58 TRUE STORIES, WELL TOLD.
his penis inside her, into her vagina.”
The woman is the recipient of male
desire: she is the object to his subject,
the vessel he must fill with his own
need. How does the woman feel? We
cannot know because we only get the
man’s perspective.
Thankfully, real-life sex is a lot
more interesting than my childhood
book made it out to be. And if only I
had had a mother like Steph Auteri’snarrator in the essay “When They
Start Asking Questions,” I would
have learned much sooner that there’s
so much more to that boring, sexist,
and heterosexist story. Our essays
about sex should reflect just how
interesting sex can be. People act as
sexual surrogates. Women have sex
with women, and men have sex with
men. And very often, people have sex
with themselves, or with the newest
vibrating gizmo. Or, maybe, the most
interesting sex happens not between
humans at all, but between sea urchins
or houseflies.- SOMETIMES LESS IS MORE
Write the sex scene in all its fleshy
detail, but in revision, ask yourself
this: does it serve the piece? Maybe,
as in so many of the essays here, sex is
the story. But it’s always a good idea
to ask whether the sex scenes move
the story forward in some important
way. Often, what is left out can be
sexier and more interesting than what
remains. Bette Davis says, “I often
think that a slightly exposed shoulder
emerging from a long satin nightgown
packs more sex than two naked bodies
in bed.” If you trim your explicit sex
scene down to the exposed shoulder,
the ghost of those naked people will
remain on the page. In “Skin Hun-
ger,” Anne Royan writes, “his finger
touches my shoulder to slide the strap
of my dress aside.” The actual sex hap-
pens between paragraphs, the white
space becoming the metaphor for what
has happened between the sheets.A digression—an internal mono-
logue, flashback, flashforward, or
metaphor—can also imply a sex scene.
Anton Chekhov does this in the short
story “The Lady with the Dog.” An
omniscient narrator takes us into the
mind of Gurov, a philanderer, as he
compares Anna to the other women
he has seduced. It becomes obvious a
few sentences later, through Anna’s
action and dialogue, that while we
were in his mind, the couple had been
at it. She cries and tells him he won’t
respect her now. Then Gurov takes
that famous bite of watermelon, a
metaphor for what has just happened.
A literary allusion can also take
the place of graphic sex, as it does in
Amy Botula’s “Past Compensation.”
She alludes to James Joyce’s character
Molly Bloom, who roughly cor-
responds to Homer’s Penelope. Both
Penelope and Molly Bloom wait for
their men, though, of course, Penelope
remains faithful while Molly does not.
Yet Joyce’s Ulysses ends with Molly
Bloom’s stream-of-conscious solilo-
quy; the woman gets the final say. The
very last word is Ye s with a capital Y,which is important to the novel, as it
is to Botula. (Fittingly, it’s also a motif
in Anne Royan’s cautionary tale about
infidelity, “Skin Hunger.”)- IN PLACE OF SEX
Novelist Elizabeth Bowen writes,
“Nothing can happen nowhere. The
locale of the happening always colors
the happening, and often, to a degree,
shapes it.” The physical world is as
important as the physical act. Use
the senses of the world to convey the
physicality of sex in an original way.
Let setting do the work of implica-
tion: the hotel room that rents by
the hour, a flower-strewn meadow, a
gay-bar bathroom stall, the marriage
bed. In Anne Visser Ney’s “Summers
of Urchins and Love,” the physical
world—the couch in the family home
and the old house near Delaware
Bay—tells us everything we need to
know about the nature of the sexual
acts.
A friend once told me she had sex
behind the curtain in the balcony
at the symphony, just as the concert
ended and people were leaving.
When I asked her if the music turned
her on, she laughed and said, “Oh
no, that wasn’t it. We were always
trying to one-up each other in terms
of who could come up with the
most unusual place to have sex. We
were very competitive.” In this case,
the symphony balcony is the most
important part of the scene, the way
it reveals the personalities of the
adventurous characters and the power
struggle between them. The place can
become a metaphor for the act itself:
sonata, adagio, minuet, rondo. The end of
a symphony is sometimes described as
rollicking, which also seems apropos.
And with that, I wish you a rollicking
time writing great sex, figuring out
not only where you came from, but
where you are going.
Our essays about sex should reflect
just how interesting sex can be.