From Bad Sex to Good Sex: A brief personal history
My impatience with bad sex began years before I even understood what sex actually was.
It was a chilly morning in church. I was ten. I sat on my hard seat, reading. The tome on my lap would occupy much of my childhood and adolescence, namely: the bible.
The particular section of the bible I was reading, Leviticus, is a thrilling, terrifying compendium of sexual crime and punishment: all the sex is bad. That morning I pulled the binding open a little more—a rather sexual gesture, now that I remember it, spreading the book wider--searching for any tiny hidden detail that might make the sex less murderous. Someone in Leviticus is always being stoned to death or cast out into the desert for committing some perversion or engaging in fornication. That’s why I read Leviticus: it was kink-before-kink.
An Elder, up at the front of the congregation, droned on. I read and pulled and peered: maybe there was an illustration hidden in the secret crotch of the book. Somehow I had already gleaned the understanding—from my body-positive mother, perhaps? from my older sister? from my own body?—that sex could be pleasurable. It couldn’t all be like Leviticus. Life was too good for that. My own body often felt so good sometimes: why were all the bodies in Leviticus so bad?
Bad sex in books falls into three distinct categories: 1) anatomically stupid, impossible or ridiculous sex that is poorly written 2) real human regular sex that is poorly written 2) punishing sex that is well-written yet rooted, like Leviticus, in shameful misery.
My impatience with actual bad sex began the first time I experienced it. I was seventeen, crazy in love, when my older—supposedly experienced--boyfriend interrupted me as I just starting to have an orgasm. He stopped thrusting and hissed, “Shh! You’re making too much noise!” I was not; I was just breathing loudly. Moaning, maybe. He stopped that, too, by covering my mouth with his hand in a decidedly unerotic way.
Major buzz kill! Needless to say, I never had that orgasm. It was one of many that got away. I’d never been so close to coming during sex, which at that time was a relatively new activity for me. The experience set me back a few years orgasm-wise by making me second-guess my own healthy physiological responses. Shame and embarrassment do not make for ease and joy in bed.
Dear reader, take a breath.
Or have a sip of water/coffee/tea/wine. Notice how my brief, truthful anecdote about bad sex may have caused a personal memory, judgment, desire or censor to flick through your own brain and body. Or maybe not: you may have been a fortunate initiate and continue to be an at-ease participant in the world of sex. But many of us can recall various unhappy experiences during a sexual encounter last century or last night.
Despite the pretend-ease popular culture cultivates about sexuality, despite all the sexy advertising we see every day, despite all the sexy Netflix series (that so often miss the mark, it seems to me) sex remains a minefield, despite its potential to give us so much happiness.
In my own struggles around monogamy, sexual identity, and sexual abuse, I decided to write a novel that honestly explored my erotic life. I didn’t want to echo the corporate blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey, in which a young inexperienced woman tolerates sexual practices she genuinely dislikes (BDSM) in order to hold on to her rich, wounded man.
“Fifty Shades is Bad Sex #1 and #2 to the power of almost a billion dollars. Bad sex, in many forms, gave us the highest grossing novel of all time.”
By the end of that famous trilogy, published by mega-publisher PenguinRandomHouse, the young woman heals her kinky-but-not-really-kinky CEO with love. He gives up his whips and chains for a vanilla happily-ever-after. We learn that his proclivities were actually his whoring mother’s fault. (What a surprise!) Fifty Shades is Bad Sex #1 and #2 to the power of almost a billion dollars. Bad sex, in many forms, gave us the highest grossing novel of all time. Fifty Shades was important, too, because it dared to make transgressive sex the centre of a young woman’s life (without killing her, yay).
As a literary writer. I knew I couldn’t do any gradations of Fifty Shades. Nor did I wish to contribute another volume to the library of fine but depressing novels that depict sex as 100% consensual yet abusive and fun-free. I deal with a lot of sexual trauma in my work as a therapist and while I touch upon the same in The Change Room, I didn’t want to sink into the hard world of trauma. (Wait for my next book.) In exploring my own vision of a liberated sexuality, I wanted to allow my characters to be healed already, and to have a lot of sexual fun.
“But can we have literary sex without pathology? Can we have any sex without pathology?”
In the middle of writing the novel, I complained to a colleague that writing the sex scenes was taking too long. She laughed and said, “Well, if you used two hands, I bet your work would go a lot faster.” It had become a joke among my friends that the sex “research” I was doing for my novel—learning more about sex workers, strap-ons, kink dynamics, adultery, polyamory—was preventing me from actually writing it. But the serious truth is that masturbation and multiple tantric orgasms really can aid the creative process!
In writing The Change Room, I had my own revolution, featuring a woman like the women I know, a woman like me, married-with-children, a self-employed, mildly work-obsessed powerhouse. I put her in a neighborhood in a big city—Toronto—and surrounded her with diverse people living realistic urban lives. In this postmodern plugged-in world, many of us get too busy and exhausted for sex with our partners, especially if we have small children. Married sex can get boring. I gave my protagonist Eliza an exciting adulterous relationship. Usually, in books and often in life, women who have affairs are brutally punished, sometimes by the death of their children or by the ultimate silencing of murder. But I decided early on that no women or children would be harmed or killed in the making of my novel.
Eliza meets and immediately lusts after the tall, dark stranger she meets at the local pool. A tumultuous affair quickly begins. The relationship is unexpected: the tall dark stranger is another woman. I used the novel as a place to explore my own bisexuality. Though I’ve written about my relationships before, The Change Room was the first time I’d ever come out so explicitly, so, uh, nakedly.
The other woman is also a sex worker. I’ve had friends, neighbours, and relatives who’ve been sex workers of various kinds. When I was younger, I often considered doing sex work, but another job or grant rolled in on time, so I didn’t get further than wondering, Could I? In my novel, tall, dark, handsome Shar is mixed-race and middle-class, but she is also an immigrant, Middle Eastern, European, North American; she is an intellectual, a polyglot, a singular and single woman who is dedicated to her own freedom and to her own pleasure. She is also the survivor of a truly horrific act of sexual violence, but she is private about that part of her past, which she considers healed.
As I said: wait for the next novel. I’m finally writing about incest and sexual violence. I needed to write The Change Room first, in order to claim my own (fictionalized) body as a site of a pleasure and freedom.
So. I let my two beautiful women meet at the public swimming pool. Why not? It’s a place charged with intersecting energies: of women’s and men’s bodies, of children’s bodies, of families playing, of nakedness or near nakedness, and of immersion in water, which is closely linked to sexuality and freedom. My novel, I knew early on, would be called The Change Room.
As a former fundamentalist Christian, it was liberating to create female characters who transgress sexually and are not punished. From the bible at ten, throughout my adolescence and early adulthood, I witnessed, read, experienced, and absorbed the punishment of girls and women. Violence in the form of punishment is a human problem: it’s not limited to gender or sexual expression. I’ve experienced various forms of punishment from women (bullying, slur campaigns, pathological narcissism) as well as from men (child sexual abuse, unwanted touching, rape, garden-variety dickheadedness). Having explored punishment in life, in work, and through writing some of my other books, I was deeply weary of it. I wanted to liberate my women and set pathology aside.
But can we have literary sex without pathology? Can we have any sex without pathology? Even in The Change Room, tucked in at the edges and slivered into the heart of it, brief stories reveal the violence that can undo any woman’s life. Knowing what I do about real life, I couldn’t write a novel full of sex without sexual wounds.
Writing about any sex—good, bad, or joyful—with intimate honesty continues to be a minefield. One of my closest friends, a lesbian--who also has sexual relationships with men--ended our friendship because she felt I had appropriated the lesbian body and experience by writing The Change Room. She never read the book; she said she couldn’t bear to. Her decision to end the friendship also meant the end of my belonging to our shared tribe of friends.
For the second time in my life, after being ostracized from the church as a wayward teenager, I was kicked out of the clubhouse by close friends. The sisterhood can be a real bitch. Writing a book in which no women were punished proved to be the most punishing experience of my adult life.
Eventually, after a lot of forgiveness work, I came to empathize with my friend’s anger and reactivity: no queer person comes through society’s heteronormative gauntlet unscathed. My ex-friend was still suffering from wounds and betrayals that had upended her life: my novel about two women having an affair was too triggering. And while our culture uses female bisexuality as pornographic and erotic fodder, the out and vocal bisexual threatens both gay and straight men and women.
No matter what we do in bed, or who we do it with, many of us are still coping with our own or loved ones’ experiences of past betrayal and trauma. We are often helplessly enmeshed in or mesmerized by our deepest wounds. The Change Room was my attempt as a novelist to claim pleasure over pain.
“For the second time in my life, after being ostracized from the church as a wayward teenager, I was kicked out of the clubhouse by close friends. The sisterhood can be a real bitch. Writing a book in which no women were punished proved to be the most punishing experience of my adult life. ”
In this crucial age of #metoo, our culture is taking a hard look at the ways in which men abuse their power sexually, but it’s still difficult to talk about our desires and the complicated, tender work of fulfilling them. How do we find joy in sexuality, especially when we’ve experienced trauma? How do we have good sex if we don’t have a partner? How do we find sexual pleasure if we’re still struggling with past sexual trauma?
The height of #metoo may have been the worst time to publish a book about joyful sex. It was also the very best of times: to remind myself and my readers that such sex—gorgeous, hedonistic, madly delightful, sometimes ridiculously and passionately desired sex—still exists.
Sexual pleasure is our birthright. Sometimes to claim that right, we have to undertake the hard work hard of healing our sexual wounds. We are blessed to live in a time and a place where we have both the vocabulary and the wisdom to approach and accomplish that vital work. We can rediscover the freedom inside our bodies.
In my work as a therapist, I’m blessed to watch women and men do precisely that. I encourage people to write about their sexual fears, desires, wounds, and fantasies as a way of approaching that freedom independently. There are trauma-informed ways of doing this safely. The power of writing down these explorations is undeniable. It’s one of my core approaches to therapeutic work: witnessing people’s lives through narrative. When we tell the stories of our lives, we can begin to change the narrative. Writing about sex openly, allowing my frustrations and fantasies onto the page, was truly transformative. It freed me. And brought a new openness to my relationship.
While the struggle for gender equality is ongoing, women in many countries are free in ways we’ve never been before. Men are free, too, and people of non-binary sexualities and genders. Many people fought hard, with tenacity and passion, to get us here, to a place and a time in which we have the legal right to live and love differently, to heal, to embrace not only each other but also ourselves, the good and the bad, the whole of our beings. That is something to celebrate.
A big kill-joy hand might still threaten to cover our open mouths, but we are wiser now, in bed and out of it. We know that we can make as much noise as we want.