How to Write Successfully About Sex

On the Literature of Our Human Condition

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490-1500, Oil on oak panel

In the early nineties, my sister covered sports for the New York Post. Once, at Madison Square Garden, near the end of a Knicks game that the home team led by a large margin, she saw one of the New York stars sitting on the bench, smiling and exchanging banter with teammates, while turned slightly toward the stands to keep an eye on his personal assistant, who brought beautiful women close to courtside so that the star could get a good look at them. He shook his head at the first few, then finally nodded, before turning back to the court, his post-game diversion secured.

According to my sister, the personal assistant had no trouble finding women willing to submit themselves to this star’s demeaning scrutiny. Demeaning, in our opinion, perhaps not in his or theirs. Perhaps they considered the opportunity for such an appraisal an honor and a compliment; perhaps they considered it a turn-on. Who knows? Maybe an evening spent with him — most likely more than dinner and a movie — compensated for being brazenly objectified with a kingly nod or shake of the head. Who are most of us to know, or to judge?

This April, Skyhorse Publishing brought out Canceled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me, a memoir by Blake Bailey, the renowned literary biographer, whose career and reputation fell to pieces in April of 2021, after allegations emerged about his sexual misconduct with former students and colleagues. The fact that his then-newly published and highly praised 900-page Philip Roth biography didn’t, according to some readers, sufficiently condemn Roth’s life of brash and inveterate womanizing, added fuel to the fire of Bailey’s cancellation. Although never convicted of anything, or criminally charged, he watched the book world turn against him, labelling him a rapist and a groomer. His lectures and book events got scrapped. W. W. Norton withdrew his biography from publication.

While, in his memoir, Bailey accuses himself of “lechery,” of being “disgustingly selfish and hurtful,” especially to his family, and even “wormy” in his defense, he also writes, “I can’t help wondering whether it would have been better if I were a professional basketball player, or a heavy metal guitarist, or Rob Lowe — just about anything not concerned with publishing, journalism, or academia.”

The line rings true, and yet, in his memoir, Bailey falls prey to exactly what I think makes some of us in publishing, journalism, and academia too quick to judge: a wariness and unease about anything that can’t be neatly explained. The book hums along when Bailey describes what happened, blow by blow, between himself and his accusers, how they met and interacted, how one thing led to another, then finally turned sour, and the aftermath — the regret, the guilt, and the damning (if overblown) recriminations. While he doesn’t come off well — good for him for not trying to — he doesn’t come off as a monster either. But the book bogs down when he writes of his relationship with his father. While the material is touching at times, I suspect that it’s meant to humanize the author, explain his behavior, and give insight into the bugbears that later emerged and caused his downfall. But how can he, or anyone, really know? Bailey knows what he did and didn’t do, what he wanted, what he feared, what he enjoyed, and what he regretted. Describing that makes him human enough. But the reasons behind his damning actions can, at best, be only partially known. “The heart wants what it wants. There’s no logic to those things,” Woody Allen famously said about falling in love and marrying Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former partner Mia Farrow, and thirty-five years his junior. I suspect that the body wants what it wants, too.

In Daybook, a short, criminally overlooked novel brought out last year by the British independent publisher Splice, American author Nathan Knapp describes a hilarious and unforgettable sex scene in which the narrator and his wife, Elle, get off by watching a cam girl drink and describe her dandelion tea: “Drink that fucking tea, Elle said. Drink that fucking tea, she said again . . . Oh my God she is drinking that tea, she said, she’s drinking that dandelion fucking tea, she said, and came.” After the cam girl finishes her tea, the couple want more and request that she wear a ball gag:

She went off camera briefly and we heard the sound of something like chains in the background, which sound caused Elle to shiver with pleasure. I asked her if she wanted me to take her from behind while we watched. Yes please, she said. She slid the laptop forward on the bed and got on her hands and knees in front of the screen. The woman on the screen placed the ball in her mouth and started to affix the strap. I slid myself inside Elle, gently massaging her back and shoulders with my hands, and began to gently thrust. The woman on the screen finished affixing the strap. I thrusted more forcibly. Elle moaned. The woman on the screen massaged her tits, which she’d brought back out as the result of someone else’s tip. I fucked Elle. Elle fucked me back. We both watched the woman on the screen. I suddenly wished that I hadn’t asked Elle if she wanted to ask the woman on the screen to use the ball gag — after all she’d been enjoying listening to her talk, and the woman on the screen, too, had seemed to enjoy talking. Oh well, I thought, thrusting, it’s too late now, and in that brief moment of my regret the woman . . . leaned forward to show a stream of spittle leaking over her lower lip and onto her chin and my feeling of regret altogether vanished; I thrusted harder than before, and came. From the sounds Elle made, so did she, for a second time.

The scene deftly sets up a riff by Knapp on why “the sex act is so resistant to literary representation.” First, he paraphrases the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, claiming that “the interrogation of the erotic by means of the intellect risks the destruction of the very aspect which brings the erotic into being and enables its existence.” Knapp writes: “Sexual pleasure can and even ought to be described, but it cannot be explained . . . . That which is inexplicable about sex is precisely what makes sex pleasurable.” Knapp’s next insight gets to the heart of why his sex scene works: “In the absence of explanations there is . . . no morality. If we cannot assign motives to these feelings and desires then we cannot say whether they are right or wrong.” Perhaps writers stumble when portraying sex by making it too meaningful, too right or too wrong, the participants too deserving or undeserving of pleasure.

The following description of an orgasm comes from the highly praised Thirst for Salt, a debut novel by Madelaine Lucas, published in 2023, about a twenty-four-year-old Australian woman who falls in love with Jude, a man eighteen years her senior:

. . . his mouth, opening me like a fruit. Twitching with it, my body made electric. Senses lighting up beyond thought. And deep within, a shift, like ice cracking in a sudden spring. First thaw. Warm waters rushing through. His palm flat on my stomach, holding me steady. I’m falling and the feeling is bottomless, holding on to him to brace myself, clutching the collar of his shirt in my hand. Cresting, like a sea. Until the feeling breaks, rolls over and floods through me. Wave after wave after wave.

Lucas’ novel has its stellar moments, but this is not one of them — reverting to trite metaphors to give the couple straight from nature’s womb, environmentally friendly ecstasy that no reader could possibly object to, or even find slightly strange. Clearly, Lucas approves of their union, and wants the reader to, too.

Lucas’ protagonist is reading The Lover, by Marguerite Duras, a novel which set the literary standard for age gap romance. Its sex scenes could set a standard, too. Duras’ narrator is fifteen and a half, and her lover twenty-eight. In the following scene, he overcomes his inhibitions and takes her virginity:

And, weeping, he makes love. At first, pain. And then the pain is possessed in its turn, changed, slowly drawn away, borne toward pleasure, clasped to it.

The sea, formless, simply beyond compare.

Duras uses the sea to imply only vastness. A few pages later, the disquiet deepens:

His hands are expert, marvelous, perfect. I’m very lucky, obviously, it’s as if it were his profession, as if unwittingly he knew exactly what to do and what to say. He calls me a whore, a slut, he says I’m his only love, and that’s what he ought to say, and what you do say when you just let things say themselves, when you let the body alone, to seek and find and take what it likes, and then everything is right, and nothing’s wasted, the waste is covered over and all is swept away in the torrent, in the force of desire.

Whore? Slut? That’s what he ought to say? What’s the reader to think? Exactly.

Knapp’s sex scene succeeds by creating a similar ambiguity. He doesn’t judge his narrator or his wife for what they desire, and the husband and wife don’t judge each other. Daybook’s clear autobiographical nature makes Knapp’s neutrality even more remarkable. Nobody feels shame, just a connection (aside from the cam girl, although who knows). The couple goes about their day, interacting, sometimes perfectly attuned. The scene ends — poignantly, I think — with the couple checking on their son:

Elle reached forward and closed my laptop. Slipping on her bathrobe, she said: Better not leave this on unless he gets up. A moment later she poked her head into the boy’s room. She whispered my name. Look at him, she said. I looked: he lay sleeping on his back with his arms extended in either direction, both utterly babylike and also as if he had, in his slumber, reached the height of some kind of drunken ecstasy. He’s so beautiful, she said.

In less than 150 pages, Knapp takes on sex, ghosts, racism, returning home, losing one’s Christian faith, and the state of universities. Daybook is fugue-like, an off-the-cuff running monologue that achieves mesmerizing immediacy while never attempting to curry the reader’s favor or approval.

Meanwhile, the soon-to-be-published The Fuck Business: A Definitive Tour of the World of Sex for Pay, a memoir by Michael Troy (clearly a pseudonym), explodes out of the box with a defiantly narrow opening statement:

This is a book about fucking.

Specifically it’s a book about people who get paid to fuck and the people who pay to fuck them.

Nobody is making you read it.

Troy got caught up in the sex business, first as a teenager receiving five-dollar blow jobs from prostitutes in the below-zero back alleys of the Combat Zone, downtown Boston’s adult entertainment district. Then he worked as an underage actor in low-budget smut films, while simultaneously operating as a small-time pimp (“I pimped a thirteen-year-old girl named Cami Eckhardt . . . . Cami was thirteen, I was fifteen. We were kids”). Later, he became a whorehouse operator and adult party host/gigolo. Although he eventually found other work, he never left the sex business as a customer.

Without shame, Troy assumes blame:

A truism about pimping or running a whorehouse is that the women who work there have to fuck you in order to get the job. It’s neither fair nor right — and, for all I know, it’s not how things are done anymore — but it came with the territory. Part of it was exploitation. But there was some pragmatism, too. If a woman couldn’t fuck, if she left unwanted tooth-marks on the tricks’ cocks, if she burst into tears after deciding she’d made a wrong lifestyle choice, it was important to know it before bringing her in.

For the first third of The Fuck Business, Troy mostly leaves himself out of it, focusing instead on the inner workings of the sex business. His stint in smut films gets touched on only glancingly, with too much emotional distance. But when Troy reaches adulthood, the book really hits its stride, becoming the intimate and insightful story of a balls-out sexual adventurer.

In the early eighties, Troy ran a high-end whorehouse on the outskirts of Boston. Dealing every day with clients and prostitutes, he made some dark yet illuminating discoveries:

I learned some things from New York Maggie. I saw how a hooker who no one could stand, who refused to do anything other than the minimum, who thought more of herself than she had any reason to, and who barely submerged the contempt she felt for her tricks could book more appointments than all but a few of the other women working at the house.

The reasons for her success were complex, but they could be reduced to four words: She was a Jew.

Maybe five words: she was a fucking Jew.

An educated Jewish girl from a good background — especially one from Manhattan — was the subject of more vengeance fucking from more cultural sources than seemed possible.

Or how about this chilling advice from Troy’s colleague on the street, T.J.:

You know who brings in the most money? Little white girls. The ones look like they just beginning to develop a set of titties. Look like they have grew them a coupla weeks ago. Ain’t almost no hair on their pussies. So, like, they might be underage. They might be twelve or thirteen. But here’s the thing. It’s gotta be like they might not be too — they gotta might be legal. Like the john gotta think about it — gotta give himself that moral excuse, know what I’m sayin’? Needs to be able to go home to his wife and kids — his daughter, if we’re bein’ honest — without thinking he’s some kinda child molester. But he’s also got to think he mighta just fucked a twelve-year-old. That’s what will keep him comin’ back over and over again.

The Fuck Business is fearless, challenging all taboos, becoming hardest to read when Troy leaves the sex business and writes about his life as a john. In the memoir’s final pages, he’s sixty years old and having a torrid, wildly reckless affair with a nineteen-year-old prostitute, Eryn, who has a drug problem. They’re regularly making love with complete abandon, zero protection, declaring fervent love to each other and meaning it in the heat of the moment, and yet he knows she’s fucking him, at least in part, for drug money. Troy seems turned on by sure doom, by beautiful young women who he knows — and perhaps they know, too — will end as the saddest and most sordid cases. He catches these women in flight, just before they nosedive into complete degeneracy, and that fuck-all hurtling toward hell fuels their passion. Their sex is some of the most disturbing and revealing I’ve ever read. By “revealing,” I mean strikingly clear but beyond understanding, and therefore beyond judgment.

In Daybook, Knapp attempts to sum up the conundrum of human sexual desire:

The genitals have no consciousness, and consciousness, no matter how much we might wish the case to be otherwise, has no authority over the genitals: ultimately, what the genitals have in common with the brain and the heart which beats time between them is that there is very little in the human heart that can be explained but much that can be described.

I would add that “conscience” could accurately replace “consciousness” in that passage. Fortunately or unfortunately, I haven’t experimented or explored enough with sex to shed the shame and conventions tied to it, and so I don’t trust my occasionally strong impulses to admire or criticize the sexual exploits of others. When I’m at my levelheaded best, I believe that basketball stars and their groupies, Philip Roth and his groupies, Roth’s eminent but libidinous biographer and his former students, Michael Troy and his life of tricks, those he turned and those he paid for, and Nathan Knapp’s (fictional?) stand-in and wife can fuck who and how they want, at their own risk.

In the final pages of The Fuck Business, Troy writes:

I loved being able to fuck all day, every day, with an assortment of beautiful women. It’s depressing to know that, however long I live going forward, I won’t fuck as much for the rest of my life as I would have on a good day when I was running the whorehouse . . . . I look back on fucking sometimes eight women a day in various combinations, and I don’t think about how lucky I was. The better it was, the worse I feel about having done it. Fucking, in reminiscence, brings no joy.

Go figure. The mysteries of the heart beat on, between the brain and the genitals.

John Julius Reel’s memoir My Half Orange: A Story of Love and Language in Seville was published by Tortoise Books in 2023. On Substack, he writes in English and Spanish at Rants from a Foreign Land. He reviews books on his YouTube channel Book Rants.