Martin Amis has said that sex is hard to write because it tends to the particular rather than the universal. Everybody’s experience is different. ‘It may be,’ he wrote, ‘that good sex is something fiction just can’t do – like dreams . . . Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.’ Indeed, The Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award has been won by many notable writers otherwise known for their fine prose. It’s a minefield. But why?
One of the problems is exactly what Amis identified: it’s very difficult to describe sensations that are highly personal and subjective using mere words. Writing sex puts into words the things we usually don’t say. There are no words in sex – only deeply felt physical and mental experiences. As soon as we seek words to label them, we’re turning the sex into a fixed and universal thing and separating an
