writing sex scenes

I wouldn’t ordinarily spend too much time thinking about what to call my private parts, not usually finding a need to mention them in my day to day life. But as most of you probably already know, I recently had my first novel, A Million Miles from Normal, published by Penguin, and as it’s a romantic comedy about sex, drugs and advertising, the storyline has its fair share of sex.

Deciding how far to go was the first challenge. Did I want to simply allude to sex vaguely? Or rather show my characters kissing and doing some light fondling, and then cut to them waking up together the next morning with sheets pulled tightly under their armpits, so as not to show any naughty bits. Or did I want to go the whole hog, with full frontal nudity and actual sex?

It wasn’t such a tough decision. In the end I chose a version of the latter. I wanted to use the sex scenes to develop my characters further and having them kiss chastely and then fade to black wasn’t going to help me do that.

For the most part, writing the sex scenes was excruciating. Partly because I kept imagining people I know, like my mom and my boss, reading them and immediately assuming that that’s how I have sex. But it was mainly excruciating because I kept running out of things to call my main character’s private parts. ‘Vagina’ is hardly the most romantic word in the English dictionary, and ‘penis’ isn’t that much better.

We start off as toddlers being taught to call our genitals easy, harmless names like ‘pee-pee’ and ‘wee-wee’, and things don’t really progress too much from there until, during our teenage years, we leap straight from sweet and innocent to just plain ugly.

As with most things in life, men have it a little easier than women. There are tons of names out there for men’s thingies, from the completely crass to the downright boring (‘Manhood’, for instance, which is ever popular in romantic fiction). Then there are the more creatively descriptive terms to choose from, like pork sword, love monster or trouser snake – none of which are particularly romantic sounding and hardly roll easily off the tongue.

That being said, these man-part descriptors are mostly a lot less cringeworthy than what we have to deal with. As women we seem to be stuck with a collection of words that seem to be the result of genital writer’s block. In our arsenal of available synonyms for the vagina I feel we’re left lacking and I shudder to type most of them. For some reason they always feel derogatory – in particular the ever hideous and unacceptable ‘C’ word, which is way too loaded to even write out in full.

So while I was writing my sex scenes I felt like I could never quite find the perfect way to word them – the last place you want to gross somebody out is when you’re trying to be sexy. I would get as far as ‘he ran his fingers over her …’ and then I would freeze. Type in a word. Blush, blush, blush. Backspace. Try another word; hang my head in shame; delete that too. I felt like as soon as I thrust one of those words into the scene developing on the page in front of me, the sex I was writing about instantly became hard around the edges.

I even tried getting scientific with it, but all you’re left with is synonyms like vulva or labia, and those really won’t do.

So where does that leave us as writers and readers? Eventually I ended up using one or two choice synonyms a couple of times. But more often than not, to keep things tidy, I avoided naming my characters sexual organs altogether. It was a bit like when you bump into someone whose name you think you remember but you’re not sure, so you do the safest thing possible, which is to not mention any name at all.

You know, Eskimos have over 200 words for snow because it plays such an important role in their lives. You’d think that as part of a culture as obsessed with sex as we are there’d be more than just a handful of words for the penis and the vagina.