Good Sex?

 This should get me on the thin ice. Before jumping to conclusions go read Amita Reed's essay HOW TO HAVE SEX IN CRIME FICTION. Please consider these passages. They bother me. Woke has become a pejorative but let me suggest something even worse contemptible for a writer: to be cliched.

My quarrel with these tropes is that they are all looking at sex from the male point of view, the effect on men, the emotions of men, the feelings of men.

I worry that the simplistic formula—thriller equals thrilling, illicit, often controlling sex and cozy equals no sex—reflects the age-old maxim that bad girls (whoever they are) have sex and good girls (I’m still confused) don’t.

I worry even more that this dangerous maxim is reflected not only in genres and tropes of crime fiction but also in abiding social expectations and beliefs. In November 2019, I was part of a three-person Feminist Book Society event called ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’ at Waterstones in Gower Street, London, made up of the rather wonderful authors Lisa Taddeo and Luke Turner. Our panel facilitators Eleanor Dryden and Katy Loftus asked the sold-out crowd of a hundred plus (mostly made up of women, though I’m pretty sure there was one man, boyfriend, brother or friend, dragged in by someone who wanted to be there) a simple question. How many women felt comfortable telling their partners what they liked in bed? This was the question. One out of a hundred-plus women of all ages and sizes raised their hand.

***

This terrifies me. It raises questions not only of consent and aggression in sexual contexts, but also, and for a wide variety of women, questions about sexual pleasure, who controls it and who gets to have it.

Think about it. Gore Vidal wrote in one of his essays that writing about sex was boring and I generally agree with that - but all the same I have does and I have tried to make sure it was satisfactory to both. Then, too, I knew too many women who agents of their own desires.

sch