Writing about sex

Why write about sex? More to the point, what’s the problem with writing about sex? Most people, whether they’re reading this or not, are in the world because their parents had sex. Even the few who were conceived in a test tube were probably conceived in the test tube because their parents had tried to conceive a baby by having sex, and hadn’t succeeded. Their parents were probably having sex because they liked it. In fact, a lot of people like sex so much that they go to considerable lengths to make sure they can do it without conceiving a child.

Unless you’re very unlucky, sex comes closer to our lives than murder, zombies, vampires, or cataclysms that threaten the future of civilisation, but you don’t hear the moralisers complaining about any of those. Along with everyone else, the moralisers might well complain if I went out and murdered someone, but if I wrote about it, that would be fine. Not so with sex. Provided it’s all done in secret, and according to a set of rules that seem rather arbitrary, the moralisers seem happy enough, but if you write about it, you might as well be offering them a slice of cold baby pie. Curiously, though, vampire stories seem to be able to sneak past the censors, in spite of their very obvious erotic overtones.

If you write erotica, you’re probably going to be writing about sex. It’s possible that there are people who just want to read descriptions of sex, but that seems about as much fun as reading a description of a zombie, or a vampire, or a murder. To my mind, the sex should be integral to the story, like the murder in a murder mystery, in such a way that the story wouldn’t work without it.

However, sex in fiction isn’t necessarily restricted to erotica. There are murders in stories that aren’t murder mysteries, though if it’s a murder mystery, there does have to be a murder. Similarly, if it’s a zombie story, there are probably going to be zombies, and in a realistic contemporary love story, there’s probably going to be some sex. It’s what people do. If you’re in a relationship, I expect there’s a better than even chance that sex is (or was) involved somewhere.

You don’t have to want to read about sex (or zombies), but if people do want to read about sex (or zombies), leave them alone. For them to read about it, someone has to write about it. Good luck to the people who write zombie fiction, I’ll stick with writing erotica. I’m obviously crazy, but I prefer sex to being killed by a zombie. I also have an idea for a vampire story that the moralisers might disapprove of. That’s fine. They don’t have to read it.