The Joy of Writing Sex - Elizabeth Benedict.pdf

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CONTENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER I
What Will My Grandmother Think?
Talking to Writers About Sex
CHAPTER 2
A Sex Scene Is Not a Sex Manual
Ten Basic Principles
CHAPTER 3
"Surprise Me" and Other
Literary Come-Ons
Beyond the Basics
CHAPTER
4
The End of Bravado
Writing About Sex in the Age of AIDS
CHAPTER 5
Losing Your Cherry
First Times to Remember
CHAPTER 6
Life Sentences
Husbands and Wives
CHAPTER 7
Three Cheers for Adultery
CHAPTER 8
Sex, Please, but Hold the
History and the Guilt
Recreational Sex
CHAPTER 9
Sex Forbidden by Law,
History and Politics
The Illicit
CHAPTER 10
First Things Last
Solo Sex
Exercises
INTRODUCTION
I was given permission to write about sex in my fiction long before I
knew how badly I would need it. In my sophomore year at Barnard,
three graduates returned one afternoon to tell us about their careers
as writers. They spoke in a science lecture hall with the periodic table
of the elements h a n g i n g b e h i n d t h e m a n d me in the f r o n t row,
hanging on their every word; even then I knew I wanted to do what
they did. One was a perky blonde-haired poet with a Chinese name,
class of '63, whose first novel was about to be published. I don't
remember much of what she said that day in 1973, but of course I
remember her name. Erica Jong.
Several months later
Fear of Flying
erupted into all of our lives. On
every page, Jong's saucy heroine Isadora Wing celebrated orgasms,
infidelity, masturbation, and something truly revolutionary called
"the Zipless Fuck," which happened when you met a man on a train,
had sex with him
right there,
and never saw him again—or even wanted
to! T h a t w o m e n , nice girls with college degrees, t h o u g h t these
things, did these things, and
said
them in print—it is impossible to
convey today how mind-boggling a notion this was for those of us
raised, not so long ago, to believe we would be virgins when we got
married. Jong's broadcast was a little like learning Nancy Reagan had
consulted an astrologist about matters of state while she was First Lady.
You have blundered through life thinking the world operates
like this,
and someone comes along and tells you that you are not even close.
At nineteen, I didn't know enough about sex or writing to do much
with the freedoms that were now mine for the taking, but I knew this
was not business as usual. I knew to pay attention to the uproar and
upheaval that J o n g and the women's movement had ignited. I knew
there was something in it for me as a woman and as a writer. Women's
rights and women's sexual pleasure were now front-page news, the
nitty-gritty details debated passionately and publicly. T h e female
orgasm had become the symbol a n d substance of who controlled
language, women's bodies and, as it turned out, everything else. In
books, broadsides, and the pages of a new magazine called My., we
p o n d e r e d real orgasms versus fake, clitoral versus vaginal, Freud
versus Masters and Johnson, yours versus mine. Freud lost a lot of
standing in this debate for having claimed that a clitoral orgasm was
"immature" and a vaginal orgasm was "mature," but the reputation
of the Greek sage Tiresias was burnished. Having been both man and
woman, he was asked by the gods which gender enjoyed sex more.
He told them that women got nine times more pleasure than men
and was promptly blinded for his trouble. His candor was not much
more welcome in Puritan North America, until Isadora Wing admitted
to us how she could "come and come and come. . . ."
The sexual tenor of the time, place and family in which we grew
up is marked indelibly on our psyches; whether we embrace it or
struggle mightily to reject it, when we turn our energies to writing
fiction, it travels with us. Before you turn your attention to the body
of this book, take some time to reflect on the sexual attitudes of the
family and culture in which you were raised. Free associate with pen
in hand or sitting at the computer. You might unearth material or
gain insight into what makes you and your characters tick when the
narrative veers in the direction of the b o u d o i r . Novelist Stephen
Harrigan told me that "the abhorrence of sex" drilled into him by
his education in Catholic schools in the 1950s makes writing every
sex scene "a declaration of independence." Though he was raised
to believe he would burn in hell for having impure thoughts, it's his
j o b to have them, he says, "and it's worth risking going to hell to get
the scene right."
For those of us who came of age in the early 1970s, in more secular
circles, the h u m a n body, the sexual connection, was what H e n r y
James would have called our
donnee,
our subject, the idea given us at
the outset. Once I started to write seriously, in my early twenties, it
never occurred to me
not
to write about sex, any more than it would
have occurred to the Romantics not to write about meadows, streams
and nightingales. And it never occurred to me that I would not be
permitted to say whatever I wanted. But of course, the thaw had been
a long, long time coming. It was not until the 1960s that fiction writers
could write about sex without the threat of censorship, without the
reality of censorship, the prosecutions, trials, jail sentences, bannings,
confiscated books, and the incalculable tragedies of self-censorship

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