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Wild sex in the working-writer class
Don’t worry, it happens to everyone
By Victor D. Infante
A few months back, an old friend asked me to contribute an essay to an anthology her agent was pitching to publishers. All in all, it wasn’t a bad bet – no guarantees the thing would ever be published, but she’d already sold a decently selling book and had a lot of prominent writers committed to the project. Plus, I always enjoy working with this woman, and will pretty much throw in on any project she’s got going, if circumstances permit. And if it all fell through, I could probably find something else to do with the essay.
But there was a problem, and one I had to ’fess up to immediately: The anthology dealt in large part with sex, and frankly, that’s a subject I’ve never written well about.
Now, love I can write about, and longing and loss, but sex itself? Not so much. My fiction is largely sexless. If I find myself in a position where writing about it is necessary, I tend to either write around the subject, or fade out at that point. My few actual forays into that territory have read like bad porn, and have, in large part, been abandoned.
I'm not entirely sure why this happens. Certainly, I have very few actual hang-ups about sex. I'm not easily embarrassed, and utterly unflappable when I'm in writing mode. And I enjoy sex. (Don't say that's a given. You spend enough time observing people, you realize a lot of people enjoy it a lot less than they claim.)
It's not a huge thing, but I dislike the knowledge that there's a large realm of human experience that I have difficulty writing about, especially when I can write about other things with some degree of facility. Politics and writing are practically specialties, I write about them so much. But sex? There’s something about it that wipes away nearly two decades of writing experience and reduces me to a fumbling amateur. The phrasing gets awkward, the movement jerky and unnatural, the diction trite and cliché: Every time is like the first, and not in a good way. I usually opt for a cigarette instead, and promise to try again in an hour or so.
The poet Amelie Frank once told me that whatever she’s afraid of is the thing she tries to tackle head-on in her writing, and over the years, I’ve found that to be good advice. But the problem here is, I’m not afraid of sex. At least, I don’t think I am.
Because while it’s certainly true I don’t have many hang-ups about sex, as I get older, I find I’m terribly, terribly conscious of not conveying an overt desire for it in my daily life for anyone other than my wife. Sure, I can listen with open-minded interest as single friends discuss their straight/gay/poly relationships, even offer advice when needed. I find nothing about other people’s lives shocking save actual abuse. But in my own interactions? I don’t flirt much, and I’m always extremely careful to not send false signals.
Part of this, I’m sure, is simply being married – the fact is, I’m not going to cheat on my wife, and I don’t want to inadvertently make someone think that’s a possibility. And I find myself in the odd situation that is one’s mid-30s, where you’re young enough to still fall easily into indiscretion, and a bit too old to take that sort of thing lightly.
At work, the old guys make flirtatious comments with ease, and young women laugh because they know the guys are harmless. I can’t do that, because I’m not harmless. Not really. There is always a danger that an offhand joke would be misconstrued as an advance, and whether it’s welcome or unwelcome is beside the point: Either would be equally problematic.
So perhaps there is fear there. Not fear of the act of sex, but rather a fear of perception, a fear of causing harm where none is intended. Perhaps that thought, that stricture on my behavior, gets sublimated into my writing. Personally, it sounds like an excuse to me, but that might not mean it’s not true. After all, the mind and the heart are strange, strange things, and often act of their own volitions, without regard to logic. The heart and the mind, to cop a phrase from Natalie Goldberg, are wild, feral things, and frequently have no time for the veneer of civilization we coat them with.
So, too, is writing: At its most basic, it’s a savage expression of the things creeping around inside us. We are, every one of us, Sargasso Seas, and the klik-klack of keyboards sometimes is the only thing that can make sense of the violent force of the tides that daily crash against our chests. I find it difficult to believe that there’s any writer out there who can look long and deep into that turmoil and not find some corner, some rocky outcropping, that makes them blink with trepidation. And if there isn’t, I’m forced to wonder if they’re not looking deep enough.
Because that ocean is frightening, and worthy of respect. Finding something to be afraid of inside of it, it seems to me, is something to be expected, and no dishonor. Ah, but there’s the rub. Because I do find it difficult to admit weaknesses as a writer. I’ve been a writer longer than I’ve lived any one place, longer than I’ve worked any one job. I’ve been a writer longer than I’ve been married, longer than I’ve smoked, longer than I’ve driven cars. More than any other one thing, it defines me. So yes, the admission of a weakness there pricks at me, and no matter how many times I dive back into that sea to try to correct the weakness, I find I bash my hand and knees on the same sharp rocks, limping bleeding back to shore.
But in those repeated thrashings, it occurs to me that the problem may be that I’ve approached sex like a small subject, as an action in a scene, like pouring tea or firing a gun. It’s not a mistake I’d make with, say, writing about politics or writing, but perhaps I’m making it here. Perhaps I’m looking at sex as that outcropping of rocks, a treacherous section of water, when it is indeed as much the sea itself as anything else.
This is, of course, something I’ve grasped on an intellectual level before. When writing about politics, one doesn’t try to encompass the enormity of the subject in one stroke of a pen, but rather hone on in on the terrible detail, the epiphanic moment that makes the enormity human. But there’s a flipside to that. As much as it’s the small detail that allows the reader to grasp and relate to the subject, there must also be a nod to the grandeur and mystery of the whole thing, an acknowledgement of the enormity of it all. There’s power in the scope, a contrast which puts the relatable detail into startling focus.
Indeed, the writing about sex that I’ve read and enjoyed has encompassed an enormous range, from Anais Nin’s erotic diary “Delta of Venus” to Robert Peters’ brilliant-but-repugnant play “Snapshots of a Serial Killer,” the sex itself is not the subject, but rather is the window to look at the human condition, about the things that make us real.
And in that, it’s little different than the act of writing itself – this urge to create, to break the surface of loneliness and form a connection, to channel one’s self into a moment that washes away the desperation of the past and future into an unadulterated now – driven, hands trembling, breathless in expectation.
How can that moment – when you see the story, see the poem with crystal clarity – be anything less than the anticipation of a first kiss?
Submitted by ocvictor on Wednesday, July 05, 2006 (11:05:00) (4883 reads)
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| "Features: Wild sex in the working-writer class" | Login/Create an Account | 6 comments |
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Re: Wild sex in the working-writer class
(Score: 1 )
by John on Wednesday, July 05, 2006 (12:00:23) |
What did you end up sending to your old friend?
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Re: Wild sex in the working-writer class
(Score: 2 , Interesting )
by Tony on Thursday, July 06, 2006 (09:48:29) |
I think you hit on a critical point when you mentioned age. I know that I had similar issues with the topic, but once I hit an age where I was more certain that I would not be seen as an old lech, I found it much easier.
Terrific piece, by the way.
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