The Ideal Sex Scene?

Like most everyone here who submits stories, I'm groping for the perfect way to depict sex scenes. Here and elsewhere, some have questioned the way I write some scenes, sex scenes in particular. To some the style seems overly poetic and ethereal, though the most common adjective is "flowery." There is a reason for this choice.

The typical approach to sex scenes is to relate them as they might appear to an observer, with inner feelings and thoughts described more or less literally. That's fine, but it's not my goal. Mine is to relate them as they feel to the characters, to convey, as well as I can, the totality of characters' visceral experience in the scene. Ideally, the reader becomes, not observer, but vicariously a participant, living the scene through the experience of one or more characters as the reader's mind instinctively chooses. You might say that I am aiming at a Romantic (capital R) or Impressionistic style rather than a literal and factual Classical one.

That is tricky. Appearances can be described objectively, but the language of our feelings and inner experience is subjective and unique to us all. There is no vernacular for that. So, how might a writer accomplish this goal?

To seek an answer, let's look at an entirely different genre: horror/suspense.

Go to the IMDB and check out Alfred Hitchcock's unsurpassed classic, Psycho. (I'd like to put a link here to make that easy but that's verboten.) Let's see now, the titles of the first few user comments: "The Greatest Horror Film Ever," "A Perfect Film," "The Scariest Ever," "Hitchcock's Best," "A Horror Masterpiece," and so forth, on and on in that same vein. Scrolling over the next few pages of comments, so far I see not one that is even equivocal, much less disparaging. That must mean it's pretty good.

Who doesn't know about that scene, the topper, the money shot, the one single scene that is universally venerated as the epitome of cinematic fright? Right, of course. Janet Leigh. The shower. The score with those nails-on-chalkboard strings. The silhouette of the hand grasping the knife. The sudden lacing of the draining water with a dark fluid. Need I say more?

Now suppose we review the scene analytically. It probably would not be all that difficult for you or I, equipped with a decent video camera, some shop lights from the garage, some bedsheets to control the light, some simple props and a little creativity to manage a fairly good approximation of the actual images, other than Janet Leigh's horrified expression, of course. How can such simplicity achieve such mind-blowing impact upon young and old, nearly fifty years later, the more so in an age of intricate, elaborate (and expensive) special-effects horror?

The first part of the answer is, Hitchcock does not try to scare you with his film!

Say what, you ask?

It's true. He doesn't. The creative genius that makes this scene the masterpiece it is lies not in what it shows, but in what it doesn't. Hitchcock knew the secret: Craft the film to lead, not push, the audience to the edge of the terror, deliver the right hints and suggestions in the right sequence and with the right timing, and then get out of the way and let the viewers' imaginations do the real work.

He and the true masters of the art know that there is nothing anyone can put onto the film that will outperform the cinema of the mind. You just need to know how to tickle it the right way.

(On the DVD of Wait Until Dark starring Alan Arkin, Audrey Hepburn, Richard Crenna and Jack Weston, Arkin, who performed another classic scare scene in it that had audiences screaming, has some nicely articulated words on this subject..)

Likewise, there is nothing that can be written into an erotic story that will outperform the sexual imagination and instincts of the reader, if you can manage to tickle that the right way. In fact, both sexuality and the instinct of fear that facilitates the fight-or-flight response necessary for survival, and thus makes that scene from Psycho so effective, live in the same part of the brain, the limbic system, the most primitive part, not much different from those of such highly intellectual life forms as crocodiles. The limbic system is not logical, it is not analytical; it is not even intelligent. It regulates the most basic things needed to keep us alive: waking and sleeping, hunger and thirst, knowing when survival is threatened by injury, environment like excessive heat or cold, and so forth, all things we cannot control just by thinking about them (though we can affect them by some kinds of mental training), often in ways other than what we would like. And that includes sex.

If sexual arousal could be accomplished with simple information and thought, there would be no market for Viagra. While memory, expectations created from logic and analysis of situations and a few other such things can trigger arousal, they do that indirectly, usually by way of hooking into previously learned experiences, which creates the necessary linkages. (If you get turned on when you're near Sally's house because Sally has given you a really good time there before, that's a learned reaction, not reasoned. It's not the house; it's the memory.)

The ideal erotic story would provoke a sexual response in the limbic system the way Hitchcock's scene provokes a fearful one. How to do that with words? I don't know. Maybe the approach I've been using is in the right direction; maybe it isn't. I only know that knowing when to deliver the words and when to get out of the way is very much at the heart of the answer.