The Times -story by Kathy Lette
June 20, 2009
Who writes best about sex?
Women certainly are passionate enough to create raunchy erotica, even if they are impeded by biased cultural expectations

Women think that the Kama Sutra is an Indian takeaway. We are just not fluent in body language. Nor do we have the gift of the grab.
While men are ready, villain and able, a woman’s biggest fantasy in the bedroom involves discovering that her husband has picked his underpants up off the floor. On official Name/ Address/ Age forms, after it says Sex most women should write: Not if I can possibly help it.”
I know this because the new owner of the relaunched Erotic Review, Kate Copstick, is loath to allow too many female authors to slip between her covers.
In the press last weekend and on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme with me this week she stated that women seldom write well about sex because females “have an agenda, they complicate sex, they make layers, it’s conditional. And they lie as well.”

Apparently, it would be like reading a meat-lover’s guide written by a vegetarian.
So, what exactly is erotic fiction? I suppose the most reliable definition is a magazine or book that you can read only with one hand.

It is difficult to write about carnal matters without being unintentionally funny or just plain nauseating. So many contemporary sex scenes — the Bad Sex Award-winning Charlotte Grey by Sebastian Faulks, for example, or the later work of John Updike — read like a hard day’s work at the orifice. They’re as arousing as Ian Paisley in a posing pouch.
The purple prose we girls grew up on in historical romances was no better. In fact it was hilariously obfuscatory — “He was diamond hard and proud.” “His thighs stiffened as his scabbard pierced her secret citadel.”
We passed around our mothers’ dog-eared paperbacks featuring smouldering Heathcliff-esque heroes ravaging proud, raven-haired beauties, with all the rude bits marked up in red pen.
But modern vernacular is repulsively brutal.

The Australian erotic lexicon is a meaty smorgasbord of playing “hide the sausage”, with the “luncheon truncheon”, “meat injecting”, “chucking the spam javelin”, “spearing the bearded clam”, or “getting stabbed with the beef bayonet” — not exactly a Shakespearean love sonnet.

But English Lotharios fare little better in the lascivious linguistic stakes. In British literature there’s an infantile retreat to the nursery with your “rumpy pumpy”, “hanky panky”, “slap and tickle”, “leg-over”, “nookie”, “bonking”, “giving the dog a bone” and endless triple entendres about crumpet, muffin, tiffin, tart and buttered buns for tea. Not to forget the playground singsong of rhyming slang — “I suppose a Friar Tuck would be out of the question?”

Read the full story at The Times online.

Related Links:
How to write sex: a woman’s tips

How to write sex: a man’s tips

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