To write an explicit sex scene, you mostly need the same things you need to write any other scene.
You’ll need a point you’re trying to make (this doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. I think this is sexy will do just fine). You’ll need a place to write that allows you to sink into the flow of the scene, a place that doesn’t make you feel as though someone is peering over your shoulder (feeling overly observed will make writing a sexy scene impossible). You’ll probably want to have at least a few ideas about the moments on which the scene hinges (a surprising moment or one that introduces forward momentum in the scene). And lastly, you’ll want to discard many of the untrue things you’ve subconsciously absorbed about sex over your lifetime.
Good luck with that one. It’s a doozy.
By the time I sat down to write the sex scene in my novelette, The Flip, I had already written a dozen or more sex scenes in other stories and novels. I knew, though, that this one would have to be different. For one thing, The Flip was an enemies-to-lovers story. For those not familiar with common romance novel tropes, enemies-too-lovers is exactly what it sounds like: the main characters begin in antagonistic positions and over the course of the story fall in love. The story derives much of its energy from the tension between the characters’ simultaneous distaste for each other and their attraction to each other. The best ones carry that edge of antagonism through the story and into the sex making sex scenes in enemies-to-lovers stories often emotionally complex in ways that other tropes are not. I’d never written an enemies-to-lovers story before and I was excited about the challenge.
Beyond that, though, there was another way I wanted the scene to be different from ones I had written previously: I had become more aware in recent months about the ways sex scenes in romance novels often conform to cultural ideas about how sex should be and less to the ways actual humans generally have mutually pleasurable sex. It had begun to seem problematic and potentially harmful to me.
If you read enough sex in romance novels and erotic stories, you’ll start to notice that the sex in stories with heterosexual couples usually follows a predictable pattern: kissing, foreplay, fingering or oral sex with the female character as recipient, an orgasm for the female character, male character’s penis inserted into female character’s vagina, another orgasm for the female character, and finally the male character’s orgasm. If a novel includes a sex scene where the characters do not finish the scene with his penis in her vagina, then there will without fail be a later one where they do. In many (if not most) sex scenes that center penis-in-vagina sex, the female character’s orgasm appears to result solely from the penetration with no stimulation of the external clitoris mentioned.
As a reader of romance, it’s not that these scenes bother me on an individual basis. I’ve enjoyed reading a lot of them and am quite proud of the ones I’ve written. Taken cumulatively, though, this formula is a bit odd. Research on human sexuality consistently finds that only a minority of women are able to have an orgasm through vaginal penetration alone, and even women who can are less likely to have an orgasm through penis-in-vagina intercourse than their male partners. While this research sometimes comes as a surprise to men, it seems to rarely surprise women. At most, women are usually relieved to find that their inability to have a vaginal-penetration-only orgasm is not a defect.
Yet, this fairly common knowledge never seems to make its way into the vast majority of romance novels. And this fact becomes even more perplexing when you consider two important things about the romance genre: 1.) it is a genre written almost entirely by and for women and, 2.) fantasy about how sex and romance ought to work are a cornerstone of the genre (how else to explain the frequency with which such unlikely creatures as 28-year-old billionaires, professional athletes deeply respectful of women, and Regency-era dukes with zero percent body fat appear as genre heroes?). In effect, women have created fantasy worlds where they could have changed the expectations placed on women’s bodies to ones that were not centered around male pleasure, but have chosen nearly unanimously to instead create worlds where their heroines’ bodies conform to those expectations.
That makes no sense. Why on earth would we do that?
The only explanation that makes any sense is socialization.
From the time we first learn about sex, the primacy of penis-in-vagina sex is emphasized. Most of us learn about sex-for-procreation first and learn about sex-for-pleasure much later (and perhaps never formally). In sex ed classes (for those students lucky enough to get them at all), the penis and its capacity for pleasure is discussed, but discussion of female anatomy is usually limited to the organs of reproduction like the uterus and ovaries. I don’t know how old I was when I first heard the word clitoris, but I was definitely out of my teens—meanwhile, by the time I was eighteen, I’d heard and read hundreds of explanations, both serious and humorous, about the best ways to stimulate a penis.
In film and television, it’s even worse. How many sex scenes have we all seen in popular movies where the female character clearly experiences a sexual peak as a result of being penetrated by her male partner? For the average television-watcher or movie-goer, it’s probably in the hundreds if not the thousands over the course of a typical adolescence and adulthood. How many scenes in movies or television even hint at the characters engaging in sexual contact that isn’t penis-in-vagina? Very few—not many of them seem to exist, particularly in widely distributed media. As the 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated compellingly argued, films that depict male characters orally stimulating female characters often receive ratings that restrict their potential audiences so severely that they are not economically viable. Meanwhile, PG-13 movies can easily depict a traditional sex scene between characters so long as the actors are not shown below the shoulders, even as it’s easy to figure out what the characters bodies are supposed to be doing just out of frame.
All of this comes together to communicate to all of us even before we’ve entered puberty how sex is supposed to go. Sex is supposed to begin with a hard dick. Women are supposed to have an orgasm as a result of her partner’s penis stimulating her vagina. That is supposed to be the most fulfilling, mutually enjoyable type of sex a couple can have. And the sexual encounter is supposed to be over when the male character ejaculates, preferably inside his partner. Even if nobody ever says those words aloud, that message gets through. In fact, it gets through more thoroughly because it’s never explicitly stated but reinforced at every turn that it winds up unconsciously embedded in nearly all of us. Horrifyingly, because it’s unconscious, it remains impossible to resist even after we’ve intellectually figured out it’s wrong.
That was the situation in which I found myself in writing The Flip. Even though the enemies-to-lovers trope always strikes me as more than a little fanciful (how many people really wind up in healthy, stable, satisfying relationships with someone they once truly despised?), I wanted the sex to feel both real and also deeply sexy. It was important to me that after my main character and narrator, Jackie, overcomes her distaste for her neighbor, Ian, and gives into the attraction simmering between them, she did not have an orgasm through vaginal penetration alone. And since I am a person who thinks a lot about sex and gender and expectations and socialization (in case that needs saying after the previous thousand words you’ve read), I was confident that I could do it.
The reality was humbling.
It started out pretty well. Even though Jackie and Ian have grown fond of each other over the course of about 10,000 words, when the scene begins they continue to needle each other a little while also tentatively expressing some of these new, tender feelings. This builds to making out and groping each other on the couch in Ian’s living room. What’s left of their antagonism is turning playful.
As things continue to develop, Jackie sheds her clothes while Ian remains fully dressed. Usually when one character is nude and the other fully clothed, it introduces an immediate power imbalance in favor of the clothed character, but Jackie is never one to give up the upper hand, and immediately asserts herself. This would be a wonderfully subversive moment if only my own unconscious understanding of the primacy of penis-in-vagina sex weren’t already asserting itself. “I want you to f*** me,” Jackie tells Ian. Even after she amends it with “Not right away, though. I want you to make me come first. Then I want you to f*** me”, Jackie (with me pulling the strings as the writer) is following the script of foreplay to female orgasm to vaginal penetration practically to the letter.
Damn it.
I didn’t see it then, though. My female character being demanding was good enough, and I had my eye on what was going to happen after the characters move from the couch to the bed. So, Ian agrees to her suggestion and off they go down the hallway to Ian’s bedroom.
Things start out promising there, too. Ian asks her to show him how she likes to be touched. If romance novels are a fantasy, this is one of the areas where a thing that frequently happens in romance novels lines up with what women who have sex with men wish men would do more often. A little-discussed reality in the real world is that there is a wide variety in the ways that women like to be touched and many women want or need a very specific type of touch to have an orgasm. Jackie shows Ian how to move his hand over her clitoris and Ian, quick study that he is, brings her to a satisfying climax.
After that, Jackie encourages Ian to get undressed fully. Enjoying the sight of his penis, she considers orally pleasuring him. I considered having her do that. That almost certainly would have been truer to my stated goal of a more realistic sex scene. And yet something stopped me. Since The Flip was a novelette, there was only enough space for one sex scene, and to have that scene end without Ian’s penis inside Jackie’s vagina felt… wrong. Even as I write that sentence, it makes me irritated. I know intellectually that there is nothing less than about a scene where both characters have mutually satisfying orgasms but still…
Regardless, in my head I was still on track. Jackie still was not going to have an orgasm from Ian penetrating her alone. So, Ian tells Jackie where the condoms are and she fishes one out of the drawer and puts it on him before straddling him and taking his penis inside of her. And here I decided to make explicit my plan to deny Jackie a penetration-only orgasm. “Can you come like this?” he says, sounding out of breath, I wrote. Jackie shakes her head before explaining to the reader, I’ve never been able to come from penetration alone, but this feels so good and I’m so full of emotions, I’m not sure I can form words right now.
There. I’ve said it out loud. Gold star for me.
Now I needed to get Jackie and Ian to a conclusion. Ian—poor, patient fellow—needs to have his orgasm. In the real world, a woman who has a single orgasm in a sexual encounter is doing pretty well (one study found that in first sexual encounters with new male partners, the number of women who had an orgasm was a depressing 7%). But regardless of how much it would be true to life, sending Ian over the orgasm edge without giving Jackie another climax felt… anti-climactic. Ah, well, might as well lean into the fantasy, right? Jackie rubs her clitoris while Ian’s penis is inside of her and Soon I’m there, over the edge, my head thrown back, my legs shaking, my back bowing, a hoarse scream torn from my throat. Okay, Ian. Your turn my friend.
The problem is that I still couldn’t just let Ian come. I couldn’t just let that be a pleasurable experience for both my characters. Something inside me compelled me to make sure that Jackie’s pleasure still came from Ian’s, which is how I found myself having Jackie tells the reader, I may not be able to come from penetration alone, but apparently a hard dicking will keep an orgasm going because—holy s**t—I’m riding waves and waves of pleasure.
As soon as I wrote that line, I knew I had missed my goal. Not by much—I’d at least succeeded in staying away from the idea of a penetration-only orgasm for Jackie. But still, in the end, Ian’s penis was a primary driver of Jackie’s pleasure. I’d tried hard to subvert my own socialization, and yet I hadn’t quite done it. I defaulted to the spirit of the formula.
I could have rewritten the scene, I suppose. But I was on deadline and the scene worked—nobody’s going to accuse The Flip of not having a sexy sex scene. And there are the economics of the genre to be taken into account: typically when authors subvert the genre’s expectations around whether a female character will have an orgasm as a result of penetration, it’s writers who have already well established themselves with readers (like Alisha Rai with First Comes Like and Cat Sebastian with The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes). For a writer without bestseller status, who had not yet built a reliable readership, subverting the reader’s expectations can be risky. And ultimately, I’m proud of the novelette for a lot of reasons, not just the sex scene.
I do worry, though. I worry that continuing to center men’s pleasure in romance novels is hurting women. That what the genre portrays lines up so closely to what society tells women they’re supposed be would seem to risk continuing to make heterosexual women feel inadequate in their real lives. It risks reinforcing the idea that finding other pleasurable ways to have sex is somehow not an option, or not as good an option as just continuing to try to have an orgasm through vaginal penetration. It risks giving younger readers, readers who may be getting the near entirety of their sex ed from romance novels, the idea that there’s something wrong with them if they can’t have a vaginal orgasm.
I don’t say all of this to malign romance novels. The genre has been a great source of joy and comfort and pleasure for me over the years. It’s because I love this genre so much that I critique it. It’s because I love it so much that I want it to be the best possible thing that it can be. It’s because I believe it could be a force for good and an argument for feminism that I want it to stop defaulting to the idea that the ultimate source of pleasure for women is a hard dick.
In fairness, the genre is getting better about this. The increased prevalence of widely available romance novels featuring queer characters, particularly those written by queer-identified writers, has made scenes celebrating the broad diversity of ways humans can give each other pleasure much more common. In addition, more writers of heterosexual romances have clearly started thinking about this issue, about the ways in which we can be more honest about what women’s bodies can and cannot be expected to do.
There is so much further to go. It will be a long time before a book where the characters rarely, if ever, penetrate each other is so normal as to be not worthy of note. It will be a long time before a heterosexual sex scene doesn’t feel incomplete if the male character doesn’t ejaculate inside his female partner. Those days are coming, but they’re still a ways off.
I guess those of us who want to see them will just have to keep trying until they’re here.
The Flip is available from Amazon.
Read an excerpt from The Flip here.