On (not) writing about sex.

Since I started this blog partly as part of a show-and-tell exchange with Charmaine, I ought at some point before long to write about sex. Otherwise the exchange would be far too one-sided, and that’s not generally something I enjoy.

And it’s not just that I feel as if I ought to – I want to. But it’s not necessarily that easy.

For a start, there’s the danger of writing something awful. This not being literary fiction, I’m in no danger of being shortlisted for the Bad Sex awards, but their shortlist certainly flags up some of the dangers. (Really, though, this paragraph was little more than an excuse to share the following wonderful piece by Giles Coren, which won him the 2005 award.)

And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he’d ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.

One thing’s relatively clear, though, namely that I’m not going to get over this difficulty by not writing about sex.

The procedure for resolving the second is perhaps less obvious. As I said to Charmaine,

I suspect that before I get round to posting about sex I might well end up having to write something about the gender-related difficulties of writing in semi-public about enjoying sex with multiple partners without (a) being and (b) seeming misogynistic. I guess the solution is to spend more time getting fucked by men.

Living in Berlin, there are plenty of opportunities for the latter. But experiences with women form an important part of my sexuality, a part about which I want to (be able to) write. But I’m not yet confident that I’ve found or developed the right voice in which to do so. And I suspect that doing so might involve some work.