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One day a girl in love said to the man she loved: “I could write the kind of stories you like...”
“Do you really think so?” he answered.
The girl speaking was Anne Desclos, better known in French literary circles as the journalist and critic Dominique Aury, and the man was Jean Paulhan, director of the literary publication Nouvelle Revue Française. Paulhan didn't believe a woman could write erotica the way men wrote it.
So, Aury began to write the now-famous Story of O for her lover. From the end of spring, across summer and through fall, she wrote five to ten pages at a time, always sending them off to the same general delivery address, without a carbon copy or a final draft.
Jean Paulhan collected and published the novella, calling the story of humiliation and absolute submission the greatest love letter ever written. He would know—after all, the letter was for him.
But no one else believed the controversial story could have been written by a woman. The book was published in 1954. Aury came out in 1994. Despite this and the dissemination of erotic works by other women writers, the stigma that women are somehow less capable than men at writing about sex continues to exist.
In a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine, Jane Vandenburgh, author of the new memoir A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century echoed this idea.
“Most women don’t write about sex at all, and if they do, they don’t do it very well,” she told The New York Times's Dwight Garner. “Or women write all purplish or silly and blushing or get gothic or medieval or do it with space aliens or become all mannered, elaborate and Victorian, and all of this is just about equally irksome to me, and some of it makes me almost physically ill.”
Has she never read Fleshbot's sex blog roundup, Best Sex Bloggers or Sugasm?
Maybe Vandenburgh has no internet access. But it's no excuse. I have a copy of The Best of Best American Erotica 2008, the last of the Best American Erotica series edited by Susie Bright. Of the 23 stories featured in a collection that stretches beyond its fifteen year-history, 15 are written by women. No aliens or Victorians in sight.
I turn to last year's Bad Sex Awards by the Literary Review, for the ten worst attempts at sex in literature. Of the 10, four are women.
“What makes good erotica?” I asked my friend Atherton Bartelby during one of our epic late-night phone conversations over cigarettes and coffee.
“Well, obviously being a good writer, and using language well,” he said. “Also being able to fully explore all elements of fantasy. Also I think that old fiction workshop saying of 'write what you know' is doubly true for erotica. Write what you know, or, write what you fantasize about, and I think if you do, it becomes a much better piece, more involved, more engaging.”
Fantasy lubricates inspiration. While the actual sex appeal of the piece is largely subjective, proper execution of the elements of writing enable the reader to suspend reality.
The bad sex scenes named by the Literary Review share some traits: cliche similes and metaphors (“like a moth to the flame,” “like a cat lapping up a dish of cream,” “as if struck by a sacred bolt of lightning,” “I'd been parched... and he was the long, cool, sensual drink I'd craved,” “like a wave breaking over him in the sea shallows,”), tired descriptions (“agonizing pleasure,” “his spurting glans,” “burned her to the core,” “sighing in bliss,” “ravenous kiss,” “plunged inside me,” “she shuddered to her climax,”), ridiculous elaborations (“the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo overtakes me,” “[the vagina]'s the Medusa's head, that turns them to stone,” “it was a return to the garden of Eden; it was the moment when Eve was reabsorbed into Adam's body and the two halves became Creation,” “he made her forget she was a Communist,” “so big I mistook it for some sort of monument in the centre of a town. I almost started directing traffic around it,” “as we contorted like origami creations,” “more purring noises, now with little squeals punctuating them,” “into the shuddering void beyond,” “it was as if self-awareness had been surgically removed,” “[she was] like a large terra-cotta urn and... [he] a specialist restorer focused on her intricate finish,”), and annoying words for genitalia (“appendage,” “member,” “membrane,” “hard bead,” “vulva,” “weeping orifice”).
Still, the perpetrators of these sins against erotica are both
