Since my teens, when I started openly dating other women, I have fielded (mostly from men) the rude but âinnocentâ question of how two women have sex. The implication being that sex includes penetration by a penis, that this act is the culmination of all the lesser acts that precede it. Perhaps the biggest inherited narrative about sex that Iâve had to undo in myself is that default defining of all sex as related to hetero sex. Back then, no matter how I explained it, the askers of that question frowned. How sad, their faces seem to say, that youâve never ever gotten past third base. How sad, Iâd now like to reply, that youâve been trapped on a baseball diamond for all of your sexual life.
Show us what your sex is, what your charactersâ sex is. Maybe you, too, have been defining it in relationship to heterosexual models that have nothing to do with your own desire, or that of your characters. This might be hardest for straight people, who have the greatest number of inherited stories to wade through. Discover it in the writing; I often have. The beauty is that we donât have to agree on this. When I was a dominatrix, I once rubbed balloons all over a man for seventy-five dollars. He wouldâve called it sex. I called it work. It was mutually consensual, and I think we were both correct in our assessment.
If your sex is balloons, if it is blowing raspberries on your loverâs belly, if it happens fully clothed or in furry costumes, if it happens in a group or aloneâgive it the same gravity, the same reverence or irreverence as all of the tiresome dick-chafing scenes we all grew up reading. In the world of your writing, no sex is a punch line unless you make it one. There is no marginal erotic unless you sideline it.
-Melissa Febos, âMind Fuck: Writing Better Sexâ
