By Emily McGowan
In the summer of 1958, Hurricane Lolita made landfall in the USA. It was not an actual hurricane, but a best-selling novel—an erotic morality tale by Russian-American Vladimir Nabokov—and as critics took notice and controversy began to build, Lolita and its author were tossed into the perfect storm. “He writes highbrow pornography,” wrote Orville Prescott for the New York Times. “Perhaps that is not his intention. Perhaps he thinks of his book as a satirical comedy and as an exploration of abnormal psychology. Nevertheless, Lolita is disgusting” (Prescott).
This hostility is hardly unique. From Lady Chatterley’s Lover to the google-at-your-own-risk Omegaverse, fiction and its readers have a notoriously awkward relationship with sex. Some books have transformed literature, while others have fallen flat on their face. Competent portrayals of sex are hard to find, and even when we do find them, we may not recognize them or understand the techniques that make them a cut above the rest. But never fear. When writing behind closed doors, our secret weapon is empathy.
Why Sex, Why Here, Why Now?
Sex presents a challenge to any writer, and as an ex-homeschooler, I may be the strangest candidate for the task. Raised under the eye of the Southern Baptist Church, I received a sex education that was hardly an education at all: “true love waits.” A purity ring on my finger. My job, according to the man in the pulpit, was to not distract boys (or their fathers) with a bare knee or pre-teen cleavage during prayer. Women allegedly did not enjoy sex, and, for many years, the steamiest thing I read was the Scripture’s King Solomon:
“Your hair is like a flock of goats, leaping down the slopes of Gilead.”
As it turned out, most of the world—including the world of fiction—was also misinformed about sex, and Facebook groups have popped up to document every cringeworthy chapter: “Drawing Men’s Anatomically Incorrect Fantasies,” one calls itself. “Cringerotica and Bad Poetry Posting” is another, but my favorite by far is “Did You Fail Sex Ed or Did Sex Ed Fail You?” This phenomenon is fueled by morbid curiosity: why do writers treat characters like literary Fleshlights? Why do they use so many metaphors to do it? Why—my god!—do they keep describing breasts with surprised facial expressions?
Let’s Get Technical
With a subject this taboo, it’s important to understand our keywords: sex, fiction, narrative, and (perhaps most importantly) empathy. If that seems unnecessary, consider that—unless you are a middle school boy trying to convince your buddies that “yeah, we totally banged!”—concrete definitions are helpful. In the real world, “sex” is surprisingly up for debate. “So, the question is,” muses a side character from Netflix’s Dope, “not, ‘am I technically a virgin,’ but… am I technically… gay?” Confused? Most people are, too. Let’s clear the air and define this term in the context of craft.
The act(s) must belong to a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end—rather than a stand-alone work for the primary purpose of arousal or fan service—because My Immortal, after all, isn’t known for its plot or sense of empathy. “Developing empathy,” writes MJ Pullen for Deep South Magazine, “means the author must take time to experience the world as each character does.”
In Lolita, Nabokov uses this concept to masterful effect, never losing track of even his most despicable character. Humbert (the pedophile-protagonist) spends pages mewling about how he wants to preserve Lo’s innocence, but when he consummates their sexual relationship, he turns to his audience with a wink. “I am going to tell you something very strange,” he says. “It was she that seduced me.” This moment—this glint of erotic self-delusion—is what keeps us hooked. It is the source of the story’s conflict and why Humbert is one of the big, bad greats. We can’t look away because we’ve lived inside his head.
Facing Facts
“Slotted in at the right time,” says crime-fiction author Susi Holliday, “it can help add to the tension of your story, especially if the characters are having sex with people they shouldn’t.” Readers love it when characters are DTF, and—ex-homeschooler though I may be—I’ll admit that sex might just save (or, at least, stimulate) the great American novel.
But that requires separating the good from the bad (or the ugly or the comical or the breasts with surprised facial expressions) and writing in a way that serves the story best. To impact the reader, storytellers need to walk in their characters’ shoes: exploring perspectives, the desires that pull them together, and the complex tensions that threaten to tear them apart. Good sex scenes are more than fan service or fun or a smart grab for cash. They happen on purpose, because the author found their home in the narrative.
The Dramatistic Pentad
In sex scenes—or any scene, for that matter—it is critical to write characters as if they were actual people. Who are they? Where did they come from? Why sex? In 1945, literary critic Kenneth Burke created a method to answer these questions and write a compelling narrative, a five-point guide dubbed the Dramatistic Pentad.
Rather than chart the rise and fall of a story, Burke lists five factors that create dramatic tension. The first of these is the act; “What happened?” “What changed?” or, for our purposes, “What kind of sex?” The agent is equally important. Like a good journalist, fiction writers need to characterize their subjects. It helps to know what enables them to act (agency), but also why (purpose) and under what circumstances (scene). Author and ex-dominatrix Melissa Febos explains why these elements matter, especially when sex is on the page:
“To teach sex scenes is to talk about plot, dialogue, pacing, description, and characterization: all those elements that comprise a captivating scene. A sex scene should advance a story and occur in a chain of causality that springs from your characters’ choices… Reading, we often say, is an exercise in empathy. It is entering into the consciousness of a character and feeling what they feel, assuming their concerns.”
Sex is one of the most personal decisions a character can make. Whether it’s a ninety-year-old escort brought out of retirement or a virgin on their wedding night, our characters’ choices are thumbprints of their identities and how their motivations play into the larger narrative.
The Billiard Rack
Well-written characters have limitations, motivations, and deep layers of conflict, but when a story ignores this complexity, it creates caricatures rather than people. Let’s watch this mistake in action. Once a year, UK-based Literary Review finds the worst lovemaking in fiction:
“Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or downright cringeworthy passages of sexual description in modern fiction, the prize is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature.”
The recent nominees speak for themselves. In Kismet, by Luke Tredget, the female is “an empty vessel,” and in Gerard Woodward’s The Paper Lovers, the protagonist imagines “her swan’s neck, her Alice in Wonderland neck coiling like a serpent.” Yet another character dubs his genitals “the billiard rack.” At this point, it’s hard to tell if we’re reading about people or a very-censored episode of Hasbro’s Transformers (‘robots in disguise!’).
This lack of warmth exemplifies the problem behind bad sex scenes: reverse-anthropomorphism. That is to say, the authors have swapped living, breathing characters for unfeeling objects. Nabokov, in the afterword of an early edition of Lolita, scornfully describes this practice this as “the copulation of clichés,”, and in Partisan Review, Susan Sontag added her own two cents, pointing out how bad sex scenes are often based in a canned portrayal of character and motivation. “Pornography,” she wrote, “is a theater of types, never of individuals.”
While fiction is never, in the journalistic sense, required to be factual, it always should ring true—“real to me”—a shard of self the reader can love and follow through a resonating transformation. Without it, sex reads hollow. Conflict becomes cliché, and the writer severs the emotional link of story-telling in favor of exaggeration and silencing the characters who make us care. In the end, this is worse than a failure to practice empathy. It is objectification.
Humbert the Wounded Spider
At this point, it might be tempting to throw in the towel, bleach your eyeballs, and swear off writing anything remotely naughty ever again. Your story becomes a laughingstock, and understandably, many writers feel that it isn’t worth the risk. I certainly used to think so, but after wading through a bog of “his manhood” and “my inner goddess,” I found a surprising wealth of serious fiction that not only included sex but fully utilized its narrative potential. Of these, Lolita was the best.
For some time, I felt that Nabokov’s coup de maître was, yes, “highbrow pornography” and struggled to separate my hatred of Humbert from the quality of the novel as a whole. I wasn’t alone. In 1958, literary critic Leslie Fiedler called Lolita “seduction of a middle-aged man by a twelve-year-old girl,” condemning Lo instead of her odious stepfather. In light of its cultural legacy, the novel felt problematic and one-sided, but as I read it again—more carefully this time—my perspective shifted.
Nabokov wrote to offend the moral imagination, but rather than listing Lo’s body parts, he plumbs the depths of Humbert’s pathological mind. “I am not concerned with so-called ‘sex’ at all,” writes the self-proclaimed Wounded Spider. “Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.” So he does. Chapter thirty lays out the act in two, Rorschach-worthy paragraphs, but not even a full sentence is devoted to the concrete physical details. Then, somehow, his last three words bring us crashing back down to earth:
“…a wincing child.”
Here lies the subtlety, magic, and controversy of Lolita. Not once during sex does Nabokov forget the monster he’s writing, or the child who is hurting along the way. It only takes a flicker, and we’re hooked. Fiction is fueled by the writer’s unique voice, and as narrative blossoms into conflict, it ebbs and flows with a quality that’s almost musical. Michener tip-toes through episodic symphonies. James M. Cain writes jazz. Whatever your style, there must be a rhythm—a constant swing between immersion and context—and when either has overstayed its welcome, it’s time to pull out.
The Stories We Want to Tell
Literary sex is terrifying, and for good reason. It demands vulnerability but enough confidence for the stories we want to tell, passion for our craft, and the courage to document the full spectrum of the human experience. We don’t need to prove that our characters are the sexiest or cleverest by use of erotic metaphors, merely that they are themselves, playing their part in a story our readers already love. The rest will take care of itself. And Lolita? In time, this hurricane proved her haters wrong. “Far from celebrating perversion,” wrote Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times, “this novel somehow communicates the utter hopelessness and bitterness of it… There is no lack of insight in Lolita but it is enhanced by its relationship to all else in the world and by implication, the cosmos.”
Causeway Lit 