What makes sex writing hot? What gives it its ability to not just stimulate and titillate, but to make us sweat, to push us to the point where it really moves us, to take it across the line into something that resembles an art of arousal?

A couple of examples:

John kissed Mary. He put his hand under her skirt and felt her leg. Mary took his cock and squeezed it. “That feels good, Mary” John said. “It does.” Mary replied. John took off Mary’s clothes and then his own and they got into bed and started to fuck…

Okay. Intentionally bad porn. But why?

It’s more than just the fourth-grade level sentence structure. Consider this rewrite:

John grabbed Mary and kissed her hard. He slid his hand under her skirt and began to caress her leg. Mary shuddered and grabbed his cock and began to slowly beat him off. “Damn, that feels good, Mary!” John gasped. “God, yes!” Mary breathed. John struggled to pull off Mary’s clothes then tore off his own. They stumbled into bed and started to fuck.

Same simple sentence structure, just a few more words, but it’s much more palatable. What’s the difference?

The difference is: emotion. The added words allow us to build a mental picture of the scene that shows us what the characters are feeling, whereas the first example has been stripped of all words that convey emotional content. It’s told in a flat, valueless language that paints the characters as automatons and is therefore devoid of all emotion and all humanity and consequently, all warmth and sexual heat.

And that’s the point: sexual heat happens in the characters’ heads. It’s the job of the erotic author to write sex in such a way that the reader knows what his characters are feeling and thinking as they’re having sex.

What makes a story hot is not so much what the characters do, it’s what the characters feel about what they’re doing. The hot little heart of any porn story is always psychological. Sex acts are arousing not because of organ plunging into orifice, but because of what that means, because of what that tells us about what’s going on in the characters’ minds.

You can prove this to yourself. Think about any juicy bit of sexual gossip you’ve heard lately. Take Elliot Spitzer. What’s the first thing you think about when you think about the former governor of New York? Do you think about what Elliot’s cock looked like going into that lounge singer’s pussy? Or do you think: What was he thinking??? What was it like to be Elliot Spitzer??? As humans, we’re fascinated about what other people think and feel. When we hear about some woman fucking 38 guys at a time, or the polygamist Mormon sect, we’re only interested in the sexual details insofar as they shed light on what those people are thinking and feeling as they’re having sex. Do those 14 year-old girls really “love” their 50 year-old husbands? Did they blow them? (Because oral sex means something much different than having intercourse, and we all know that.) What does it feel like to have four wives?

It’s the thoughts and feelings we’re interested in, and unless you can convey thoughts and feelings through sexual action, you can’t write decent erotica. Writing about people screwing isn’t enough. You have to write about how they screw. You have to show what their emotions are as they screw.

When we read a porn story, we’re always looking for those subtle clues that tell us how the people are feeling about what they’re doing. Does he “grab” her or “embrace” her for the first kiss? Maybe “clutch her” or “sweep her up” or “hug her”, hold her by her upper arms or her hands, twist her arms behind her or hold her face or not touch her at all. Each gesture means something precise and different, and each speaks volumes about what’s going on in his mind. It’s the difference between John kissed Mary and John grabbed Mary and kissed her. The first tells us nothing about how John was feeling. The second tells us John was a bit excited. That excites us, too.

Sex acts too are hot not because they show organs sliding in and out of each other, but because of the way they slide…or grind, or mash, or pump, or hammer, or slither, or whatever. The words create an image and the image reveals what the characters are feeling, and there, in the internal states of their minds, resides the secret heat of eroticism.

There are some who feel that erotic heat is obtained by describing the most outré and forbidden sexual act one can imagine, but unless this is done in such a way as to convey the emotions of the people involved, it’s going to fall flat. No kind of incestuous nasal intercourse or group bondage with teenaged tentacled space aliens is going to have any interest whatsoever if told in flat, affectless prose. It’s emotion that carries the heat.

On the other hand, think what is conveyed in such a simple act as oral sex, woman on man, the complicated issue of who is in charge of whom, how much can said about a relationship in how the deed is performed. Or the terribly intimate surrender implicit in an act of anal sex, whether the male be the aggressor or the woman use a strap on. Either one tells us a tremendous amount about the feeling states of the people involved in such an act and about their relationship. Sex is emotion, visibly expressed, as intimate and honest as it gets.

Fiction has been defined as emotion expressed though action, and in the case of erotica, the emotion is whatever it’s possible to feel for another human being, everything from hatred to love. All of these may be experienced when two people have sex, and we as readers are tremendously curious about this. We want to see these emotions described in the way the characters make love. We want to see their internal thoughts and feelings made manifest in their actions through the writer’s descriptive skill. We want, ultimately, for the truth of character to be revealed under the emotional strain of blistering ecstasy and transcendent passion, and that’s where the heat in any erotic story is ultimately found.

Dr. Mabeuse

In the dictionaries, pornography and erotica are similarly defined: “creative activity…of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire.”

This definition has to be changed. For me, it serves to describe pornography, but I think we have to differentiate erotica, which I define as “the literature of sex“, and being literature, that means it has value besides mere titillation. Erotica examines what sex means to the human experience, how it affects our lives and emotions and perceptions of ourselves, our relations with others. There’s a difference.

With this definition I also set up a value scale, implying that erotica is of more intrinsically artistic than porn. The reason for this is simple. All a piece of creative activity has to do to “stimulate sexual desire” is be descriptive of a sexual act. Due to the way we’re constructed as human beings, we react to descriptions of sex by getting more or less aroused, plain and simple. Therefore, anyone who can describe a sexual act can be a pornographer, and it’s a pretty hapless human who can’t describe two people screwing or having some sort of sex.

To create erotica, though, one has to provide some insight into what sex means to the human condition, and this takes some intelligence and skill, some art. To be an eroticist or an erotician (I like the latter term myself, cognate to “mathematician” and “magician”. Yes, and “mortician” too, I suppose), one has to be something of an artist. Obviously, insight is harder to come by than description. Erotica is therefore harder to do than porn. Surprise, surprise, I consider myself an erotician.

That doesn’t mean that erotica is necessarily better. Sometimes you just want to get off on a piece of smut and you reach for the porn. But some thought should be given to just what it is we’re looking for when we go for porn. Are we looking for simple descriptions of sex acts, or might our needs be better served by something that goes a bit deeper beneath the surface and opens our eyes to the sexual mystery of the world, the sexual secrets and implications of this life we live in?

In other words, do we want porn that just has dicks and pussies, or do we want it to have brains too? If the latter, then we probably want to be reading erotica, something that has some meat, some depth, some curiosity and skill behind it. That’s how I feel about writing it too. I’m not as interested in what people’s gonads are doing as I am in how they feel about what their gonads are doing—the sexual experience of the entire person: mental, emotional, physical, even spiritual—and that’s the kind of stuff I write.

Next time I’ll talk about just where the heat in erotic heat lies. (Here’s a hint: it’s not in the organs.)

Dr. Mabeuse