Literary Sex

I enjoy sex. I find it fulfilling, and fascinating, and, simply, fun.
However, I have an issue with writing about sex. Generally I find it distracting from serious literature. I wont say I dislike sex in my fiction, as a matter of fact I like it a great deal. I recently read John Ringo’s novel Kildar, which has a good amount of rather entertaining sexual encounters. I enjoyed the shit out of the entirety of the novel. That said, there is entertaining fiction and literary fiction. Not that literary fiction isnt entertaining, it should be or else it fails, but it is simply something different. Ringo, while being one of my favorite authors, is not a literary author. He makes far too much money and sells far too many books. I however am a literary writer. It is what I work towards being, and is as far as I am concerned my craft. In this environment I find sexuality verging on erotica to be distracting from the craft, the language, the writing.
However, my writing is a reflection of who I am, and things I believe in. Although I do not attempt to moralize or tell my readers how to believe, I hope that my writing gives a new perspective into unexplored areas. In many cases, these areas are unexplored to me as well as my audience, and it is through my writing that I work out some of my thoughts on them.
An area of recent shift to me is that of sexuality, and human relationships. I do not find my ideas there-upon that odd, and they are certainly not among some of the community I’ve surrounded myself with. There are however some of these ideas which are unresolved to me. As with everything else, it is in the doing that one works these things out, but as it is for writers, it is in the writing about it that we can flash upon, or cement in our own minds, things not entirely manifested to the mind during the doing.

And it is this which troubles me. It is hard to write about someone enjoying pain, or someone enjoying the company of more than one person (without denying actual love to either of them), or someone enjoying the plain, pure, simple, sexuality so many consider “natural”, without to some degree being explicit. Like all things, it is a balance I have yet to find a good way to achieve. I have with violence and action, and I am beginning to with the technical details which I enjoy and which are of import to the literary value for my fellow neobohemians who truly live and work in the remarkable arenas I write about the most, but sex is proving as yet a challenge.
I think, I really think, this is the perfect excuse I need for doing more research…