Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex

Recently, I began a weekend creative writing workshop with this exercise: write your sexual life story in five sentences. Short of gratuitous usage of semicolons, there was no wrong way to do this; it could be as abstract or as concrete as my students wanted. It could be a chronological list of the five most high-topography sexual events in their lives, or it could be a list of images more akin to a surrealist poem. After the allotted five minutes, they all set their pens down with a touch of weary accomplishment. Then I asked them to do it again.

This request was met with stares, some uncomprehending, some with a touch of loathing. I pressed on. The only requirement was that they not reiterate any of the previous five sentences—they could zoom in to a single event, zoom out to a philosophical summary, make it silly, make it emotionally opposite, make it more honest, make it less or more abstract. After they'd finished, I asked them to do it for a third time. A fourth. At this point, many of their stares implied that I was unhinged, sadistic, or simply ridiculous. Eventually they stopped staring and started writing faster. Here's the point: their writing got better. It became truer. It became more theirs. I told them, We could do this all day. I meant: and not run out of ways to tell that story. More importantly, they would bear witness to something greater than mere improvement.

Over the years, I've come to look forward to the point in my own writing at which continuing seems both incomprehensible and loathsome. That resistance, rather than marking the dead end of the day's words, marks the beginning of the truly interesting part. That resistance is a kind of imaginative prophylactic, the end of ideas that I already had when I came to the page. The exhaustion of narrative threads that were already sewn into me by other sources of varying nefariousness or innocuity. It is on the other side of that threshold that the truly creative awaits me, where I might make something that did not already exist. I just have to punch through that false bottom.

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Left to my thoughts, which are driven by pragmatism, ambition, anxiety, and past reference, my conception of creative possibility, of what might comprise my art, is a steadily narrowing doorway. My favorite classes—like my favorite lectures, like my favorite texts—are usually those that remind me of all the possibilities, of the incredible capaciousness of art and my own imagination. There are so many ways to write a thing, so many ways that only I could possibly write it. Over time, we start to narrow our thinking about what a piece of writing—what a certain story—can be, how it needs to be told. Partly, this is because we get attached to the most familiar narrative. We get attached to the one we tell ourselves, because it makes persisting easier. It makes us feel better about ourselves. It excuses us. It excuses others.

The cause of this limiting of our range, of our scope, is inertial: that is the narrative we have been told about ourselves or our stories, and so that's the narrative we tend to tell. I've spent my whole life being prescribed narratives about my own body: how it should and shouldn't look, what it should or shouldn't do, and what its value is. Particularly, I have learned a lot from my culture, media, government, men on the streets of whatever city I've lived in, men whom I have loved and not loved, women whom I have loved and not loved, and even readers and fellow writers about how my body is mostly good for sex and that sex should mostly be good for men.

The degree to which this education has affected my life is impossible to overstate. It has defined my relationship to my body; all of my sexual and romantic relationships; my relationship to food, clothing, money, and of course, sex...