip service paid to gender equality, a stark asymmetry still prevails. Women who engage in sexual relations still run the risk of reputational harm, exploitation and abuse, pregnancy and the loss of bodily autonomy. We’ve put a few celebrity abusers in jail, but 74 million Americans, many of them women, voted for an avowed sexual predator in 2020.
There are literary voices who offer a more candid, inclusive, nuanced portrayal of sex—all hail Melissa Febos, Alan Hollinghurst, and Mary Gaitskill, among others—but it’s still hard to imagine them being afforded the literary respect that John Updike and Philip Roth have long enjoyed. As Michael Cunningham observed, after publishing his novel, The Hours: “I can’t help but notice that when I finally write a book in which there are no men sucking each other’s dicks, I suddenly win the Pulitzer Prize.”
The story “Cat Person” became a viral sensation a few years ago precisely because Kristen Roupenian dared to write an explicit scene that captured what practically every straight woman has experienced multiple times: sex that is technically consensual but deeply upsetting. The story chronicles the one-night stand of Margot, a twenty-year-old undergrad, and Robert, a man fourteen years her senior. They wind up back at his place, where the sweet nothings sour:
Looking at him like that, so awkwardly bent, his belly thick and soft and covered with hair, Margot recoiled. But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.
Margot’s complicity isn’t the product of intimidation, but expedience, and a certain capitulation to her vanity. She gets herself turned on by imagining his arousal and they stumble on to a consummation governed by the desolate, disembodied mechanics of pornography. Margot feels like “a doll made of rubber, flexible and resilient, a prop for the movie that was playing in his head,” Roupenian writes. “At the end, when he was on top of her in missionary, he kept losing his erection, and every time he did he would say, aggressively, ‘You make my dick so hard,’ as though lying about it could make it true. At last, after a frantic rabbity burst, he shuddered, came, and collapsed on her like a falling tree, and crushed beneath him, she thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made! And she marveled at herself for a while, at the mystery of this person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing.”
How many millions of young women, and men, have typed some flirty words into their phones, downed a few drinks, and cast their bodies before their hearts, only to arrive at the same mystification? Roupenian refuses to reduce hook-up culture to a set of disposable experiences. Even when the participants mimic the glandular detachment of porn, sex remains profound and revealing.
As writers, we should be brave and curious enough to explore the many contexts of sexuality in the lives of our characters (hook-up sex, break-up sex, courtship sex, marital sex, IVF sex, pregnancy sex, postpartum sex, postmenopausal sex) as well as the emotional functions of sex (revenge sex, healing sex, rebellion sex, ego-boost sex, dutiful sex). We should consider what forms sexuality takes for people who are differently oriented, differently abled, victims of sexual abuse, the aged, the mentally ill, the morbidly obese, for those bound by religious or moral prohibitions. We should approach sexuality as a path to illumination. Which means that the most powerful sex scenes are those that lead characters toward revelations they might otherwise dodge.
I’m thinking here about a piece of advice that Elizabeth Gilbert passed along to me years ago. Actually, the advice came from a romance novelist Gilbert consulted as she was writing The Signature of All Things. Gilbert was struggling to figure out how to write about the sexual life of Alma Whittaker, the novel’s heroine.
The romance novelist urged Gilbert to think about the character in question and to simply imagine—given her temperament and circumstances—how she would have sex. Gilbert knew that Alma had a strong sexual drive, but also that this drive would have been difficult to express in the nineteenth century, particularly for a woman of her social standing and intellectual aims. And so Gilbert—bless her—granted Alma an outlet. Throughout the book, she retreats to the privacy of a small closet where certain thoughts make “wild demands upon her body.” She lifts her skirts, opens her legs, and begins “frantically exploring her spongy petals, trying to find the devil who hid in there, eager to erase that devil with her hand.” It, uh, works:
She felt an unraveling. The hurt in her quim turned to something else—an up-fire, a vortex of pleasure, a chimney-effect of heat. She followed the pleasure where it led. She had no weight, no name, no thoughts, no history. Then came a burst of phosphorescence, as though a firework had discharged behind her eyes, and it was over. For the first conscious moment of her life, her mind was free from wonder, free from worry, free from work or puzzlement. Then, from the middle of that marvelous furred stillness, a thought took shape, took hold, took over:
I shall have to do this again.
Please note how faithfully Gilbert followed the counsel she was given. Alma desperately needs to experience erotic pleasure, to quiet her busy mind, to relax. She wishes to explore that part of herself. But she has no conventional romantic outlet. It’s important to recognize the great variety of our sexuality expression, which resides in our fantasies and our solo explorations, as well as our congress with other bodies.
It’s important, also, to acknowledge that we’re often terribly ambivalent when it comes to experiencing sexual delight. Alma Whittaker returns to this closet time and again. But she never shakes loose from the shame of these episodes.
At the other end of the spectrum is Smilla Jaspersen, the heroine of Peter Høeg’s Danish novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Smilla is a biracial woman who operates with a fierce defiance and mistrust of the authorities, an attitude reflected in the nature of her coupling with her lover, Peter. “He has a light, fumbling brutality, which several times makes me think that this time it’ll cost me my sanity,” Smilla tells us. “In our dawning, mutual intimacy, I induce him to open the little slit in the head of his penis so I can put my clitoris inside and fuck him.”
Well then.
This is why I urge my students to write sex scenes—because they inevitably reveal secret aspects of your characters. Not just their peccadillos, but motives that remain hidden from public view. In Sula, Toni Morrison’s restless heroine returns to her hometown. While others scorn the destructive power of her promiscuity, Sula herself uses sex to express the grief she bears for accidentally killing a younger child years earlier. “It was the only place where she could find what she was looking for,” Morrison writes. “Misery and the ability to feel deep sorrow.” Her one steady lover, Ajax, likes for Sula to mount him “so he could see her towering above him and call soft obscenities up into her face.” What others might see as the claiming of power is inextricably linked to punishment.
Consider this passage, from the novel Spending, by Mary Gordon, in which a divorced woman takes a new lover for the first time in many months.
He put his head between my legs, nuzzling at first. His beard was a little rough on the insides of my thighs. Then with his lips, then his tongue, he struck fire. I had to cry out in astonishment, in gratitude at being touched in that right place. Somehow, it always makes me grateful when a man finds the right place, maybe because when I was young so many of them kept finding the wrong place, or a series of wrong places, or no place at all. That strange feeling: gratitude and hunger. My hunger was being teased. It also felt like a punishment. I kept thinking of the word “thrum,” a cross between a throb and a hum. I saw a flame trying to catch; I heard it, there was something I was after, something I was trying to achieve, and there was always the danger that I’d miss it, I wouldn’t find it, or get hold of it. The terrible moment when you’re afraid you won’t, you’ll lose it, it won’t work, you won’t work, it is unworkable and you are very, very desperate. At the same time, you want to stay in this place of desperation . . . at the same time, you’re saying to yourself, you’re almost there, you’re almost there, you can’t possibly lose it now, keep on, keep on a bit longer, you are nearly there, I know it, don’t give up, you cannot lose it. Then suddenly you’re there.
How much of this passage is devoted to the physical act? Three brief, declarative sentences. So let’s dispense with Foolish Creed Number One of writing sex scenes: Thou shalt be explicit and name all the parts and note where they are going, and how the lubrication is progressing and so forth. Nonsense.
The central event during any sexual interaction is thought. That’s what Gordon conveys here: the ticker tape of cogitation that runs parallel to the happy hum of our bliss centers. She uses those great underutilized tools of the trade, syntax and sentence shape, to convey the upheaval within her heroine, how anxiety keeps breaking the rhythm of her ascent toward climax. This is primarily what we’re witnessing: the heroine’s struggle to allow herself pleasure, the anxiety that “it won’t work” and therefore she won’t work. Consider the words associated with sex: punishment, danger, hunger, afraid, terrible, desperate. As with Alma, the goal isn’t just physical ecstasy, but the annihilation of thought.
I’m not suggesting that every story you write should include sex scenes. In fact, if you don’t feel comfortable writing about sex, please don’t.
By this, I mean writing about sex as an emotional experience, not a form of titillation. Sex scenes are compelling only to the extent that they convey how vulnerable we all are when it comes time to get naked, how eager and frightened and ashamed and hopeful. You mustn’t abandon your characters in their time of need. You mustn’t make of them naked playthings with rubbery parts. You must love them, wholly and without shame, as they go about their human business.
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