Ardeur

It’s an old and well-used maxim that you gotta start with a joke. With that in mind, I’d like to tell you about the time Ms. Hamilton announced that she would never, ever write a sex scene. It was an ironclad rule: No Sex On Stage.

That’s right. No sex for Anita. Ever. At least, not in front of her readers.

Stop laughing. I can hear you from here, you know. Honest, she really said that. And with a long tradition of sexy but not sexual vampires in the literature, there was no reason to suspect at the time that Anita would ever be sleeping with the undead, except possibly in a purely literal fashion.

Sure, the phrase sleep with to mean sexual intercourse has been servicing the law, and authors, since at least the tenth century. But as late as the nineteenth century, while everyone and his dog were probably humping everything in sight (though, we hope, not each other), no one was going to talk about it. Even though humping as an alternative to sleep with had evolved by the late 1700s (servicing was even older than that) and was clearly available, titillating readers rather than thrusting sex in their faces was the order of the day.

Call it the age of coyness, at least ideally. John Polidori, the first to mingle vampires and noblemen, wrote that his vampire, Lord Ruthven, in the story “The Vampyre: A Tale,” seduced women so that they were “hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation.” In fact, so sullied were they, that they became wantons who cared nothing for their reputations or those of their families. They “had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their vices to the public gaze.” One suspects that Polidori, if not familiar with much sexual licentiousness before meeting his employer, Lord Byron, was much more educated afterward, and yet, his prose remained proper. Despite the swath Lord Ruthven cut through the unsullied young women of Europe, the author’s eyes remained politely averted while all of this degradation was actually taking place.

Well! Long gone are the days when phrases like “hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue” could make a reader hot and bothered. Anita, of course, has no patience for such long-windedness, and anyone who’s managed to get to the end of Polidori’s story might be forgiven for wanting to hire Anita to stake him simply for his run-on sentences. (One hopes he was a better doctor than he was a writer.) By concentrating on heiresses hurled from pinnacles rather than depicting characters putting the sour cream in the burrito, Polidori had successfully stormed the pearly gates with the English of his time. But we’ve come a long way since then, haven’t we?

Literature no longer requires coy phrases like “hurled to the lowest abyss of degradation.” And yet, even so, for the modern author, English still sucks donkey balls sometimes. Not when it comes to cutesy semi-crude phrases like sucks donkey balls. No, then English is your whore. When Hamilton wants Anita to date worm food, watch the idiot box, and eat shit on a shingle, she’s got it made. But sex? Then English isn’t so helpful.

Onward, chers lecteurs. . . .

The most famous vampire of all, Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, followed in Lord Ruthven’s tracks. He was a blue blood. He was cultured, had good manners, and conducted the proper sorts of gentlemanly business, like purchasing parcels of land that used to belong to the Church. He, too, was handsome and fascinating (although with “massive eyebrows”) and traveled in high society. However, society—and language—had moved on a bit. Well, a tiny bit.

Though residing still in the land of skirted tables and chicken bearing “dark” and “white” meat instead of “legs” and “breasts,” Dracula and his pursuers had at least moved up the symbolism scale from just teeth to other things, like needles. Tres kinky! No longer were characters penetrating the flesh of women with mere teeth! Science, in the person of Abraham Van Helsing, allowed them to do so with hollow metal tubes. And even though Stoker wrote his work in a pre-Freudian age, the symbolism is all too clear. Not even the thesaurus I consulted on the topic was fooled, as, in place of needle, it offered up prick. No subtlety there.

As Mina finds Lucy Westenra in a strange sleeping stupor in a cemetery, she reports that Lucy breathes in “long, heavy gasps” and she shudders and moans. Although a modern reader used to plain speaking might pass over this, no Victorian reader would be fooled. Dracula has, ah, gone like a rat up a drainpipe, as it were.

But Lucy is a she-devil who finds Victorian prudery and marriage laws so constricting that she complains that having one husband is not enough (“Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her ...”). And she will, by the time her head is chopped off, have been married by blood to no fewer than five husbands. Well, not legal husbands, but you understand what symbolism is, mon cher.

Van Helsing certainly understands symbolism, even if the rest of Stoker’s putative heroes do not. He warns Seward, the second blood donor, “Mind, nothing must be said of this. If our young lover should turn up unexpected . . . It would at once frighten him and enjealous him.” Sharing one woman among several men just ain’t the Victorian idea of a proper relationship, but the idea sure made Dracula’s original readers a bit breathless. Anita wouldn’t know anything about that, of course (oh, wait ...).

We must find a soft spot for poor Quincey Morris who, while symbolically wedded by a needle to the woman he loves, not only dies for her, but comes fifth out of five—after not only Lucy’s fiancé, but a vampire, a madhouse doctor, and a seventy-year-old married Dutchman whose wife is a bit of a Bertha Rochester. Well, one can’t have everything in love. That’s something Anita grapples with continually in the series. And so does Nathaniel. And Richard. Just to name a few.

But forget just your ordinary, everyday lusts, needles substituting for penises, and crazy Dutchmen. Stoker even titillated his Victorian readers with hints of homoeroticism. When Jonathan Harker is attacked by three vampire women (Harker, ever conscious of class, notes clearly that they appear to be “ladies”), Dracula rescues Harker in a fury. Upon being charged by the women that he does not love, Dracula does something very curious: “Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper—‘Yes, I too can love.’”

Mon dieu! It would appear that Dracula is perfectly willing to swing both ways, to fly the rainbow flag, to be a friend of Dorothy, at least with Harker. Now that’s something Jean-Claude knows a thing or two about. In Danse Macabre, Asher tells Anita that, although he and Jean-Claude have been lovers and, indeed, look forward to being lovers again, “Jean-Claude would never be content with just men in his bed. He is a lover of women above all else.”²

But he’s a lover of men, too. Where Stoker only hinted around the subject with eyes averted, Hamilton screams it out loud, with eyes open and lights on. And while Anita is carnally entwined with Auggie and Jean-Claude in Danse Macabre, in full view of every preternatural creature in St. Louis. But when one decides to go there, one really needs to start assessing how much help and/or hindrance English is going to be.

As was explained to me by another writer long ago, “Think about it—is there really an uglier-sounding word in English than vagina?” Hmm, well, maybe debacle. Or pustule. Maybe.

The situation with vagina is bad enough that Eve Ensler felt compelled to write The Vagina Monologues, an entire play about women getting all sappy about their own anatomy. Though to be fair, they’re celebrating the organ, not the word itself.

Still, the point is made: English lacks sexy words for sexy things. One can certainly engage in bed boogie, but honestly, would one really want to?

Let’s start with sex itself. One can have sex or make love and be talking about something relatively ordinary in a relatively polite way. Otherwise, you’re going to have to go with something more clinical (intercourse, penetration), euphemistic (sleep with, do) or rude (screw, fuck). Not a whole lot of choice when you’re going for erotic rather than clinical, boring, or rude. This paucity of words to describe the act, well, sucks. Hell, you want to set a mood for the readers, right? The sex shouldn’t just be sex, it should lead to character development and plot development and be erotic at the same time. And if that isn’t bad enough, it’s got to be well-written.

Who’d set themselves up for that on purpose? Yeah, writers. Many of us aren’t terribly bright sometimes.

Ah, c’est la vie . . . or l’amour . . . or volupté. And describing the act doesn’t even begin to address the problem of what to do with the body parts. Well, not what to do with them, exactly, but what to call them.

If vagina just doesn’t sound right, would cunt suit any better? Eh, too rude. How about passage? That one gets a lot of use, though not by Hamilton, and is accurate enough that it isn’t even quite a euphemism. And let’s not forget glory hole. Wait—on second thought, maybe we should. I’ll forget it in favor of snatch, but, ah, well, that does reek of castration anxiety. How about scrapping all of those for cooter, even though that’s a kind of turtle. Agreed?

Describing the rest of the lower female anatomy can either be scientific (vulva, labia) or downright puerile (pink taco, hamster). And then there’s beaver, which, like hamster, begs the question of where all this castration anxiety comes from. I mean, equating a woman’s genitals with something that bites? Calling Dr. Freud—stat!

Now when it comes to breasts, what can you say but hooters, rack, girls, bazooms, tits, boobs, peaks, honeydews, and kalamazoos? Actually, I sincerely hope the good folk of Kalamazoo don’t realize the name of their town has been swiped and turned into such unrefined language. Or perhaps I should hope that they already knew that, so I am not the one responsible for popping their cherry.

At least when it comes to that phrase, popping the cherry, Hamilton is in the clear. She’s already informed her readers that Anita had sex in college. When Guilty Pleasures opens, our heroine’s no slut, but she’s no virgin, either. Hamilton conveniently got herself out of any need to worry about maidenheads, cherries, or removing the training wheels from the bicycle.

Whew!

But truly, the main problem is what to call a penis, right? I mean, Anita’s not worried about her own anatomy, and she’s not gay or bi, so it’s the male equipment that’s going to be licked, sucked, stroked, and inserted. Tab A into Slot B, n’est-ce pas?

One of the more interesting things I’ve discovered lately is that you can’t get a list of synonyms for penis from the online thesaurus. The same site that offered up prick for needle wants to know, rather primly, when quizzed about penis, “Did you mean pen?”

Ah, no, though seeing as how pens are long, straight, and hard, and can be held erect, I suppose that would work. Thanks, online thesaurus!

Pens aside, one of the perennial favorite alternate terms for penis is phallus, which has the bonus of sounding antique, and therefore it seems to work in historical fiction very well. But it’s still kind of a silly word, not one I think Anita would have much patience with.

If the spam in my inbox is any indication, the words one should be using are schlong, wang, fuckstick, and/or rod. But those aren’t really appealing. At least not to me, and I’ll assume not so much to Hamilton (or Anita) either.

There’s always the fallbacks of johnson, dragon, snake, fireman, or johnny. Hmm. Maybe not. And definitely not cucumber of love, one-eyed trouser mouse, or purple-headed custard chucker, all of which are completely absurd, and none of which I made up. Promise. Cross my heart, even.

Honestly, though, one of the best strategies for writing sex scenes is not writing them. Authors like Polidori and Stoker didn’t get to show sex on stage, but perhaps their works were all the more erotic for that. Much as horror movies avoid showing the monster in the first reel, sexy tales that jump straight into bed have a tendency to just lie there like a, well, two-dollar whore. Part of the secret of erotic literature is to make the character, and the readers, wait.

Unfortunately, English isn’t much help there, either. Terms like foreplay and mutual sexual stimulation are not only dull, but sound as if they belong in health class, not adult fiction. But there are other ways English can be useful. Hamilton chose to concentrate on what characters were wearing and, especially, how a voice could feel like velvet sliding up your spine. Hamilton’s readers were introduced to Jean-Claude thusly:

Softly curling hair tangled with the high white lace of an antique shirt. Lace spilled over pale, long-fingered hands. The shirt hung open, giving a glimpse of lean bare chest framed by more frothy lace. Most men couldn’t have worn a shirt like that. The vampire made it seem utterly masculine. (Guilty Pleasures)

Now that is much more the thing, right? No dead gray eyes or leaden gazes or wan skin that refuses to warm to a blush, like Lord Ruthven. Or even, God forbid, overly bushy eyebrows, like Dracula. Nope, what we got right there in Guilty Pleasures was guys who could wear lace and make it masculine. Men who could whisper your name and make you shiver in a way you liked. Men who weren’t going to need any penis substitutes like needles.

Men who had a way with words, and who weren’t afraid to use them, despite their love interest’s disinterest in being called ma petite.

Anita is taken enough with the vision of Jean-Claude in his lace shirt that she even finds herself wondering if the lace is as soft as it looks. Fortunately, she comes back from the brink—what kind of girl gives it up only three chapters into the first book in a series? English definitely has words for that sort.

The delicate tango between Anita and Jean-Claude does not culminate in sex for books upon books. Even two hundred pages into The Killing Dance, Anita is rejecting Jean-Claude’s advances. He tells her, “your resistance to temptation grows thin,” but even if that’s true, Anita still hasn’t given up the fight. “No is one of my favorite words, Jean-Claude. You should know that by now.”

Indeed, no remains in Anita’s vocabulary for several more chapters, even though Jean-Claude “had the cutest butt I’d ever seen on a dead man.”

The heart has reasons that reason cannot know, and all that. We knew Anita loved Jean-Claude. She also loved Richard. Heck, she was pretty good at being in love with lots of different men in different ways. Enough so that, eventually, there was going to be sex on stage. Even though The Rule said clearly, No Sex On Stage.

As Anita herself would say, dammit. Or perhaps she wouldn’t. She’s a very practical girl, and if you can stake someone on stage, why not do them on stage? Sounds fair.

Indeed, it was time, cher lecteurs. Foreplay can only go on for so long, and finally Anita came around to Jean-Claude’s point of view. It was time to give a dog a bone or, perhaps, to grease the wheel.

Anita was ready. Jean-Claude was ready. The readers were ready. And even the English language was up to the task. Because when Anita falls into the bathtub with Jean-Claude in The Killing Dance, we are clear on what happens, but not treated to a litany of ridiculous words for anatomical parts.

He was like carved alabaster, every muscle, every curve of his body pale and perfect. Telling him he was beautiful was redundant. Saying golly gee whiz seemed too uncool . . . I did what I wanted to do since I first saw him. I wrapped my fingers around him, squeezing gently . . . He pulled me against him suddenly, pressing our naked bodies together. The feel of him hard and firm against my stomach was almost overwhelming.

Now that’s erotic and sexy. No Victorian sensibilities pandered to, no clichés utilized, no pet names or stilted description stumbled over. Language problems conquered, not just avoided. Readers are given an erotic sex scene that breaks Hamilton’s own rule and leaves them wanting Anita again and again. And fortunately for them, she keeps on (ahem) coming. I doubt there’s any stopping her.

As she’d say herself, golly gee whiz.

Marella Sands is a native St. Louisan and member of the writers group Alternate Historians (www.sff.net/people/marella/). She earned degrees in anthropology from the University of Tulsa and Kent State University and currently teaches a class at Webster University on J. R. R. Tolkien. She has published both fiction and nonfiction. The author’s household includes the author, her husband, a multitude of pet rats, and four cats.

Tragedy is easy, comedy is hard. I don’t remember who said that, but it’s true. It’s much easier to make someone cry than to make them laugh. When I was a young pup in drama and doing work on stage I wanted to make people cry, or gasp. But the older I get the more I value laughter. I actually count how many laughs I get at question-and-answer sessions with the fans, and if I can make the audience both gasp in shock and then laugh, well, that’s gold.

Cathy Clamp says that the Anita Blake books are funny and she’s right. I’m not a humor writer by any means, I can’t imagine trying to be funny for every page of an entire book, but there’s always been humor in among the violence and sex in the Anita books. I learned a long time ago as a writer that if you hit someone with humor and then follow immediately with something horrible it doubles the impact. If you can make a reader laugh, then scream with terror, and then laugh again, you have nailed it. If you can do the scream, then the laugh, and then the scream, that is equally effective, because there is just something about breaking up the tension with humor and then raising the stakes that helps raise those stakes even higher. Sometimes the humor in my books is because I can’t resist, and sometimes you laugh because it hurts too much to cry. The humor in Anita’s world is a combination of outright funny, brave laughter in the face of sorrow, and that nervous laugh you do in the dark when you hear that noise behind you. That noise that you know shouldn’t be there, and is probably nothing anyway, but you always have to turn, always have to look.

It is at these moments in the Anita books that I can never decide what kind of monster it should be: sexy, terrifying, or funny. Like real life sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh, to cry, or to cure it all with a good roll in the hay. Or maybe that’s just how I solve my problems?

—Laurell