Writing Graphic Sex Scenes

Henry and June’s First Date on the writing agenda today. It begins in a Chinese restaurant. It ends in the back seat of a cab. They have sex. Then June tells him they’re being followed. First emergence of her schizoaffective disorder.

Tricky transition.

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Miller writes the sex scene thusly:

We got into a cab and, as it wheeled around, Mara impulsively climbed over me and straddled me. We went into a blind fuck, with the cab lurching and careening, our teeth knocking, tongue bitten, and the juice pouring from her like hot soup. As we passed an open plaza on the other side of the river, just at daybreak, I caught the astonished glance of a cop as we sped by. «It's dawn, Mara,» I said, trying gently to disengage myself. «Wait, wait», she begged, panting and clutching at me furiously, and with that she went into a prolonged orgasm in which I thought she would rub my cock off. Finally she slid off and slumped back into her corner, her dress still up over her knees. I leaned over to embrace her again and as I did so I ran my hand up her wet cunt. She clung to me like a leech, wiggling her slippery ass around in a frenzy of abandon. I felt the hot juice trickling through my fingers. I had all four fingers up her crotch, stirring up the liquid moss which was tingling with electrical spasms. She had two or three orgasms and then sank back exhausted, smiling up at me weakly like a trapped doe.

This scene is a complete turnoff for me.

I get that the brain inside the body with the phallus is dictating (or should that be dick-tating, heh, heh, heh) the description, so naturally his cock is gonna be front and center. But our teeth knocking, tongue bitten…clung to me like a leech… liquid moss… trapped doe… I mean, really, Henry? C’mon!

But it’s the existing record of the encounter, and at this point, the narrative has to follow the existing records.

It’s not good writing about sex. Maybe that’s the point? When he wrote this, Miller was at a point in his life where he was dissociating himself from his obsession with June, and I suppose the bizarre imagery is part of that dissociation process.

But all of Miller's erotic writing has that weird imagery. How did Miller ever get a reputation as a sexy writer?

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The most erotic reading experience I ever had was at age 12 when I plucked an expurgated version of Lady Chatterly’s Lover off my mother’s bookshelf. The unexpurgated version was not yet widely available in the States.

To my mind, the single most erotic passage in that book is this one:

The keeper, squatting beside her, was also watching with an amused face the bold little bird in her hands. Suddenly he saw a tear fall on to her wrist.

And he stood up, and stood away, moving to the other coop. For suddenly he was aware of the old flame shooting and leaping up in his loins, that he had hoped was quiescent for ever. He fought against it, turning his back to her. But it leapt, and leapt downwards, circling in his knees.

He turned again to look at her. She was kneeling and holding her two hands slowly forward, blindly, so that the chicken should run in to the mother-hen again. And there was something so mute and forlorn in her, compassion flamed in his bowels for her.

Without knowing, he came quickly towards her and crouched beside her again, taking the chick from her hands, because she was afraid of the hen, and putting it back in the coop. At the back of his loins the fire suddenly darted stronger.

He glanced apprehensively at her. Her face was averted, and she was crying blindly, in all the anguish of her generation's forlornness. His heart melted suddenly, like a drop of fire, and he put out his hand and laid his fingers on her knee.

'You shouldn't cry,' he said softly.

But then she put her hands over her face and felt that really her heart was broken and nothing mattered any more.

He laid his hand on her shoulder, and softly, gently, it began to travel down the curve of her back, blindly, with a blind stroking motion, to the curve of her crouching loins. And there his hand softly, softly, stroked the curve of her flank, in the blind instinctive caress.

She had found her scrap of handkerchief and was blindly trying to dry her face.

'Shall you come to the hut?' he said, in a quiet, neutral voice.

And closing his hand softly on her upper arm, he drew her up and led her slowly to the hut, not letting go of her till she was inside. Then he cleared aside the chair and table, and took a brown, soldier's blanket from the tool chest, spreading it slowly. She glanced at his face, as she stood motionless.

His face was pale and without expression, like that of a man submitting to fate.

Here come the ellipses!

When I subsequently read the book sans ellipses, I realized it was actually sexier without the descriptive coital prose. John Thomas and Lady Jane are a comedy team, right? The adult industry's version of Mike Nicholls and Elaine May.

Not sure, exactly, why I find this particular passage so erotic.

Possibly has to do with the extreme unwillingness of both partners as they embark upon the sexual relationship. They can’t help themselves. They’re up against an archetypal power that’s bigger than they are. It’s a complete loss of agency.

Not sure whether this is a female thing or a particular kink in my own sexual psychology.

A book I found amazingly hot as an adult was Susanna Moore’s In the Cut. A creative writing teacher witnesses a murder in a seedy NYC bar. Begins an affair with the investigating police detective who’s brilliant, mad as a hatter, and waaaaaaaay kinky. Her sexual obsession is fixated on one hand gesture that he has, a way of cocking his finger. Presumably this is the same gesture he uses when he goes spelunking for her g-spot.

Now, the g-spot is the Pegasus of female sexuality, a great mythical beast. Does it exist? Does it not exist? If it exists, does stimulating it produce orgasm or something closer to grande mal seizure?

The heroine in In the Cut goes around quoting from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse a lot, which I confess, I found nearly as sexy as the come hither crook of the detective's finger. (That one's definitely a personal kink!) Moore’s tricks with syntax and language in this book are really interesting because they don't paint a portrait so much as cast a shadow on a wall of a protagonist who's desperately searching for something that she doesn't consciously understand is missing.

I know! Maybe I can put off writing my scene for two more weeks by embarking upon an utterly fruitless search for a copy of In the Cut in the Hudson Valley library system since my own copy – helas! – got lost in the diaspora, and clearly I need to reread it.

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So. Writing sex scenes convincingly from the female point of view. Difficult.

But even more difficult: Writing schizoaffective meltdowns!

So far, my June is a character who’s in control, who prides herself on her control, in fact, so writing this state change convincingly will require some finesse. There’s gotta be some kind of trigger. No idea what that trigger might be.

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In other news, it was back-to-back action on the tax preparer front yesterday, and I decided to be a bitch about the broken printer since being nice about it didn’t seem to be motivating anyone to fix the damn thing. Being a bitch about it certainly did. Now the printer works!

And I’m not sure what to do about the Current Crush situation. I’m certainly fixated on his transversus abdominis. He is a pretty man. But a terrible writer, and I’m a complete snob about writing. Plus, honestly, crushes seem like a lot of work. Really, I want to marry someone and embark upon a six-month exploration of the old Silk Road on our honeymoon. And that's not gonna happen with him.