Sex scene, not heard (part three)

The scene we’ve been discussing is actually the second “big” sex scene in Fast Lane. I learned a lot from the first one and previous scenarios that take place in Lara’s imagination, but I still found myself wondering what made a great sex scene great.

In erotic romances I’ve read, the sex scenes remind me of the decidedly male-oriented “letters” to Penthouse magazine’s Forum that I find more comical than arousing.

Fortunately, I live with a woman who has read, reread and re-reread every Jennifer Crusie book. She took Welcome to Temptation and Faking It from their exalted positions on our bookshelves and pretty much opened each to within a page or two of some noteworthy carnality.

I love Crusie’s sense of humor, particularly the way she blends humor and sex. After all, sex is kinda funny—but the key is that in Crusie, the funny aspects enhance the arousing ones.

Crusie also demonstrates how an author can achieve huge popularity without writing Forum-like “clinical” descriptions or euphemistic purple prose. A few snippets from the two aforementioned books:

He kissed his way down the curve of her neck, into the hollow of her shoulder, and found a nerve there she didn’t know she had.

He moved higher this time until he hit something so good that Sophie jolted against him and said, “Oh, God, there.”

She gasped once as he licked inside her, and she grabbed the arm of the couch over her head to keep from sliding off, and then he licked her again and got serous and she gave herself up to the pressure he built slowly in her, thinking, This boy has a great mouth.

Top-notch stuff worthy of emulating.

To wit: “Clay kissed his way down the open V of the robe, and when he came to where it was still closed, he buried his face in the pink nap and pushed aside the dense fabric as he continued on his way. Lara sighed when Clay parted her legs and slid his clean-shaven chin up her thighs, stopping to tease her with his breath.”

Did I nail it? The Women of the Roundtable thought so. YMMV—and if it does, let me know.

Sex scene, not heard (part two)

The reason it’s “sex scene, not heard” is that I did not read it out loud. I needed to know if the women at the table found the scene arousing when they read it, and me barking the words at them didn’t seem like an effective approach.

As I thought they would, the ladies of the round table approached the assignment like pros.

“Excellent use of senses and description,” Kate wrote. “Sensual…delicately written…I tried to hide my blush.”

Judy liked reading what Lara was thinking while she was “stroking Clay through his white cotton briefs.” At this point, Lara’s seriously conflicted about her mission to destroy Clay, and the readers agreed the tension added an interesting dimension.

Christi enjoyed Lara’s musings about Clay’s unexpected underwear, but suggested I better describe how Lara grabs Clay by the face to pull him up from in between her legs.

On a related topic, more than one reader noted that as much as a gal likes looking at a guy with an unshaven face, she wants him to put some mileage on his razor before putting his face anywhere close to her thighs. Duh.

Sheila didn’t write anything, but she gave the scene a thumbs-up and a nod. High praise, indeed.

Finally, there was some disagreement about duration. Fodder for a stand-up? Not really. Kim thought there “could be even more of the scene—building up excitement and anticipation.” Judy, though, was glad the scene played out in six hundred words.

“In one book I read,” she explained, “there was eight pages of sex in a row, and I kept thinking, ‘Get on with it already.’”

Sex scene, not heard (part one)

The most recent batch of pages I brought to my writing group included a sex scene. Should be no big deal for serious adults, right?

Well, sure—except for the part about reading this kind of material at a table with women filling half of the seats. That problem got “solved” when the other men in the group decided to stay home for the evening.

Oh, well. What they would have said wasn’t really the issue.

Of course, there was also the chance someone would laugh. Me, for instance. Once a sixth-grader, always a sixth-grader.

But let’s be honest. Sex writing can be funny. It was a thread at a website called All About Romance, where commenters said words like “throbbing,” “pulsating” and “turgid” and references to men with “hard thighs” made them want to throw the book across the room. One said that when “aching buds” stand in for erect nipples, she “skims over it to get to the story.”

“What to do?” one commenter lamented. “We don't want to go back to the days of the Hayes office, when one foot had to remain on the floor at all times.”

The scene in Fast Lane contains no turgidity. Nothing pulsates or throbs. There are no buds, aching or otherwise. But Lara and Clay don’t exactly have one foot on the floor. They go down on each other, have a little fun rolling a condom into place, then have sex.

It’s better than that, really. No…really! I have proof in the form of written notes from five actual women who, in the end, really did handle the assignment like serious adults.

The full report on what they said will appear in part two.

Hang up the phone and bring on the thigh-highs

Maybe you’ve seen ads like this: A guy’s with a beautiful woman and he has to choose between her and beer.

And he chooses beer.

Man, these ads are not selling beer. They’re selling sickness.

Sorry to be so serious, but there is nothing funny about a man picking beer over a babe who’s obviously interested in him.

Neither is the one with a bunch of people who are so fixated on their phones they’re oblivious to what’s going on around them. One of them is a loser sitting in bed unaware of the gorgeous female parading around in a teddy and black thigh-highs.

The key word here is “loser.”

I guarantee you, if the choice is between a phone that shuts you off from the world and black thigh-highs, I’m going with the stockings 100% of the time.

I don’t see how there’s even a choice. And neither does my hero, Clay.

Upon further review…maybe not so sexy

I watched 9½ Weeks the other night for the first time since 1986 and I have one question.

What the—?

It’s about a newly divorced woman who gets into a dominance-and-submission relationship with a mysterious stranger. After a while, though, she gets tired of their games and tells him to go fuck himself.

Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s there was a spate of movies about how our society’s love/hate relationship with sex makes people crazy. Sex, Lies and Videotape. Dangerous Liaisons. Fatal Attraction. Basic Instinct. Jade. Disclosure. Sliver. The Color of Night. They were all marginally erotic—and thoroughly unromantic.

Sex, Lies and Videotape was about a guy who couldn’t get off with an actual woman. Basic Instinct theorized that repressing homosexuality could lead one into an alternative (psychopathic) lifestyle. Disclosure and Fatal Attraction warned histrionically about sexuality in the workplace—and threw in a recipe for rabbit stew.

No one had any idea what Jade, Sliver and Color of Night were about, but Dangerous Liaisons featured people wearing wigs, so I am genetically incapable of understanding any of it, except where Keanu Reeves says, “Whoa.”

For some reason I remembered 9½ Weeks fondly. Maybe it was how good Kim Basinger looked in a business suit. Then again, every woman looks good in a business suit, so maybe it was the scene in which ice is dripped onto the Basinger belly. Or the one in which Basinger goes solo in Soho. Or where Basinger bags the benjamins as she crawls across the floor.

Hot. Hot. And kinda hot, but you probably wouldn’t admit it if you wanted to run for president someday. Still, keeping those scenes and junking the rest would have made for a fairly compelling six-minute movie.

I know, you’re thinking, “But, Dave, the scene that had everyone talking was Mickey Rourke pushing olives, cherries and Jell-O past those luscious lips and dumping milk and mustard all over Basinger’s bodacious bod.”

My take: Like the sex-in-the-sink-with-the-dirty-dishes scene in Fatal Attraction, this scene is, shall we say, icky.

Some critics call 9½ Weeks a “self-destructive romance” that explores darker aspects of human sexuality. But any time a man in a movie says to a woman he hardly knows, “Will you take off your dress?” and she does, I’m only left wondering, “What the—?”

Pick-up game

Is the first thing a man says to a woman he’s attracted to necessarily a pick-up line? Maybe. But that doesn’t make it something sinister. My guess is a sizable percentage of “pick-up” lines are conversation starters gone awry uttered by regular Joes guilty of nothing more than trying too hard.

But, gee…you have to say something.

I met the woman who’s now been my wife for twenty-eight years during my sophomore year of college at a party at her house. A noisy, crowded party. I said, “You’re in my English class!” And she said, “No…I tested out of English.”

A defining moment in a relationship if ever there was one.

Since my hero and heroine in Fast Lane have never met, I have to have one of them say something to break the ice. A mutual acquaintance leads Clay through a noisy, crowded party at his house to where Lara waits at a railing, silhouetted against the moonlit sea.

He says, “The view is amazing from here.”
And she says, “Yes, I’ve always loved the ocean.”
And then he says, “Me, too. But I’m not talking about the ocean.”

Comments I got from my writing group were:

“Typical—what a line!”
“Groan—but great in how it establishes the character” and
“So suave.”

Whoever wrote that last one didn’t write a name on the copy, so I can’t tell if it was a guy being sincere or a woman being sarcastic.

I suppose women hear so many lines that, eventually, none of them sound good. If Clay’s line is romantic, great. If it’s funny (groan) or funny (typical), also great! That’s an advantage of writing a funny romance. I can’t lose—especially if I succeed in establishing character.

I looked around online and found no shortage of sites offering doofy pick-up lines. The best I saw were, “Is it hot in here, or is it just you?” “If I could rewrite the alphabet, I would put U and I together,” and “Nice shoes. Wanna fuck?”

I have a pretty good idea what would have happened if I had opened with that last one all those years ago. But I know for sure my life might have been a lot different if I had used that second one. As everyone reading this knows, the correct grammar is “U and me,” not “U and I,” and the mere suggestion I didn’t know the difference could have made my first line my last.