This Is What Sex Looks Like
The first sex scene piqued my curiosity but left me unsatisfied. My mom’s intervention denied me the opportunity to get a glimpse, and I have a feeling the film wouldn’t have been very generous with the details, either; these were teenagers, after all. But I wanted to see what sex looked like—all kids do. My friends and I would look up sex in the dictionary, hoping for a clue, but like another three letter word—God—it points to something so vast that it’s almost meaningless.
The sex scene in Fargo took a concept and gave it a body—four bodies, in fact, engaging in the act of sex simultaneously, graphically, unmistakably. This was what I had hoped for during that brief interruption to Cliffhanger. It wasn’t about love, or even desire—it was about sex, and what sex looks like.
I don’t recall any written sex scenes that made such an impression on me as a kid, which is surprising, since I was a precocious reader and had more access to graphic adult material in books than I did in films. But the sex I encountered in novels was probably couched in innuendo, in metaphor. I’ll bet I passed over some of the more artfully constructed sex scenes without even realizing that they were supposed to have been sex scenes at all.
The one written sex scene I do remember—in a book my mom gave me about how to be a writer—didn’t actually contain any sex. In the chapter about writing sex scenes, it instructed budding authors to get a little creative with the act. Don’t be so expected, so banal, it urged. There was an example of a “good” sex scene (I almost feel like “sex” belongs in quotation marks too). A woman asks a man if he has ever held a raw egg. She breaks one in his hand, and he describes how it feels for the runny white to slide between his fingers. Something weighty and important was being communicated, something that could not be conveyed by a straightforward description of the sexual act. I felt like a joke was being told that I didn’t quite get—it was slippery and off-putting, like the egg itself.
While the humor in Fargo might have been over my head, the sex scene was not—there was no mistaking what was going on in the two hotel beds. Those bouncy hookers took my curiosity and shoved it down my throat in a way that almost made me want to gag: there was something repulsive in the way they bounced so nonchalantly and openly, panting alongside one another like animals.
Now I have a full-fledged sex life of my own, but my childhood frustration with the bigness and vagueness of the word “sex” persists. I don’t see how a single word can encompass such conflicting encounters, such cacophony of emotion, and still hold meaning. The word doesn’t contain the experiences it references.
I keep a mental list of everyone I’ve slept with, and people sometimes tell me this is silly—that a blowjob is just as intimate as intercourse. I think that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Holding hands with my middle school boyfriend while I rode his skateboard down the street was more intimate than the sex I barely remember having on the last night of summer in Yosemite. Should I put that on my list?
I suppose I could make one list for all the intimate encounters, one for all the non-intimate ones, and one for everything in between. But at a certain point, this exercise would render me list-less, with separate accounts of the radical particularity of each encounter. And the list was supposed to show me how these elements hung together as one. In many ways, they don’t.
You could say that this shows the failure of the word “sex” to serve as an appropriate category for my experiences. But this would be denying the ability of language to do more than just categorize—it also performs. The point of the list was not to simply catalogue intimacy but to enact it—to make something out of language that did more than just reference and describe the past. I want to make a list that is as vivid and surprising as the sex it points to. I want to find language that surprises and delights and disturbs and disgusts, that is as viscous and raw as the egg it describes.