So
ideally this month’s blog post would have been written in the style of 50 Shades of Gray,
but that would've required us to get the book and read it, and the thought of that
just made us tired and want to take to our beds. And not in a good way.
So, instead, we decided to just tell you what happened.
Well for
starters, good ol’ Karol, who’d come up with this brilliant topic in the first
place and had been waiting all year for this Schmooze, got deathly ill and
could not attend. Never fear
though, because young Rita Crayon Huang stepped in to add a feminine counterbalance
and avert the horrible prospect of “An Evening With Charlie Talking About
Sex.” As an added bonus, Karol was
able to attend virtually, through speakerphone.
Karol
later mused that it was just like an episode of Charlie’s Angels, except Charlie was in the room,
and ”the angel” was on the phone.
It was a
smaller group of Schmoozers than usual, around 15, the others scared off by the
adult nature of the topic, no doubt (picture book writers are so
delicate). But it was a terrific
Schmooze, nonetheless.
We
started off with a round robin of the first sexy scenes we remember reading that
really impacted us. There were
lots of mentions of Judy Blume’s Forever (page 88, people!) and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather; even Erica Jong’s Fear of
Flying and, uh,
Bob Guccione’s Penthouse Forum, uh, came up. (The age of
the unnamed Schmoozer who copped to reading Penthouse Forum? 13.)
Charlie
read some comically terrible romance writing he’d found, and we discussed what
to avoid, like the words “throbbing” and “flowering” and phrases like “pink
palace of pleasure.”
Charlie
read a great quote Karol had sent in from a Dear Editor.com post which suggested
that, if you start from emotion and character and build up to the physical, the
audience will
be putty in your hands.
Karol
then chimed in to give a full-throated (between coughs) defense of the Twilight series as an example of
this, calling the work a “bodice ripping romance” rather than a supernatural
vampire story. “It’s hot because
it could mean a literal death for the heroine.” That said, she complained bitterly that, after thousands of
pages of foreplay, when Edward and Bella are finally going to do the deed,
there’s a nearly immediate fade to the moonlight on the ocean rather than the
hot, steamy paranormal lovemaking every Twihard had long been waiting for.
This led
to a discussion of how far to go, with a sampling of various scenes, from the
“Fade to Black/Jaws Approach” (implying but not showing the shark) of Harry
Potter & The Order of the Phoenix to the explicit full frontal passion of Jenny Downham’s Before
I Die.
Along
the way, Charlie insisted deference be paid to Sherman Alexie’s long overdue
salute to masturbation in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, and Frank Portman’s awkward, and
very specific, make out scenes in King Dork. Comparing them to the swoony, sexy and emotional scenes in
books like Jennifer Bosworth’s Struck, Charlie posited the notion that women write about sex as
an overpowering force that takes them away, whereas men write about logistics:
this goes here and that goes there, and if I grab this and fiddle with that, then that happens… etc. Rita noted that a
lot of guys in the room began nodding vigorously, saying they much preferred
scenes written the latter way.
At this
point, a fight broke out.
Lee Wind
wasn’t so sure that this was always the case, arguing that the lead character
in King Dork
was simply distant from his emotions.
Jeff Cox sided with Charlie, saying that this was how young sex was for
him. After we shook from our minds
the image of young Jeff Cox having awkward young sex, Rita countered Lee's
response by saying the emotion that connected her to the character in King Dork
was performance anxiety, which she found convincing.
Josh
Hauke (creator of web comic, Tales Of The Brothers Three)chimed in, taking exception to Bosworth’s young heroine’s description of
desire as “a thing separate from me, a wild animal with a mind of its own,
attacking the bars of the cage I kept it in, looking for a weak spot.” He argued that the wish of women in
these stories to be “conquered and overpowered” was unhealthy and a result of
sexual stereotypes. Lee
agreed. Charlie stared off wistfully,
imagining what it must be like to conquer… anyone. As for the women at the Schmooze, they seemed to take
greater exception to the fact that all these young girls so easily achieved
orgasm in their first sexual at-bats!
– –
An aside
from Rita, after the Schmooze: "The Sex Schmooze was so good, I stayed up
half the night afterward still thinking. I particularly loved the examples
Charlie brought in of gendered Point of View differences – and the assumptions
this unearthed from all of the men and women in the room! A lot of the guys
took offense to the idea that the female point of view would involve sex as
surrender – as opposed to liberating or empowering – and even though I and
other women defended this as obvious, it really got me questioning whether I've
been harboring repressive ideas without realizing it. Which got me mining my memories
deeper, afterward, as well as remembering the experiences and attitudes of
various friends . . . "
Said
Sara Wilson Etienne after the Schmooze as well: "The best part of the night was when a
woman started off, "It's all about the male gaze . . . " and it took
some of us a while to figure out she meant gaze g-a-z-e and not gays . . . "
But we
did talk about gays, too, as you will see . . .
– –
Rita
quickly reeled in the discussion before Charlie could start talking about his first sexual at-bat and pointed us
to a blog post by author Marianna Baer.
She was having difficulty writing a sex scene, so she studied sex
scenes from various novels to help her break her block.
 |
| Author Marianna Baer |
This amazing
post not only answers the question of “How far can I go?” but Marianna also
addresses her own concern about “Where do I put their hands?” There’s too much great stuff in it to
recap here, but you owe it to yourself to click on over to it, if only to read
the beautiful and explicit excerpt from Jenny Downham’s devastating aforementioned novel Before
I Die, where oral
sex is not only a plot point and the consummation of the book, but deeply
moving as well.
Karol dubbed
it “Coming Home for the YA set!”
After
looking at all those novels, Marianna Baer came to the conclusion that the
secret to writing sex scenes is to think about them not as sex scenes but just
as scenes. The hands go wherever they would go to
show character and advance plot.
From
there we discussed sex and the market, quoting (March Schmooze guest) SonyaSones, whose poem Ice Capades from her novel What My Mother Doesn’t Know led to the book being banned and
thus selling through the roof!
Sones said she “never met a banned book list she didn’t want to be
on. I dance a happy little jig
every time my book makes the cut again!”
So, shockingly, sex sells.
Things
break down a little differently though, if your characters are gay. While straight characters seem to be
getting a lot of sex lately, with pressure from publishers to include more
titillation, gay characters are, sadly, pressured to be more celibate.
Lee
(whose blog, I’m Here. I’m Queer. What The Hell Do I Read, you really must check out) said,
“There’s definitely a straight kiss = PG13, gay kiss = R attitude that seems to
be operating in our culture, and that seems to be reflected in the very few MG
and YA books with major LGBTQ characters and themes.
One exception is YA author
Ellen Hopkins,
who is equally revealing
for all her very diverse characters in terms of their sex lives. She treats gay and straight and bi
characters the same, and I think that’s ultimately the guideline: don’t fade
out at the kiss for lesbians but write pages and pages of intimate physicality
for the heterosexual couple.”
Rita
thought that said it perfectly.
Charlie
stared off wistfully, thinking about lesbians kissing and pages and pages of
intimate physicality…
And then
it was time to go home. Of course
much more was discussed during the evening. Near the end, the Almighty came down and revealed the
secrets of connubial bliss, but to hear that you would’ve had to have been
there (hint: it has nothing to do with dill pickles and chicken feathers).
Still
not satiated? Here are some more
books, articles and excerpts cited in tonight's talk:
Rita
brought in contrasting examples from Kristin Cashore's Graceling and Will Davis's My Side of the
Story, which tied
in to the discussion on character point of view and gender, whether less is
always more (it depends on what you're trying to show), the power dynamic that
can be involved, and when and how to give nods to safe sex.
For more on gay sex
and the market - check out the “Four Levels of Sex Scenes” in the middle of
this article – fascinating!
Rita mentioned Storky, written by D. L. Garfinkle, a female author writing from the point of view of a high school guy. This was in response
to Charlie's wish to see a book truly, perhaps painfully, portray how focused many boys in
high school are on a particular body part, which may or may not be cooperating
at the precise moment when a guy gets called on to go to the front of the
class. Rita found this scenario portrayed convincingly in Storky and would like to know whether you do, too.
And
lastly…since apparently everyone was so completely astonished by her brilliance
and not at all because she’s in any way an egomaniac and, coincidentally, the
person who physically creates these blog posts…but merely because Charlie and Rita insisted…here are Karol’s kisses:
-->
From
page 319 of Cursed:
Suddenly,
he’s mashing his lips against mine, trying to put his tongue in my mouth. I keep my lips pressed together like
they’re super-glued so instead he just slimes up my face and it is gross,
gross, GROSS!
It’s
over in like a millisecond. I leap
to my feet, twisting my ankle in the process.
“What
the hell was that?” I yell.
“It’s
called kissing,” Paul says, like I’m the idiot here, but it’s his face that’s
all red. Good. He should be embarrassed. “I should have known a freak like you
would be a lousy kisser.”
From
pages 327-328 of Cursed:
“No,
dummy!” Jeremy says, “I don’t want to be just friends.”
He
laughs at me, and all I can think is – why is he laughing? – because I don’t get it and then, after a moment, what he
just said sinks in and…oh…and then I’m laughing, too, and then he’s moving closer to
me, but just his face, and before I know it, I’m moving, too, just my
face.
And
then his lips, his soft lips, touch mine.
And
our mouths open, just a little, and it’s not gross, not at all,
it’s…exhilarating, just like Dani and Noland said it would be.
And
then I stop thinking.
Stayed
tuned to this space for our recap of March’s special guest, YA novelist Sonya
Sones.
Until
then,
Keep
passing the open windows,
Charlie
& Karol
We assembled a crack panel of experts featuring Lee Wind,
Nutschell Windsor and representatives from The Pen & Ink Blog.
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