Your Kink Isn't Art

Liza Libes on Distinguishing Literature From Pornography

Dear Republic,

With Liza Libes’ reply, we now have that satisfying feeling of the last missing piece in the ‘Sex in Literature’ jigsaw puzzle.

-ROL

YOUR KINK ISN’T ART

“Serious” literature can have sex scenes, argues

Tolly Moseley

in her latest piece.

I concur. But the sort of sex scenes that appear in serious literature are not the sorts of sex scenes that Tolly wants us to write.

In my recent piece “Stop Writing Sex Scenes” for my Substack

Pens and Poison

, I argue that the best sort of sex writing is implicit rather than graphic. After all, sex is universal, but because everyone’s sexual appetites are so different, sex is one of the most difficult experiences to capture on the page without invoking the “cringe” factor—not necessarily because these scenes make us feel uncomfortable, but rather because they are distasteful and often gratuitous. Simply put, the vast majority of sex scenes are neither well-written nor beautiful.

So perhaps I should amend my original thesis. Sex writing is not inherently bad writing. But graphic, kinky sex sure tends to be.

To show you what I mean, let’s do some literary analysis.

In her piece, Tolly provides two examples of sex writing—one from Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (arguably a serious work of literature) and the other from Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior (definitely not a serious work of literature).¹ According to Tolly, there are three functions of sex scenes in literature: to “reveal a character’s emotional weather system,” to “put a spotlight on a character's private pain (and pleasure)” and to “normalize kink and sexual self-awareness.” The excerpt from Lady Chatterley’s Lover accomplishes the first of these, and the one from Bad Behavior fulfills the second. We shall deal with kink normalization later in the essay, but for now, let’s take a look at Lawrence and Gaitskill’s sex scenes.

While I am not personally a fan of Lawrence, I recognize his contributions to the literary world; to be sure, Lawrence is a Great Writer™ in the traditional sense of the term because he uses language to reveal the universal through the particular. At its best, after all, literature must show us what it means to be human by highlighting a particular aspect of the human experience.

My beef, then, is not with sex scenes per se but with sex scenes that do not aspire to comment on a universal aspect of human nature. Graphic sex, in its strangely anatomic and often fetishistic tone, tends not to lend itself well to this universal or beautiful sort of writing.

And what Tolly doesn’t realize is that she excerpts two wildly different sorts of sex scenes—one universal and beautiful and one not so much so.

Let’s take a look.

Then she quivered as she felt his hand groping softly, yet with queer thwarted clumsiness, among her clothing. Yet the hand knew, too, how to unclothe her where it wanted. He drew down the thin silk sheath, slowly, carefully, right down and over her feet. Then with a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched the warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had to come in to her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him, the entry into the body of the woman.

—D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

The last time I made a typing error and the lawyer summoned me to his office, two unusual things occurred. The first was that after he finished spanking me he told me to pull up my skirt. Fear hooked my stomach and pulled it toward my chest. I turned my head and tried to look at him.

“You’re not worried that I’m going to rape you, are you?” he said. “Don’t. I’m not interested in that, not in the least. Pull up your skirt.”

I turned my head away from him. I thought, I don’t have to do this. I can stop right now. I can straighten up and walk out. But I didn’t. I pulled up my skirt.

“Pull down your panty hose and underwear.”

A finger of nausea poked my stomach.

“I told you I’m not going to fuck you. Do what I say.”

The skin on my face and throat was hot, but my fingertips were cold on my legs as I pulled down my underwear and panty hose. The letter before me became distorted beyond recognition. I thought I might faint or vomit, but I didn’t. I was held up by a feeling of dizzying suspension, like the one I have in dreams where I can fly, but only if I get into some weird position.

At first he didn’t seem to be doing anything. Then I became aware of a small frenzy of expended energy behind me. I had an impression of a vicious little animal frantically burrowing dirt with its tiny claws and teeth. My hips were sprayed with hot sticky muck.

“Go clean yourself off,” he said. “And do that letter again.”

—Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior, the short story “Secretary”

What’s the first thing you feel when you read the scene from Lawrence? The tone is certainly tender—the characters’ actions even more so. Lawrence’s writing is undeniably explicit, but its aim is fundamentally literary. That is, this is not really a scene about sex—rather, Lawrence uses sex as a metaphor for an emotional landscape: he writes not to arouse but to explore the psychic and spiritual resonance of sex through a shared emotional moment. The woman’s body is soft and quiescent; the moment is peaceful and loving. We get the sense that sex means something: we’re not watching bodies copulate as much as we are observing souls attempting to merge.

Lawrence’s writing, therefore, is an example of what we call aesthetic beauty. His sex scene is universally recognizable because it is fundamentally not about sex. If there is sex in this scene, it is overshadowed by desire, spiritual bonding, and intimacy. Notice, again, that Lawrence’s writing is not particularly graphic—that is because he writes about sex in order to make a more universal statement about the human soul.

Gaitskill, on the other hand, does not attempt to reach such heights; there is nothing “deeper” going on in her scene. The sex is just sex, and it does not try to be beautiful or even erotic. Her language is clinical, grotesque, and intentionally disgusting; the experience she chronicles is degrading and even vulgar. Gaitskill’s writing might be the literary equivalent of Duchamp’s urinal: there is neither moral tension nor narrative consequence, and its entire purpose is to delight in the taboo by dressing up soft-core BDSM porn in a veil of minimalist prose.

While both scenes are sexual, therefore, only one is pornographic.

What Tolly misses is that there is a fundamental difference between the use of sex to explore the human condition and the use of sex to titillate under the guise of fiction. I would characterize Gaitskill’s writing as pornography far before I would deign to characterize it as literature simply because it does not aspire to literature’s more sublime purpose: to comment on a universal aspect of human nature through beauty.

And while Gaitskill defenders might argue that she’s “unpacking the masochistic tendencies of the female narrator” or “exploring trauma, power, shame,” great literature requires more than psychological accuracy—it must reflect human nature through a certain moral orientation. Not all emotionally raw stories are art, after all—or we would all be taking random Reddit posts about relationship abuse and calling them art. No—literature is not a license to detail trauma in high resolution and call it “art.” Literature must contain beauty and meaning.

The difference, then, between these two sex scenes is that while Lawrence gives us yearning and tenderness, Gaitskill writes about sex because she’s fascinated by kink—and perhaps because she needs an outlet for her own sexual fetishes.

This brings us to Tolly’s third point—that sex in literature normalizes kink and sexual self-awareness.

I have one question. Who the f*ck wants that?

Perhaps this point simply reflects an ideological difference in our worldviews, but I believe that we’ve gone way too far in normalizing kink in our society and that we should use literature instead to attempt to return to sanity. The literary establishment, unfortunately, replete with left-wing moral relativists, often elevates transgression for its own sake: the uglier, kinkier, and more disturbing the content, the more “serious” it must be. Such a line of thinking, however, has only led to an increasing number of people getting hurt. Take, for instance, the case of Neil Gaiman, whose obsession with BDSM culminated in an entire harem of women confused about whether or not they consented to have their pelvises brutally whipped. Similarly, the success of E.L. James’ steamy Fifty Shades of Grey, which has sold over 165 million copies as of 2021, has led not only to a decline in moral values but also to an increase in Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-inspired and BDSM-related injuries.

Perhaps where I am going with this is that contemporary sex writing might just be an excuse for the normalization of harmful behaviors. A healthy society, after all, does not broadcast its sexual deviants—it encourages both men and women alike to strive for healthy sexual relationships. Unfortunately, however, “kinky” sex scenes in literature are not just unrealistic—they also, as at least one study indicated, destroy women’s relationships in the same way that violent BDSM scenes in visual pornography pervert men’s expectations of sex. And if we shame men for watching violent porn and being unable to connect with women, why don’t we shame women for reading about disturbing sex in books? Both sexes, after all, have been sucked into porn—men through the “manosphere” and women through “literature.” And both sexes struggle to form meaningful bonds because our media grossly mischaracterizes what sex is supposed to be—an act of love and beauty.

Perhaps, then, the decay of meaningful books in our society has led to the abandonment of meaningful relationships—and we owe ourselves a duty not only to restore beauty to literature but also to restore normal human connection to our society.

The question, then, is not whether literature should depict sex but rather to what end. When sex in literature dares to touch the sublime, it earns its rightful place in the literary canon. But when it revels in degradation and fetish, it renounces its right to call itself literature because it does not aspire to the beautiful—and in so doing erodes the possibility of meaningful human connection.

In treating smut as serious literature, our culture has unfortunately not only forfeited its sense of aesthetics but also our understanding of healthy human relationships. Literature, after all, is simply a mirror to the human condition. And if literature is to mean anything at all, we must demand that it aspire to beauty for the sake of beauty.

Liza Libes found­ed her lit­er­ary project, Pens and Poi­son, in New York City. Her writ­ing has most recently appeared in The Hechinger Report, The American Spectator, and Minding the Campus.

1. Ouch - the editor