Stop Writing Sex Scenes

Graphic Writing Is Never Good Writing

Let’s talk about sex.

There was an article floating around Substack titled “What Makes Good Sex Writing?”

I confess that I did not read it fully because I could not keep reading after I hit the following quote:

“God,” he groans, "you're such a little slut sometimes."

The author of the original piece gives this excerpt as an example of “good” sex writing. Now, unless your conception of “good” writing is an adequate command of punctuation, I see no “good” writing here at all. What I see instead is an author’s strange sex fantasy translated into the dialogue of her characters. Frankly, I do not care about what two people are up to in the bedroom and certainly do not want to read about your strange sexual fetishes in a work of literature.

Listen, I get it. The excerpt, which comes from Casey McQuiston’s romance novel The Pairing, is not supposed to be representative of serious literature. But such explicit scenes are bound not only to the romance genre but also to contemporary literary fiction—the more “serious” literary genre where an author is expected to display an impeccable command of language (though linguistic prowess itself is a true rarity these days). And in the vast majority of cases—especially in the case of literary fiction—sex scenes are completely gratuitous and have nothing to do with the plot of the novel whatsoever. I am convinced, therefore, that the primary reason that authors write sex scenes is that they are themselves horny—no sane reader, after all, wants to read graphic sex scenes in a serious novel unless they are coming to that novel for their own sexual gratification. In fact, of 200 readers I surveyed on my Instagram page, 60% agreed that graphic sex scenes in literature are gratuitous.

This means that the majority of readers do not like graphic sex.

Part of the reason I personally do not read contemporary “literature” is because I do not want to sit through these cringey sex scenes. We do not include prolonged pornographic scenes in films, after all, and while we might see a brief shot of two characters having sex on screen, we certainly never see the juicy details—unless the streaming platform is Pornhub. I cannot, in fact, name a single serious piece of cinema where we are subject to a full-on penis ejaculating, say, into a woman’s mouth—with, perhaps, the exception of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, which I would personally hesitate to classify as a serious film—because there is a line between art and pornography, and in the film world, at least, we respect that line.

Why, then, do we subject serious literature to pornographic scenes? Why, then, are there entire chapters of serious literary novels that contain nothing but sex? After all, the majority of readers—with the exception of those who purchase straight erotica—do not want to read about graphic sex!

The fact is that there is no such thing as good sex writing because sex writing is nothing other than pornography—and the quicker we stop diluting serious literature with pornography, the quicker the publishing industry will stop signing “writers” whose only talent is talking dirty to their one-night-stands.

So let me give every writer a tip that once revolutionized my creative writing.

Stop writing sex scenes.

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At the age of 18, I was obsessed with writing about sex. You can excuse my adolescent antics and my discovery of that new world, but around that time, many of my novels featured at least some graphic sexual details. About halfway through college, I showed my newest project to some friends—a work that would later become my first completed novel, Man a Museum—and was told by several people to try cutting out the sex scenes because the story would be stronger without them.

I was puzzled. Man a Museum was a (somewhat controversial) novel about a sexual assault case. It was fundamentally about sex—and different people’s interpretations of a given sexual event. How could I write a sex novel without writing a single sex scene?

I hit up the rest of my friends that week and asked them whether they thought sex scenes in novels were gratuitous. Though I got a few dissenting responses, the consensus among my friends was clear: no one actually wanted to read sex scenes in novels.

I went back to my draft of Man a Museum and toyed around with deleting the sex scenes, implying what had happened rather than describing the event outright. I couched my language in metaphors and borrowed concepts from Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory—the idea that a story’s deeper meaning often lies “between the lines,” so to speak—to let my sex scenes speak for themselves.

The novel became so much stronger.

Suddenly, I didn’t have a “shock-factor” scene drawing the action away from the rest of the novel. I had a delicate description of an event that happened between two people behind closed doors—and the rest was left up to the imagination. Suddenly, my novel was more readable—and did not cause anyone to cringe or make a face.

Around that time, I thought back to every single novel I had ever read—every single serious novel, that is—and realized that none of those novels contained sex scenes. Sure, this may be because many societies banned such scenes from publication, but literature has done perfectly well without sex scenes for centuries. For God’s sake, even Venus in Furs—the novel that birthed the concept of masochism in literature and in the modern psyche—contains no explicit language.

I realized, then, that there is no such thing as “good sex writing” because good writing, by nature, is not sex writing even if it is about sex.

The best way to write about sex is not to write about it. If the sex is relevant to the plot or to a given relationship, implying that it happened will often get the point across far more potently than describing a scene in which two characters call each other “sluts.” Good writing, after all, is writing that understands restraint. It is the very sort of writing that T.S. Eliot describes in Tradition and the Individual Talent—not a “turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.” Good writing, Eliot tells us, certainly makes reference to the author’s original emotions but ensures that these emotions do not appear in their unadulterated form; a writer’s emotions must be transmuted into a purer, higher sort of poetic language because only such language will touch all members of the human race. Recreating a scene in the bedroom, therefore, will never aspire to the sort of “perfect” writing that Eliot describes—prose that is implicit rather than indulgent—because such scenes do not aspire to the universality of human nature.

All human beings like sex—but everyone likes it differently. When we encounter a sex scene in literature, the vast majority of us will not be able to relate to it and will therefore feel as if we are reading about the fetishes of the author rather than those of their characters. And at that point, we might as well be reading fan-fiction.

We don’t need novels that moan and pant their way through five pages of sweaty expletives. Great novels respect not only their characters but also their readers—and enough to know when to shut the door.

So for God’s sake. Stop writing sex scenes.

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