Are straight male writers scared of writing about sex? If you read modern fiction, it’s hard to conclude otherwise. Perhaps we worry that including a sex scene would feel exploitative or gratuitous. Or maybe we feel our gender has said enough on the subject and should now stay quiet.
Women writing about straight relationships don’t seem as nervous. In fact, sex is often a central narrative element and a means of nuanced portrayals of masculinity—from the slow-burn tenderness and awkward intimacy in Sally Rooney’s work to the surreal celebrations and lamentations of the erotic in Diane Williams’s extraordinary short stories.
The Bad Sex in Fiction award ended in 2019. It is not missed—for me, its offense was conflating comically bad writing about sex with great writing about sex that simply happened to be bad. Still, the funniest and most excruciating winners were straight men trying and failing to write sincerely and exuberantly about sex, landing somewhere between the ludicrously metaphorical and the shoddily pornographic or exoticizing. Past winners included James Frey (“Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her …”) and Didier Decoin (“Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono …”).
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that, in the 21st century, it feels as if straight male authors have stopped writing about sex altogether. And that’s a shame: as writers, we’re naturally obsessed with relationships—how we treat, fail, or fulfill each other; how we connect despite our ultimate unknowability. To leave sex out is to neglect both the minutiae and excesses of human experience.
I tried not to shy away from writing about sex in my latest novel, Black Bag, because it’s part of what forms a character. In a sex scene, every detail or desire is described for a reason, revealing where a character stands in relation to their own sexuality, their treatment of others, and themselves.
Nobody wants to emulate Henry Miller’s or Charles Bukowski’s pathological misogyny and coldly itemized conquests. Nor would we take John Updike’s waspish, suburban proto-polyamory starter kit as a blueprint. Whether urbane or grotesque, it still feels like the voice of a priapic pub bore. It’s good that we know what to avoid, but we don’t really know what to do either.
We’re uncomfortable, so we tend to decorously fade to black and rejoin our characters when they’re finished—the next day, if possible. “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over,” as the typist says in Eliot’s The Waste Land. Keiran Goddard’s debut novel, Hourglass, is heartbreakingly candid about its narrator’s post-breakup grief, but the physical is sublimated into a masochistic dedication to long-distance running; sex is notable by its absence. Joe Dunthorne’s scintillating comedy of manners, The Adulterants, brilliantly presents a sexless open marriage (“Lee thinks I sleep with other people but I don’t”). The central couple in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection strongly feel they should be having more adventurous sex to accessorize nicely with their houseplants and expat Berliner lifestyle, but they try going to a sex-positive club and find they don’t like it one bit. In my second novel, The Answer to Everything, I actively avoided writing about sex by making all the characters young parents—too exhausted to consummate their emotional affairs. And when they finally do, it’s…I just described them buttoning up their shirts afterward, shuddering with remorse. In David Foster Wallace’s 1999 short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the anonymous subjects talk until they condemn themselves, often focusing on how much they hate women but love having sex with them. They list seduction techniques, smirk, brag, and seem to lack human emotion on some level. This was less satire and more a bitter revelation: the end of the reign of Roth, Updike, and Bellow—a death knell and perhaps an apology.
As Luke Brown wrote in 2020: “Heterosexual male desire has been linked so closely to abuses of power for so long that the two seem inextricable.” The traditional campus novel turns this power imbalance into something of a trope: a vaguely depressed, self-absorbed, middle-aged lecturer begins an affair with one of his students and ruins everyone’s lives. This device is used brutally in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace; tragically in David Gilmour’s Sparrow Nights; and satirically in Percival Everett’s American Desert.
I’m not waiting for an uplifting, life-affirming novel by a straight man about how wonderful he thinks sex is. That would be gross. Get a hobby. But I do think we write to discover, and we have some serious hang-ups that we’re not quite giving ourselves the space to explore or understand. Maybe the hang-ups themselves are too embarrassing to admit: sex as a kind of competitive sport, the attendant performance anxiety. If the stakes are high in trying to write about sex, and the risk of failure so starkly embarrassing, it might be because men are actually quite insecure about sex in general but would never want to admit it, since doing so would be unsexy and unmasculine.
There are innumerable examples of good writing about sex in queer fiction. I’m always desperate for Brandon Taylor’s self-loathing, misunderstood protagonists to find some kind of release in the physical; and Djamel White’s just-published debut, All Them Dogs, sets its devastatingly authentic intimacy against the hyper-masculine world of west Dublin gang culture. Some of the best writing about sex acknowledges power or plays with the power dynamic. In Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan writes: “There was something Shakespearean about imperious men going down on you: the mighty have fallen.”
The narrator of my new novel, Black Bag, is an out-of-work actor who gets into an unconventional relationship with a professor of posthumanism at the university where he has been temporarily employed in a psychological experiment. This felt like a good inversion of the traditional campus novel’s leering suggestiveness. Their relationship is never really consummated because he spends the duration of their romance encased in a black, oblong leather bag, but their sex life becomes one of constant edging, where she tortures him with interrupted stories of her exploits in the mode of 1,001 Nights—something he enjoys very much. He finds joy and satisfaction in being submissive, and in a relationship that more or less removes him from the equation.
When it’s done well, sex in novels can be a transformative reading experience. Maybe because the fantasies it gives definition to are private in the same way that reading is private, and thus without shame. And maybe because the imagination is just as important an element as the physical. In researching Black Bag, I read Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, which is infamously overwritten and melodramatic, but he did literally give his name to the kink, so it seemed worth consulting. The best lines are given to the narrator’s lover, Wanda von Dunajew, particularly when she spells out the terms of their arrangement: “Know that henceforth you are less than a dog, something inert; you are my”You are my plaything, something I could shatter just to pass the time. You are nothing, and I am everything. Do you understand?” She laughed and held me close again, sending a tremor through me. Much of what we do is driven by the search for that very kind of tremor, which makes it feel important to try and describe it, no matter how complicated or strange it may seem. Black Bag by Luke Kennard is published by John Murray (£18.99). To support the Guardian, you can purchase a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about the topic Too hot to handle Why straight male authors need to rediscover writing about sex designed to sound like questions from curious readers and writers
Beginner Definition Questions
1 Whats the main point of this discussion
It argues that many straight male authors often write about sex in a clichéd mechanical or malegazey way and that they could benefit from focusing more on emotion intimacy and the female characters perspective to create more powerful and realistic scenes
2 What does male gaze mean in writing
Its when a sexual scene is written primarily from a heterosexual male perspective often focusing on describing a womans body parts for the male readers pleasure rather than exploring the shared internal experience of the characters
3 Isnt writing about sex just about being graphic or explicit
No not at all Graphic detail is just one tool The core of a good sex scene is about revealing character advancing the plot or exploring emotionwhether its tender awkward powerful or funny
4 Can you give an example of a clichéd way to write about sex
Phrases like he took her her mounds of flesh or overly technical descriptions that read like a manual Scenes where the female characters experience seems like an afterthought
Intermediate Why It Matters Questions
5 Why is this specifically a problem for straight male authors
Because they may unconsciously default to the dominant cultural perspective they know potentially overlooking the interiority of female characters and the full emotional spectrum of intimacy Its about expanding their creative toolkit
6 Whats the benefit of writing better sex scenes
It creates deeper more believable characters and relationships A wellwritten intimate scene can be as revealing and plotcritical as a dialogueheavy confrontation It engages readers on a more profound level
7 Are there examples of male authors who do this well
Yes Authors like Colson Whitehead Kazuo Ishiguro and John Green are often noted for writing sex and intimacy with emotional weight and character focus rather than just physical mechanics
8 Whats a common mistake beyond just being graphic
Making the scene
