It’s a high-wire act and the risk of an embarrassing failure can weigh heavily – but that’s no reason to avoid writing about sex, argues Black Bag author Luke Kennard
A
re straight male writers scared of writing about sex? If you read modern fiction it’s hard to conclude otherwise. Maybe we’re worried that the very presence of a sex scene in our book would feel somehow exploitative or gratuitous. Or maybe we feel our gender has simply said enough on the subject so we should shut up.
Women writing about straight relationships don’t seem as nervous. In fact, sex is often a central element of narrative, and of nuanced portrayals of masculinity; from the slow-burn tenderness and awkwardness of intimacy in Sally Rooney’s work, to the surreal celebrations of and lamentations for the erotic in Diane Williams’s extraordinary short stories.
The Bad Sex in Fiction award wrapped up in 2019. It is not missed – for me, its offence was that it conflated comically bad writing about sex with great writing about sex that happened to be bad. Still, the funniest and most excruciating winners were straight men trying and failing to write sincerely and exuberantly about sex, and landing somewhere between the ludicrously metaphorical and the shoddily pornographic or exoticising. Past winners have included James Frey (“Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her …”) and Didier Decoin (“Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono …”).
