A Touchy Subject: Integrating Eroticism In Your Writing

In my writing classes for women, I teach one week entirely devoted to Eroticism and Sexuality. This is usually one of the most fun, freeing, and enjoyed classes. Women who had previously been quiet and seemed demure, bust out with racy tales of excitement, experimentation, and adventure. They light up and come alive in the telling of these stories that they’ve never told before, laughing with delight in the permission they’ve been given to express this usually suppressed part of their lives.

One of the reasons I feel that it is important to integrate this subject into my class is because it is usually so avoided in daily life, and has such a negative and shameful stigma attached to it. At a reading series I used to attend, week after week the men would write about sex, filling their pieces with sexual themes, and freely flinging about profanity, sometimes to the extreme where it seemed ungrounded, and just there for shock value.

Conversely, the women would barely even touch upon any sexual topics, and if they did, they would quietly tip-toe around them, as if to say that they were not in any part sexual beings, nor did they in any way have sexual desires. Week after week, I grew increasingly more frustrated – I wanted the women to be bolder and more courageous, to take a risk and fess up to what people, especially women, rarely talk about in polite company. I wanted them to explore sexual themes and make it alright for women to talk, think, and write about sex. I wanted them to stop rigorously avoiding it and instead, look at it, examine it, and bring their femininity, vulnerability, emotion, and even raw desire if they wished to bear on this difficult, uncomfortable, and taboo subject. I was frustrated that what was so easy and natural for the men seemed impossible for the women.

During this time, a guy dumped me because I wasn’t “sexual enough” for him. I immediately bought a black lace push-up bra to feel better about myself, but I still felt pretty bad. A few weeks later I discovered the book The Erotica Project by Lillian Ann Slugocki and Erin Cressida Wilson, and I had this feeling of recognition, like I had finally found my mentors. I had been incorporating sexuality into my writing for a few years, but up until then, I didn't see any other women who were doing it in a way that mixed emotion, vulnerability, fear, uncertainty, insecurities, and total honesty. I also felt shy and embarrassed about some of the things I had written.

I wanted permission to put my writing out there, and a place where it would fit in—a sense of community, a tribe.