Good reasons to not write about sex

Perhaps the best reason not to write about sex is that it is really hard to do so without sounding either vulgar or idiotic. At one extreme we have quivering distaffs, thrusting manhoods, and bursting chausses, and at the other end, nothing I’m going to repeat.

Certainly it is common for people to have difficulty talking about it, but one of my clear memories of high school is in health class one guy just looking at me because he could not believe what I had just said. It was not that I had said anything really dirty, but that I could talk about it without being embarrassed. I think I owe a lot of this to my mother.

Now, in all fairness, her early attempts to educate me were somewhat plagued by the difficulty of speaking clearly about sex. When I asked how babies were made, she told me that the man plants a seed in the woman, which is true, but I was fairly literal minded and thought that you had to buy the seeds. My sisters later found this hilarious, and wanted to know if I thought they were tomato or corn seeds. No, I knew they were baby seeds. I even understood where they were planted, but I was really mistaken on the rest.

For technical details, those came from the book “Where Did I Come From”, borrowed from the same neighbor who had all the comic books. Later augmented by health class, all of my mechanical understanding came from there.

Where my mother did really well was in not being embarrassed about sex, or finding it dirty, or trying to change the subject. Yes, I believed it was something for married couples, and still do, but there was never any stigma attached to it. Even if you don’t find sex dirty and bad, acting really embarrassed about it can convey that impression, so being able to be comfortable with the topic is helpful, even if talking about it all the time would be going off the rails in a different direction.

Now, I know that one reason sex is often written about clumsily is that it is done by bad writers, but I also know that there are better writers who have taken it on, and that’s the other disturbing thing that I need to hit on, and it is the tendency to make things nasty. I am going to mention two books by name, and I recommend neither. (And I have only read parts of one, and about the other.)

One example would be The Story of O, by Anne Desclos, where a woman consents to bondage to please her lover, and ends up being passed around, then loving his brother, and being degraded more and more by the brother until finally she asks for permission to die and receives it.

The other is Lost Girls, a pornographic graphic novel by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. In this, Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice from Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz meet up, and their back stories include incest, attempted rape, runaways prostituting themselves and being brutally beaten, and more child abuse.

Oddly, this material seems to work for some relationships. Desclos wrote her novel to impress her lover (successfully), and Moore and Gebbie became engaged during their collaboration. Maybe it doesn’t work to write about a happy husband and wife enjoying a good sexual relationship, because that would feel too much like voyeurism, and I can see how it would, but the directions they do go should not be turn-ons either.

I have tried not to focus too much on the morality of erotic content, because not everyone weighs that equally, and I think there are valid reasons beyond morality for why this sort of content can be harmful.

One key part of my religious beliefs is that none of the commandments are random, but that they are based on what will work towards our happiness and betterment. It may not be possible to write erotically and not tend towards degradation. After all, it is only words, not sex, so it will not have that satisfaction, and perhaps like a drug where you are building tolerance, you keep needing to take it to another level to get the same rush. That would not be a good direction to go. Honestly, I don’t know. We are right around the limits of my knowledge, and I think I already know too much.

One common complaint about the rating system is that sex and nudity is treated as more offensive than violence, when they are beautiful things and violence is bad. That totally makes sense, only I know that for me, sexual images stay with me more than violence. That makes sense too. I have more interesting in physical intimacy than in violence, and that’s probably healthy—there are just too many ways that it can turn unhealthy.

So that’s why I don’t generally watch R-rated movies, or premium cable shows, and why I basically try and be careful what I take into my mind. I want to be healthy emotionally and mentally. I don’t want to get twisted ideas about human relationships (at least not any more than I already do). I want it to be easy to feel inspiration and to live a good life. If that sounds odd to you, at least consider it, because I have found it very valuable.