NANCY FRIDAY

 

New York Times:  Let’s Read About Sex

October, 2013

 

Sex is hard in words. Stories seduce a different part of the brain — the one that, er, thinks ... The real triggers of lust are rarely the food of great literature.

 

While the Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller, John Wilmot, and Erica Jong are worthy salacious suspects, my gold star goes elsewhere, to those who really do it best: horny women. Think of those whose filthy, uncensored fantasies froth forth in Nancy Friday’s collections, like Vesuvius upended, silencing the sentimental soft-core of Anaïs Nin and E. L. James in a single eruption. Here, unconsidered desire slices swiftly to the core of lust, and with their — our — trailer-trash orgies of incest, bestiality, rape, pedophilia, domination and submission, whoredom and heterosexual lesbianism we eat our cake before baking it. And leave men reeling in trailer blowback.

 

Wrong is hot, and great writing, by definition, can just never be quite wrong enough.

 

Roundup:  TONI BENTLEY

Writing about sex can be uniquely powerful — and perilous. A group of novelists, memoirists and poets tell us about working blue: what novels first inspired them,... and who they think writes sex best.