Some readers are, indeed, only in it for the cheap thrills.
So… sex scenes.
Humans are sexual creatures. Seeing as they have this weird obsession with writing about other humans, it follows that a great many stories will end up referring to sex in one way or another.
At the same time, sex scenes are not trivial to write correctly. In fact, there are so many possible mistakes to make that How NOT to write a novel –on which my own advice is heavily based– has an entire section dedicated to analysing them.
What that book does not do, however, is offer rules. In keeping with my dedication to pretense, I have decided to offer them in its stead. Behold, then: The 3 golden rules of sex scenes.
Three golden rules:
- You can write an amazing sex scene without communicating what the characters did.
- You can't write a sex scene worth the paper on which it is printed without communicating what the characters felt about what they did.
- The emotions with which your words are tinged will in turn tinge the entire scene.
Most mistakes you can make with regards to the sex scene itself can be covered with just those three rules. There are more, but they mainly concern how the sex scene fits within the broader narrative, rather than the sex scene itself; as a result, they fall outside of the scope of this specific article.
The discreet sex scene
There are lots of good reasons to want to create a sex scene that is carnally pleasurable for the characters, but not for the readers. Maybe you want to focus on how emotionally fulfilling it is, or maybe at the end of the day you yourself are too squeamish to write it. 'Sfine, no problem.
Going by the three prior rules, however, we must note one thing: It would be a huge mistake to go about this by describing what the characters did in an unsexy way. For instance, if you go for clinical detachment and use words like “fornicated” or “intercourse” or “copulate“, all you'll achieve is to make the reader believe that the characters themselves feel nothing except for clinical detachment. This basically only works if the POV is a psychopathic voyeur who's peeping on them.
Instead, if you want the scene to be discreet, just don't describe the acts themselves. Describe how their touches felt, what made them moan and how, what they lost themselves in. I promise you, readers will not feel anything is missing.
The filthy sex scene
As many good reasons as there are for a sex scene to not be filthy, there are equally as many for it to be. Some readers are, indeed, only in it for the cheap thrills.
At the same time, the above rules must not be violated. Lurid descriptions of each other's looks must by necessity go through the POV characters. This in turn means that they mainly serve to illustrate the characters' opinions, not the narrator's. If she's “stacked”, it's because her partner finds her stacked; if he's a “hunk”, it's because his partner finds him so.
It follows that even words used to describe things relatively objectively can end up imbuing the scene with unintended emotions. For instance, take the words I jokingly offered in the last article: “pneumatic” and “brobdingnagian”. Those two words evoke one emotion only: Comical exaggeration. If the scene is meant to be taken 100% seriously, those words will work directly against it. On the other hand, if you're trying to subtly make fun of the character for how awestruck s/he feels, those words can convey that pretty concisely.
The second sex scene
Once we assume that a sex scene's primary purpose is to communicate the characters' feelings, it becomes obvious that any additional such scenes that essentially describe the exact same feelings are redundant. It follows that every new sex scene that a book offers must portray new and evolving feelings.
There was a book I read (was it Christopher Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends?) that did this very cleverly: The first scene described solely what the characters did. The second scene only described their feelings. This immediately high-lighted the progression of their relationship from physical to emotional: At first they didn't really feel much of anything, but later on their emotions overshadowed their carnal lust.
The unsexy sex scene
In a few rare cases, you might want your sex scene to be unsexy on purpose. I have personally witnessed two movies with such scenes, both of them brilliant in their unsexiness:
- Example 1 is from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. In it, a professor gives a class on sex education, including a practical demonstration… and it's every single boring, monotonous, mind-numbing lecture you've attended in your life. It doesn't take much to interpret this as a cutting satire about some professors' ability to take, in this case, the absolute most interesting subject in the entire world, and so completely drain it of life, of love, of some goddamn ███████ passion, that it ends up insufferable.
- Example 2 is from American Psycho. The protagonist hires a prostitute and beds her. What we see of the scene is the protagonist, looking at himself in the mirror, and flexing his biceps. The girl is nowhere near the point if view. It's as if he doesn't care about her at all; as if she's merely an accessory, a prop to the scene. Which is, as it turns out, exactly what the protagonist is feeling at the moment.