TEENS

Joe Dunthorne: ‘Comic sex is easier to write than romantic sex’

Joe Dunthorne Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

There’s a great moment in Slavoj Žižek’s A Pervert’s Guide To Cinema where he describes an “unfortunate experience, probably known to most of us, how it happens that while one is engaged in sexual activity, all of a sudden one feels stupid. One loses contact with it. As if, ‘My God, what am I doing here, doing these stupid, repetitive movements?’”

The realisation that sex can be at one moment ecstatic, and the next absurd, is rarely acknowledged in literature. That seems a shame, particularly for descriptions of teenage sex where heightened expectation and limited experience can make the delusions more real, the failures more profound.

The 15-year-old narrator of Submarine, my first novel, conducts research before his first sexual experience, taking notes from his schoolfriends, pornography, the unillustrated Kama Sutra, and from listening to his parents through the wall. He wants to last longer than his father. When he and his girlfriend do have sex, he keeps trying to imagine grim things – senile maculation, smokers’ lungs – as a way to slow himself down. But, after a certain point, his self-consciousness falls away and he enters into a fantasy world in which both he and his girlfriend are enjoying a life-changing and flawless sexual masterclass.

Most of the time, sex is not fully serious, nor fully romantic, and to pretend so feels unconvincing

It’s true that comic sex is a hell of a lot easier to write than serious or romantic sex. But I think that’s largely because, most of the time, sex is not fully serious, nor fully romantic, and to pretend so feels unconvincing. I’d like to think that even Romeo and Juliet, the original love-addled teenagers, must have broken their reverie for a moment to note the bad smell in Friar Laurence’s cell, or the bumps in his mattress. Most sex scenes are short so that the writer can avoid mentioning these moments of awkwardness – peeling off socks, rolling on condoms – yet to me, it’s where characters feel most human.

The other big challenge is in choosing the right sex words. So many synonyms for penis but which one fits the mood? It’s tempting to reach beyond the classics and try for an exotic metaphor but that’s how a character might end up with a “bulbous salutation” like the young lover in Morrissey’s debut novel. It’s often best to keep it simple.

One way I’ve found to tackle the problem is to pass on anxieties about word choice to the character. In this way, the bookish narrator in my novel acknowledges his journey from awkwardness to arrogance by changes in his diction. He begins with an erection that becomes a stiffy that becomes his cock, his rock-on, his hotrod, his wang then finally – as he achieves full delusional self-belief – his dong, a word that sounds like someone important has arrived.

MIDDLE AGE

Stephanie Merritt (who also writes as SJ Parris): ‘It took three books for my spy to get laid’

Stephanie Merritt Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

The greatest hurdle for anyone who sits down to write a sex scene is the knowledge that your mother is going to read it. Or your father, your colleagues, the other parents at the school gate and probably, one day, your child. I pity my son in this regard; I’ve managed to reach my 40s without ever acknowledging that my parents know anything about sex, so I can only imagine the level of discomfort I would feel if my mother had ever committed anything explicit to print.

Writing sex scenes is by its nature extremely exposing. Whatever kind of sex you’re writing about, whether it’s wild, celebratory, tender, violent or deliberately shocking, there’s no way to pretend you haven’t thought about those acts for long enough to describe them in detail.

As with every other aspect of fiction, people have a wilful tendency to assume there must be an autobiographical element to sex scenes. This can be particularly awkward when your partner reads them. Even though he understands how fiction works, you know that somewhere in the back of his mind he’s wondering if any of it’s based on him, or – worse – other people, or whether you’re describing things you wish you were doing.

In a way, of course, it’s impossible to escape the personal. If I’m writing an erotic scene between my characters, I usually want the reader to find it enjoyable as well as satisfying in narrative terms, and the best way I can try to achieve that is to write something that I find appealing.

I want readers to find erotic scenes enjoyable – and the best way to achieve that is to write something I find appealing

There’s also the question of how we define “sex”. The truth is that describing the act itself quickly becomes repetitive and boring. That’s one reason why Fifty Shades is such a spectacularly dull book. Context and build-up are everything, and often less is more. I once heard Germaine Greer refute the notion that there is no sex in Jane Austen. Austen is full of sex, she countered, there just isn’t any fucking, and only the most unimaginative would confuse the two. In fiction, as in life, delayed gratification can be far more charged. One of the most erotic books I’ve read is Alessandro Baricco’s novella Silk, where the seduction takes place entirely through letters and stolen glances.

When I started writing my historical crime series featuring the 16th-century philosopher and spy Giordano Bruno, I was cautious about how much sex to include. It took three books before I finally got him laid, but allowing him to be seen in this most intimate of encounters made him more vivid to me as a character. It was also the first time I’d written about sex from the first-person perspective of a man, which was an intriguing exercise in empathy and anatomy.

I like to think I’ve become more relaxed about writing sex scenes. My eighth book, Conspiracy, is the raunchiest of the series. It’s set in the Parisian court of Henri III, notorious for its cross-dressing and erotic parties. My mother has just finished reading it. She told me she enjoyed it very much. We didn’t make eye contact.

OLD AGE

Arlene Heyman: ‘Sex in one’s 70s? It can be better’

Arlene Heyman

My impulse is to say I don’t write about sex, not specifically. I write serious literature the best I know how– and find that sexuality often says a good deal about characters as human beings. But why do I need to start out this way, with a disclaimer? Well, writing about sex remains a taboo-breaking enterprise no matter the age of the writer – and some of my stories portray sex among older people. What’s more taboo than that?



While Freud tried to teach us that children are sexual beings and some of us almost accept the idea, rarely do we think the same of old people. The aged are represented as eccentrics and hypochondriacs and meddlers; they can be cuddly and cute, and they are often widowed, to remove the risk that we’ll think of them in a sexual situation (Jane Austen’s Mr Woodhouse, for instance, meets all these criteria).

And we old people often collude in our disappearance as sexual human beings. An 86-year-old woman friend of mine told me it was “so sweet” that a female acquaintance in her 90s, who’d had a six-month relationship with a man her age, left him because he was unfaithful. My friend seemed to think it a weird prodigy that people in their 90s were having sex at all – who would care about a trivial detail like cheating? This from a woman who was having weekly loving sex with her 84-year-old husband and would have been murderous had he strayed.



A 79-year-old friend told me, for him, sex is better now: his wife knows her body better and tells him what she needs

What are the facts about sex in one’s 70s? It exists aplenty, especially for people in good health, who are married, who have good social networks. A 79-year-old male friend told me that, for him, sex is better now: his wife knows her body better and tells him what she needs. Sex is a friendlier act, there can be a real kindness to it. There is great pleasure in seeing a long-beloved creased face.



Why then do so many people not want to think the aged have sex? I believe it’s because of oedipal taboos. Children don’t like to think of their parents having sex. They protect themselves from their own wishes toward their parents by finding the idea of anything sexual to do with them disgusting. Old men and women should be grandparents. They should want to be with the grandchildren. They should not want to be with each other in bed.

I think it takes a certain amount of bravery to try to write well and honestly about sex, whatever your age. But sex among the aged – disgusting! Who wants to be seen as disgusting? However, not writing about it means distorting the experience of millions of people who want – who need – to see their full humanity represented.



I do so want to be brave.