Women think that the Kama Sutra is an Indian takeaway. We are just not fluent in body language. Nor do we have the gift of the grab.
While men are ready, villain and able, a woman’s biggest fantasy in the bedroom involves discovering that her husband has picked his underpants up off the floor. On official Name/ Address/ Age forms, after it says Sex most women should write: Not if I can possibly help it.”
I know this because the new owner of the relaunched Erotic Review, Kate Copstick, is loath to allow too many female authors to slip between her covers.
In the press last weekend and on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme with me this week she stated that women seldom write well about sex because females “have an agenda, they complicate sex, they make layers, it’s conditional. And they lie as well.”
Apparently, it would be like reading a meat-lover’s guide written by a vegetarian.
So, what exactly is erotic fiction? I suppose the most reliable definition is a magazine or book that you can read only with one hand.
It is difficult to write about carnal matters without being unintentionally funny or just plain nauseating. So many contemporary sex scenes — the Bad Sex Award-winning Charlotte Grey by Sebastian Faulks, for example, or the later work of John Updike — read like a hard day’s work at the orifice. They’re as arousing as Ian Paisley in a posing pouch.
The purple prose we girls grew up on in historical romances was no better. In fact it was hilariously obfuscatory — “He was diamond hard and proud.” “His thighs stiffened as his scabbard pierced her secret citadel.”
We passed around our mothers’ dog-eared paperbacks featuring smouldering Heathcliff-esque heroes ravaging proud, raven-haired beauties, with all the rude bits marked up in red pen.
But modern vernacular is repulsively brutal. The Australian erotic lexicon is a meaty smorgasbord of playing “hide the sausage”, with the “luncheon truncheon”, “meat injecting”, “chucking the spam javelin”, “spearing the bearded clam”, or “getting stabbed with the beef bayonet” — not exactly a Shakespearean love sonnet.
But English Lotharios fare little better in the lascivious linguistic stakes. In British literature there’s an infantile retreat to the nursery with your “rumpy pumpy”, “hanky panky”, “slap and tickle”, “leg-over”, “nookie”, “bonking”, “giving the dog a bone” and endless triple entendres about crumpet, muffin, tiffin, tart and buttered buns for tea. Not to forget the playground singsong of rhyming slang — “I suppose a Friar Tuck would be out of the question?”
American Casanovas are leg-crossingly crass. The erotic vocabulary of male authors and rap artists is all to do with fast food, rock music and manual labour. “Tuning in her fuzz box”, “plugging your live seed feed into the love socket”, “eating fur burger” . . . tooling, screwing and, post-Iraq, scoring a direct hit with his “sexocet missile”.
One thing’s for sure. Read most contemporary literary sex scenes and you’ll soon be cured of all sexual inhibitions — mainly because you’ll be celibate for the rest of your life.
But when it comes to penning full-frontal carnal encounters, the one voice missing is female. (Apart from brave pioneers such as Anaïs Nin, Kathy Acker, Erica Jong, Charlotte Roche and a coven of forthright French writers including Pauline Réage and Catherine Millet, that is, who make it very clear on which side their beds are buttered.)
This is because for the most part women writing frankly about sex is still taboo. Forty years after the publication of The Female Eunuch and 100 since Emmeline Pankhurst tied herself to the railings, the double standards towards sexuality still exist. The hypocrisy is innate in our language.
A man who is sexually active is a “Love God”, a “Lothario”, a “Romeo”, a “stud muffin”. A woman who has the same sexual appetites as a man is still described as a “slut”, a “slapper”, a “tart”, a “moll” or a “slag” with “margarine legs” — ie, easily spreadable.
In truth, men still expect women to be virginal. The new man in a woman’s life will invariably ask: “Darling, darling, am I the first man to make love to you?” To which the woman will reply: “Of course. . . I don’t know why you men keep asking the same silly question.”
Copstick complains that women complicate sex. But when scribes from Philip Roth to the scriptwriters of American Pie have entrenched the idea that men will have sex with anything with a hole and a heartbeat, and then count the legs afterwards (not just tethered, reasonably domesticated livestock are in demand, but even room temperature pies) — it doesn’t take much to make women look over-emotional.
Men and women approach sex differently. What men call a quickie, most women would dismiss as premature ejaculation. (Some men are so premature their wives are not even in the room. Then you have to worry who he was fantasising about. Ugh. How could the man you love let Sarah Palin have sex in your bedroom?)
We also have very different understandings of the word “commitment”. For the female of the species it means love, marriage and happy-ever-afters. But by Copstick’s logic, for the male of the species “commitment” means a meaningful one-night stand — preferably with seven bisexual hookers.
But as wordplay is foreplay for women (how else is Woody Allen still getting laid?) it seems logical that women could write well about sex. If the Erotic Review really wanted to make its relaunch innovative and provocative, it would be commissioning the cliterati.
Earlier this year Maggie Alderson, Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jessica Adams and I launched In Bed With, a collection of raunchy stories written by top British female authors, including Fay Weldon, Esther Freud, Ali Smith and Joanne Harris.
The idea was that the authors would write under their porn names (first pet, first street.) The fun of the nom de porn is in guessing the real identity of Pom Pom Paradise, Minxy Malone and Cressida Bedwell.
So much of contemporary fiction, from Harold Robbins to Bret Easton Ellis on, depicts women as submissive victims.The world of eroticism on screen and in magazines is dominated by male images and fantasies in which the women who aren’t mutilated or killed manage to achieve award-winning orgasms with no foreplay, crying out with such intense ecstasy that the audience is confused whether it’s an orgasm or demonic possession.
Partnering such a woman, I wouldn’t know whether to offer a post-coital cigarette or an exorcist. If the women draped over the pages of sex scenes written by men (Ian Fleming being a typical example) were real, they’d have constant migraines from inflating plastic sexual pleasure enhancers and persistent pneumonia from dressing provocatively. (Female protagonists are constantly having to slip into something less comfortable.)
Horny housewives would have third-degree carpet burns and fishnet friction on bits of their anatomy that couldn’t be explained away as a housework-related incident (Warning: male erotic fantasies are for professionals only. Do not try these in your own home.) We wanted a collection of stories that showed women in control, having fun and seeking pleasure.
Writing about our sexual fantasies was an attempt to create porn that was celebrating, rather than exploiting, women. Our only criterion as editors was that the stories should do more for female stimulation than Doctor Ruth.
And the diverse collection of fiction provocateur that soon poured in, ranging from fairy-tale frottage to sci-fi seducers and X-rated ghost stories, did have the editors lying down a lot. We hoped it would spawn a whole new genre of cliterature.
But even with the fig leaf of a pseudonym, many of Britain’s most famous literary lionesses refused to roar. When approached, their responses proved remarkably meek: “Oh no! I wouldn’t want my mother to read it.” “What would my husband say?” “My children would be disgusted.”
In Bed With was inspired by a newspaper report on marriage in which 42 per cent of women surveyed said that they often thought about running away with someone else. Half wished they’d never married. And one in three never reached orgasm during sex.
A similar survey also revealed that British men, on average, achieve sexual satisfaction in less than three minutes. As women need at least five minutes of foreplay, you don’t have to be Einstein to see what’s wrong with that equation. It seems to me that the trouble is not women faking orgasms but men faking foreplay.
It’s perplexing that the bloke who can calculate the total surface area of every room in the house, determine the exact mileto-the-gallon ratio of a five-hour trip to the South of France, where he effortlessly locates the remote fishing village that’s not even on a map — can’t find a clitoris. (A woman’s favourite destination, by the way, is not a French fishing village, but a cosy little spot that goes by the name of “G”. Location! Location! Location! This is all there is to say about the G spot really.)
According to the many women I’ve interviewed for my novels over the years, if a man does attempt a little half-hearted foreplay, he invariably prods away at the clitoris as though it’s an elevator button and he’s running late for a meeting. It is then that a woman might cut to the carnal chase and say, exasperatedly, “Oh, just take the stairs”.
The same research revealed that as many as 40 per cent of women in the UK have a libido that is limbo low, causing all kinds of resentments within a relationship. Husbands seem bemused about female sexual dysfunction. How can a woman lose her orgasm? What is it? A sock? Is it in some sexual laundry basket waiting to be paired so it can become a multiple orgasm?
But for nearly half of the British female population the orgasm appears to be more elusive than the Bermuda Triangle. Yet if women wrote more candidly about their needs and desires, male partners might realise that “mutual orgasm” is not an insurance company. They may even feel inspired to take an anatomical orienteering course, armed with compass and a list of edible berries.
With the double standards prevalent in our society it’s not going to be easy. Writing frankly about sex for In Bed With, I suffered from a performance anxiety I hadn’t felt since those hedonistic hours of enforced folk dancing in primary school.
I have always avoided embarrassing myself in my sex scenes by making them funny — hey, it worked for Chaucer, Henry Fielding, Ovid, Catullus, Boccaccio and comedic co. But part of the joy of writing anonymously is flirting with another style and experimenting stylistically.
The annoying aspect about anonymity is when your story is not only critically acclaimed, but is also attributed to another author, as happened to me this time. The hope is that for the next edition we’ll pen our pieces under our own names. It’s time that women got out from under.
One thing is for certain: by claiming that female writers are erotically inept, Copstick is suffering from delusions of glandeur.
How to write sex: a woman’s tips
1 Be specific . . .
A great deal of poor sex writing suffers from a lack of detail. The characters seem to go from exchanging glances to thrusting action almost instantaneously. Also, it’s not enough to know that the man put his mouth on the woman; readers will be wondering where!
2 . . . but not too specific
On the other hand, nothing depletes like excess. I despise erotica, both visual and written, that suffers from “soft furnishings syndrome”. This is a tendency to dwell on what ruffly garment was worn, the precise glossy shade of a woman’s hair, and so on. If you describe anything that is not in fact chocolate as being “like chocolate” you have soft furnishings syndrome.
3 Choreograph the action
Arms are flying, tongues are flicking, and where on earth did that extra arm come from? The effectiveness of sex writing depends, as with real sex, on getting from point A to point Z via all the letters in between. Too many stories start on the sofa, then segue straight into a threesome on the beach.
4 Have consistent characters
If there is dialogue — and it should be minimal — it needs to fit with the character who says it. If your sexy young builder suddenly starts going on about his missus in biological detail, you have serious character inconsistency.
5 Know your audience, but challenge them too
If I wanted to read about the kind of sex I have every day, I would . . . well, I wouldn’t. Why fantasise about what you already experience? I go to the written word for places and faces that I don’t get at home. Hot people in hot climates. Sex acts I can hardly imagine. Porn is about the unachievable . . . and, therefore, the inherently desirable.
How to write sex: a man’s tips
Do men write better sex than women? Yes, but this is not the fault of a difference in our DNA.
It’s because male writers have a much longer tradition of breaking taboos about sex (straight and gay). It’s interesting to compare the way that Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin write about sex with each other.
Miller is all vigour, urgency and detail. Nin’s body becomes relatively anonymous for him. Nin has to make the act seem poetic and address the virility of Miller’s “authorship”. “His book swells inside of me,” she writes. His penis is, almost literally, the canon of Western male fiction.
Sex-writing is his terrain and his writing enters her body. She claimed that he taught her to be a lover and how to write. She is “a spy in the house of love”, a voyeur and thief of a previously male-owned language.
Women have a lot of catching up to do on the sex-writing front, and most of the innovative work is coming from lesbian or bisexual writers. Chick-lit doesn’t count. Kathy Acker does.
Here’s my advice for writing about sex:
1 Avoid nature metaphors and similes
D. H. Lawrence is to blame for this awful florid poeticising in which female orgasms are likened to thunderstorms and burbling brooks.
2 Ignore the bourgeois distinction between erotica and porn
This is based on an opposition between ethically good sex with “wholesome, well-rounded characters” (erotica) and nasty cheap sex with anonymous bodies (porn). Porn is omnipresent now and calling a certain kind of porn “erotica” is a middle-class attempt to set itself against the tasteless culture of the masses.
3 Beware of accelerating sentences
There is a tendency to use progressively shorter sentences as the action accelerates — ending ultimately in non-words such as “Gnnnuh!” or “Ahhhh . . . hhh!!! Such formal innovations are now a cliché.
4 Libido needs an obstacle, as Freud said
Because Western consumer culture has become so permissive, you have to set your sex scene farther afield — gay erotica between a Palestinian and a Jew perhaps?
5 Write from experience, not fantasy
Fantastical sex scenes are hilarious, shallow and awful. Follow the masters: Miller, Jean Genet and Nin, who wrote from the depths of lives devoted to sensual pleasure. If you don’t have the experiences to enrich your writing, go out and get them or stop trying to write sex scenes.
all at TimesOnline
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