ah the usual frustration
In other words, another post about the vocabulary-related frustrations of writing erotica that includes the ladies. Haha, hoshizora just friended me and this is the first thing I post.
See, when you're writing about men-slash or het, it matters not-there isn't a lot of disagreement, or a lot of words that squick people, or that they "don't like". Cocks are hard. Whether that man and his hard cock are penetrating a woman or another man, you don't need to say too awfully much about what is being penetrated-it's slick and tight, and may have a sweet spot to feel for and rub against. And … that's about it.
Now, I don't write a whole lot of oral sex, mostly because I like to write people kissing and/or talking in some way. I have a thing for the face to face, and I'm willing to admit that. (I also don't often write people being penetrated from behind.) And when I write femslash sex scenes they tend to be either mutual masturbation or a kind of unclothed frottage. Again, I don't get into a lot of details; I talk about how things feel rather than how they look.
But recently I wrote a scene of a man giving oral sex to a woman-it's in beta-and I found myself stumbling all over the place with the description. Much has been said about the lack of a female counterpart to cock; there doesn't seem to be a word we can agree on. (Personally I go back and forth between pussy and quim. Quim is rather old-fashioned but I like it because it suggests something full of liquid, and pussy's a perennial. I'm not fond of cunt-it doesn't feel descriptive in the way I want it to be. It's full of hard consonants which seems like a bad word to describe something that's fleshy and wet.) We describe cocks all the goddamned time, the head and the shaft and maybe a vein and some pubic hair that's often called either a "thatch" or a "nest" and how hard and dry they are unless you've got some kind of buckets of precome thing going on. But quims, god, does anyone really describe them?
I had been trying to avoid the word "wet" which can be a little overused and which feels kinda pornish to me in a bad way-that "ooh, my panties are so wet" sort of thing. But "moist" and "damp" are words that turn off many people even outside of a sexual context, so I settled on "glistening." Here's the passage: She spread her legs, obligingly, and yeah, this part he'd want to keep private, the soft curly brown hair surrounding the glistening pink folds of skin. He wrapped a hand around each thigh and reached out with his tongue to her soft flesh. A wonderful thing about Hermione was that she never started from zero, was always a little wet, though the sweat from a hot day mixed in, making her skin just a little saltier than usual. There hadn't been time for this before, but over this summer he'd become rather addicted to going down on his girlfriend, to the way she felt and smelled and tasted, the way she moaned, the way her skin flushed pink.
And after all that, of course someone who was reading it said "personally I hate the word glistening." Whereupon your writer headdesked.
I mean, are we so trapped in our internalized misogyny (thanks, patriarchy!) that there is actually no way in English to describe the genitals of an aroused female without grossing out part of one's audience, without landing on a squicky word that will throw people out of the scene? I've put my own stake in the ground regarding the whole synonym for vagina thing, but am I just going to have to let the much-hated synonyms for "wet" be the same? Just land on a couple while knowing that someone's going to hate them?
SO, here's what I got from the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (the one included in my version of Mac OSX). I know some of these words might be a little silly, but I decided for the purposes of this poll not to put my own editorial spin on the list. And ticky boxes are so two thousand-late.
Poll
Why is there so much hatred for the word "moist" anyway? I'd use that word all the time if it didn't piss people off so damn much.
See, when you're writing about men-slash or het, it matters not-there isn't a lot of disagreement, or a lot of words that squick people, or that they "don't like". Cocks are hard. Whether that man and his hard cock are penetrating a woman or another man, you don't need to say too awfully much about what is being penetrated-it's slick and tight, and may have a sweet spot to feel for and rub against. And … that's about it.
Now, I don't write a whole lot of oral sex, mostly because I like to write people kissing and/or talking in some way. I have a thing for the face to face, and I'm willing to admit that. (I also don't often write people being penetrated from behind.) And when I write femslash sex scenes they tend to be either mutual masturbation or a kind of unclothed frottage. Again, I don't get into a lot of details; I talk about how things feel rather than how they look.
But recently I wrote a scene of a man giving oral sex to a woman-it's in beta-and I found myself stumbling all over the place with the description. Much has been said about the lack of a female counterpart to cock; there doesn't seem to be a word we can agree on. (Personally I go back and forth between pussy and quim. Quim is rather old-fashioned but I like it because it suggests something full of liquid, and pussy's a perennial. I'm not fond of cunt-it doesn't feel descriptive in the way I want it to be. It's full of hard consonants which seems like a bad word to describe something that's fleshy and wet.) We describe cocks all the goddamned time, the head and the shaft and maybe a vein and some pubic hair that's often called either a "thatch" or a "nest" and how hard and dry they are unless you've got some kind of buckets of precome thing going on. But quims, god, does anyone really describe them?
I had been trying to avoid the word "wet" which can be a little overused and which feels kinda pornish to me in a bad way-that "ooh, my panties are so wet" sort of thing. But "moist" and "damp" are words that turn off many people even outside of a sexual context, so I settled on "glistening." Here's the passage: She spread her legs, obligingly, and yeah, this part he'd want to keep private, the soft curly brown hair surrounding the glistening pink folds of skin. He wrapped a hand around each thigh and reached out with his tongue to her soft flesh. A wonderful thing about Hermione was that she never started from zero, was always a little wet, though the sweat from a hot day mixed in, making her skin just a little saltier than usual. There hadn't been time for this before, but over this summer he'd become rather addicted to going down on his girlfriend, to the way she felt and smelled and tasted, the way she moaned, the way her skin flushed pink.
And after all that, of course someone who was reading it said "personally I hate the word glistening." Whereupon your writer headdesked.
I mean, are we so trapped in our internalized misogyny (thanks, patriarchy!) that there is actually no way in English to describe the genitals of an aroused female without grossing out part of one's audience, without landing on a squicky word that will throw people out of the scene? I've put my own stake in the ground regarding the whole synonym for vagina thing, but am I just going to have to let the much-hated synonyms for "wet" be the same? Just land on a couple while knowing that someone's going to hate them?
SO, here's what I got from the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (the one included in my version of Mac OSX). I know some of these words might be a little silly, but I decided for the purposes of this poll not to put my own editorial spin on the list. And ticky boxes are so two thousand-late.
Poll
Why is there so much hatred for the word "moist" anyway? I'd use that word all the time if it didn't piss people off so damn much.