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around the family breakfast table, and he wanted to protect children from anything luridly sexual, as
well as to provide wives with plausible deniability. With a scene of encoded sex, Mother could pretend
not to notice that something untoward was going on while Father was enjoying his private smirk.
There s a scene in Our Mutual Friend (1865) in which the two villains, Mr. Venus and Silas Wegg, are
plotting evil. In fact, Silas Wegg is reading some financial news of a very tantalizing nature to the seated
Mr. Venus, whose pegleg begins to rise from the floor until, at the moment of greatest excitement, it is
pointing straight out in front of him. And then he falls over. Various family members could see this as
either slapstick buffoonery or as quite suggestive slapstick buffoonery. In any case, everybody gets a
giggle.
Even in our highly permissive age, though, sex often doesn t appear in its own guise. It is displaced into
other areas of experience in much the same way it is in our own lives and our own consciousnesses.
Ann Beattie s character Andrea doesn t think of her problems as being chiefly sexual or romantic. But
they are, as we and her creator can see. So it s unlikely that her sexual issues will present themselves in
terms of sexual organs and acts; much more likely they ll look like...a bowl and some keys.
17 - ...Except Sex
EVER TRY TO WRITE A SEX SCENE? No, seriously. Tell you what: go try. In the interest of good taste,
I ll request that you limit yourself to members of the same species and for clarity that you limit yourself
to a mere pair of participants, but aside from that, no restrictions. Let em do whatever you want. Then
when you come back, in a day, in a week, in a month, you ll have found out what most writers already
know: describing two human beings engaging in the most intimate of shared acts is very nearly the
least rewarding enterprise a writer can undertake.
Don t feel bad. You never had a chance. What are your options? The possible circumstances that lead
two people to sexual congress are virtually limitless, but the act itself? How many options do you
have? You can describe the business clinically as if it were a do-it-yourself manual insert tab A into
slot B but there are not that many tabs or slots, whether you use the Anglo-Saxon names or their
Latinate alternatives. Frankly there just isn t that much variety, with or without the Reddi-Wip, and
besides, it s been written in the mass of pornography ad nauseam. You can opt for the soft-core
approach, describing parts and movements in a haze of breathy metaphors and heroic adverbs: he
achingly stroked her quivering skiff as it rode the waves of her desire, etc. This second sort is hard to
write without seeming (a) quaint, (b) squeamish, (c) hugely embarrassed, (d) inept. To tell the truth,
most writing that deals directly with sex makes you wish for the good old days of the billowing curtain
and the gently lapping waves.
I honestly believe that if D. H. Lawrence could see the sorry state of sex scenes that developed within
a generation of his death, he would retract Lady Chatterley s Lover. The truth is that most of the time
when writers deal with sex, they avoid writing about the act itself. There are a lot of scenes that jump
from the first button being undone to a postcoital cigarette (metaphorically, that is) or that cut from
the unbuttoning to another scene entirely. The further truth is that even when they write about sex,
they re really writing about something else.
Drives you crazy, doesn t it? When they re writing about other things, they really mean sex, and when
they write about sex, they really mean something else. If they write about sex and mean strictly sex, we
have a word for that. Pornography.
In the Victorian age, sex was nearly impossible to find in polite literature, due to rigid censorship both
official and self-imposed. Not surprisingly, there was plenty of impolite literature. The era was
unsurpassed in its production of pornography. Maybe it was that mountain of dirty writing that used up
all the possibilities of writing about sex.
Even in the modernist period, though, there were limits. Hemingway was restricted in his use of curse
words. Joyce s Ulysses was censored, banned, and confiscated in both the United Kingdom and the
United States, in part for its sexual references (lots of sex thought, even if the only sex act shown in it
is onanistic). Constance Chatterley and her lover, Mellors, really broke ground in plainly shown and
plainspoken sex, although the novel s obscenity trial, effectively ending censorship in the United
States, did not take place until 1959.
Strangely, with less than a century of sexual writing as standard practice, there is almost nothing left
but cliché.
There s a very famous sex scene in John Fowles s French Lieutenant s Woman (1969) between the two
main characters, Charles and Sarah. In fact, it s the only sex scene in the novel, which is odd, given the
extent to which the novel is about love and sex. Our lovers enter her bedroom in a seedy hotel, he
carrying her from the sitting room because she has sprained her ankle. He lays her on the bed and
joins her amid frenetic shifting and removal of clothing, which, this book being set in Victorian times, is
considerable. Soon the deed is done and he lies spent beside her, at which point the narrator points
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