Not all romance novels feature multi-orgasmic brides and perpetually tumescent men coupling in positions of dubious feasibility.
Depictions of sex in the genre have come a long way since the days of questionable consent and improbable enthusiasm. Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation and Faking It, published in the early aughts, contain classic examples of hilarious (and very edifying) failed sex.*
But perhaps you read romance because you want to read about beautiful people doing wonderful things to each other in gorgeous settings. You don’t want to read about excessive sweating, or flop sex, or queefing, you say. Quoting Edmund White completely out of context, you add, “I think literature should be a gift to the reader, and that gift is an idealization.”
Fine, say I, but perfection gets monotonous. There comes a time when the flawless pistoning of hips starts to resemble a factory. Failure adds spice and interest, as well as believability, and it makes the happily-ever-afters so much sweeter. So, in the interest of making it all better in the end, let us examine recent historical and contemporary romances which portray sex in all of its awkward, agonizing glory: the painful deflowering, the jackrabbiting, the ouch sex, the mess sex, and the not-even-bothering-to-fake-it sex.
Newbies
“A battering ram,” is how Abbie Harewood describes her lover in Juliana Gray’s Victorian, A Duke Never Yields, while in Eloisa James’ fairy-tale Regency, Once Upon a Tower, the honeymoon and subsequent attempts are so bad that the protagonist locks herself away from her husband.
But Courtney Milan’s The Duchess War, the story of how clever Minnie Lane and Robert, Duke of Clermont, figure out marriage—and the marriage bed–while reconciling themselves to their pasts, contains one of the most deflating wedding night scenes ever:
He yearned for something magic to come out of her flesh—some secret that would transport them. Something that would make this more than good for him, more than bearable for her. As it was—he tried to suppress the terrible thought with her body so wary under his, but couldn’t quite—he’d have preferred his left fist to this.
Those illusions do crash down rather noisily, don’t they?
Courtney Milan slays the clichés of romantic fiction—in this case, the joining of the flesh as transcendent moment—but still writes love stories of incredible power. In The Duchess War, Minnie Lane, a deliberately innocuous young woman with a notorious past, allows her cover to slip, attracting the attention of the equally secretive, politically radical Robert.* Milan writes sharp characters and deft dialogue. And only she can pull off a heated courtship scene which involves handbills, paste, and public health notices.
Is That All There Is?
Elizabeth Hoyt’s Georgian historical, To Seduce a Sinner, also paints a disappointing wedding night. To be fair, Jasper, Viscount Vale, is trying to take it easy on his new bride of convenience, Melisande. He offers to wait a month or two to know her better. But she is eager to get down to business (she doesn’t tell him that she isn’t a virgin), so he lubes her up, leaving her clothes on, reassures her it’ll soon be over—and it’s all too true: “And then he thrust. Once, twice, a third time, heavy and hard. He gritted his teeth, made a sort of choked coughing sound, and slumped over her.”
I used a stopwatch on this passage, because, you know, science. The investigation involved reading slowly and lots of pauses to reproduce approximate plunge speed. I accounted for the moments it took final the final grunt and withdrawal. The experiment was repeated three times. The mean: 14.61 seconds.
Hoyt writes funny and filthy equally well, and Melisande and Jasper’s story takes wrenching turns. The lessons of To Seduce a Sinner—stick with it, go deeper—would serve anyone well.
Technical Difficulties
Pain marks the first time between Rose and Drew in Amber Lin’s contemporary novella, Tempting Fate. Rose has foregone intercourse after an assault several years ago. Rose’s difficulties during their encounter come to Drew’s attention, but in her desire to forge ahead, she utters the irresistibly sexy phrase, “Please, just continue.”
Drew manages to resist that siren call. Best of all, his penis isn’t magical and sex doesn’t “solve” the problem of Rose’s residual trauma.
Similarly, the protagonists of Sarah Mayberry’s contemporary romance, The Other Side of Us, also deal with physical discomfort. Mackenzie has sustained serious and permanent injuries in a car accident. She has taken a leave of absence from her demanding job as a writer for a soap opera. She suffers from nausea, headaches, weakness in her limbs, and her body is scarred. When Mackenzie does seduce her neighbor Oliver, the pain threatens to swamp her:
“What just happened?” he asked, stubbornly refusing to move.
“My range of movement isn’t what it used to be.”
His face was concerned as he studied hers. “Okay, what if you were on top?”
“No, no this is fine. I can handle it.”
“It’s not supposed to be an endurance test.”
In fits and starts, they figure it out. That Oliver and Mackenzie’s (and Rose and Drew’s) eventual pleasure is hard-won makes these books about adults recovering from physical and emotional scars all the more poignant.
Ick Factor
A similar theme follows Heidi Cullinan’s contemporary, Dance With Me. Ed’s career as a semipro football player is over after a serious injury that continues to dog him. Laurie has tried to put his performing days behind him after a disastrous attempt to bring same-sex dancing to the ballroom world. In this case, the shagging is excellent, but the post-coital reality proves embarrassing:
This was the part he had resented, he remembered now. The mess. The slight squickiness of sex, the sometimes serious squickiness. The awkward part where everyone cleaned up, where he’d stand and find himself involuntarily expelling the air that had gone in with his partner’s cock and then, inevitably, had to come back out.
Is post-sex farting a bridge too far? Maybe, but also appropriate for a story about messy, painful aftermaths. Ed and Laurie’s lives will never return to their earlier states: Ed will have to live with chronic injury and the loss of his career, Laurie will need to find a way to work again. The fits and starts of their courtship are adorable, and the account of their attempts to find happiness after both having lost the work that defines them is poignant and all-too believable.
She’s Just Not That Into It
A baby-making scheme results in marathon bad sex in Cecilia Grant’s Regency historical, A Lady Awakened. Martha Russell, a prim recent widow, needs to quickly produce an heir in order to keep her late husband’s estate from falling into the hands of her brother-in-law. Luckily, young Theo Mirkwood has been recently exiled from London by his father in order to clean up his wild ways and learn to manage his property.
Martha proposes that Theo try for a month to get her pregnant so that she may pass the baby off as her late husband’s. Because of Martha’s moral distaste for her deception (and because she doesn’t want to acknowledge any attraction to the feckless Theo) she refuses to enjoy it.
During their first encounter, when Theo asks her to touch him, she complies:
She did what he asked. And then he wished she hadn’t. Her hands fell at random places on his back and stayed there, passively riding his rhythm like a pair of dead fish tossed by the sea.
Just think, 30 days of floppy fish fucking to look forward to!
Martha starts off as uptight and somewhat self-righteous. Theo is immature and used to coasting on his charm. Eventually, over tenant betterment, roofing, and discussions about sheep and crop rotation, the two start to respect and, yes, enjoy each other.
Time (four years, in this case) and maturity also change the relationship between mathematician Leo Marsden and his estranged physician wife, Bryony, in Sherry Thomas’ Victorian romance, Not Quite a Husband. Leo goes to India to retrieve Bryony, but as the two try to make their way back home, they find themselves caught up in the Swat Valley uprising of 1897.
Their current predicament is interspersed with flashbacks of their disastrous marriage, and the strained marital bed:
He never imagined she’d be like beneath him like this—stiff as a log, her teeth ground together, her face turned so far to the side that the tendons of her neck trembled with the strain.
Some may find the excruciating fucking in Thomas’ book really fucking excruciating to read. But here, as in most of the books mentioned, the bad sex is a metonym for the larger relationship: in scene after scene it becomes clear to the reader–and to Leo–why, despite being in love with him, Bryony seems to barely endure his attentions, and why she leaves. As Leo finally finds out why his marriage disintegrated, their current struggle to survive changes everything.
Not Quite a Husband nearly caused my e-reader to short-circuit because of all the tears I wept. I lost my shit. I should probably add some sort of critical analysis of Sherry Thomas’ prose style, or marvel at the beauty of her prose (so good! And Chinese is her first language!), or say something about the colonial setting, or female physicians in the Victorian era—but I can’t. This book, people, this book. It takes the characters apart to rebuild them, and it shows the work, the pain and the talking, the give-and-take, and the sheer stubbornness required to create a connection. The happy ending? They’ve earned it.
Questions for discussion:
What’s the worst-best or best-worst sex scene, in any genre, that you’ve ever encountered?
Have you ever been so puzzled by a sex scene that you had to draw a diagram? Would you share it with the rest of us?
Which cliché of romantic fiction would you like to see banished or at least subverted forever?
Works Referenced
Jennifer Crusie, Welcome to Temptation (Amazon | Indiebound)
Jennifer Crusie, Faking It (Amazon | Indiebound)
Juliana Gray, A Duke Never Yields (Amazon | Indiebound)
Eloisa James, Once Upon a Tower (Amazon | Indiebound)
Courtney Milan, The Duchess War (Amazon | Indiebound)
Elizabeth Hoyt, To Seduce a Sinner (Amazon | Indiebound)
Amber Lin, Tempting Fate (Amazon)
Sarah Mayberry, The Other Side of Us, free download (Amazon | Barnes and Noble | iTunes)
Heidi Cullinan, Dance With Me (Amazon)
Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened (Amazon | Indiebound)
Sherry Thomas, Not Quite a Husband (Amazon | Indiebound)
*My personal favorite by Crusie is an abortive love scene from her novella Sizzle, in which the main character’s hair gets caught in the gentleman’s sleeve while he’s trying to grope her rear. She yells, then gets teary. He thinks she’s touched by the beauty of the experience.
**The prequel to Courtney Milan’s The Duchess War, The Governess Affair, is available as a free download (Amazon | Barnes and Noble). It’s excellent.
Tags: bad sex, doing it and doing it and doing it well, Mindy Hung, romance novels, sex
COURTNEY MILAN. That is all.
RIGHT!?!?!?
Like, everything by Courtney Milan. EVERYTHING.
Courntey Milan is the BEST. BEST. She’s the perfect gateway author to romances for people who think they won’t like romances. She’s smart and funny and that scene in The Duchess War was what I was going to reference here if nobody had yet. It was completely cringe-worthy BUT so wonderful. And I love that she can build stories around the nuances of 19th century British law and its inequalities, get deep into how the laws worked and fucked people over, and still come out with happy endings. (If you buy her stuff from Smashwords, it’s DRM-free and she makes more money from it!)
So funny and smart. I love how she completely subverts expectations. And the obsession with medicine, public health and the consequences for women–so interesting!
I did not know that about Smashwords. Will make sure to link to that next time!
If anyone wants to borrow Milan’s Duchess War or Heiress Effect (so good!) via Amazon Kindle loan, let me know.
Me me me! I have Heiress Effect but am a total ‘must read in order’ person & am still #7 on the wait list for Duchess War. So yes, please, I’d love to borrow it from you.
Thanks for the offer.
Send me your email at my username at gmail, and I’ll send it over! We (the toasties) should set a dB of users/books that are shareable…
thanks!
Okay, because of this post and these comments–and because the Governess Affair was free–I downloaded it yesterday and started reading it when I went to bed at 10:30 pm….AND STAYED UP TIL 2 AM TO FINISH THE WHOLE THING! Ahhh, it was so good! I’m downloading the Duchess War post haste!
WHAT IS FLOP SEX i can’t have that in my google search history at work
I think the toughest part about being a peasant in a romance novel would be putting up with all those truant landowning dukes. “Where’s Duke William? My lands are being besieged by marauders and he promised me protection.”
“He’s deflowering his new and sullen bride from the north.”
“Well–can he–is it going to take all day?”
“Yes.”
“Fucckckckckck.”
I don’t envy the chambermaids and footmen either. “How exactly are we going to get this clotted cream out of the tapestry?”
“That’s not clotted cream.”
And the coachmen, who learned the hard way to not come a knocking if that coach is rocking.
Great article Mindy! I want to read all of these now.
I do too! I’m sitting here trying to figure out where on earth I could find the time.
Thanks! If you can’t tell, I LOVED all of these books.
And I live in squalor, so not cleaning is one way I find the time to read.
come sit by me. Just brush the cheerios off the couch before you sit down 🙂
Audiobooks. Romance on audio, I can sit at my desk and work spreadsheets while listening. Because my right brain needs something to do all day, too!
In first year at university, instead of studying for my economics final I got obsessed with that Bridgerton series by Julia Quinn. Basically every book had a scene where the reformed rake went down on the girl because she would still be technically a virgin, and then after the marriage his “hips would move in the ancient rhythm.”
Worst Sex Scene Ever: Any sex scene in On Beauty. Middle aged straight men, so horrifying.
I honestly stopped reading the Bridgerton sex scenes and focused more on how much I fucking love that family.
Cynsters. Bring me ALL the Cynsters. S Laurens is crack.
I mean, I adore the Bridgertons, but those Cynsters make me leap about happily.
Have you ever been so puzzled by a sex scene that you had to draw a diagram? Would you share it with the rest of us?
Yes. I think things like Wait, where is her arm? way too often when reading sex scenes.
Try writing the darn things. Don’t forget to factor in that while you are standing /sitting / lying / twirling? at your desk, one of your dogs WILL come in and stick her nose in your business, like, THAT IS NOT SEXY, DOG, and also the dog will leave the door open and then one of your kids will walk by and basically yeah it’s a problem.
Jennifer Crusie!! She was my point of access to romance novels. <3 Welcome to Temptation 4evah.
I’ve recently been trolling through my library’s e-book collection of historical romances, and although I’ve come across some clever, good writers, it’s dismaying to find a few of the same sex cliches still cropping up all the time:
1. Serious lack of foreplay–a little fondling for the lady and nothing for the guy
2. First-time intercourse that is painful for the lady for approximately 3 seconds, then she’s good to go
3. Vaginal orgasms for ALL the ladies! Ugh.
Aaaaand how so many rolls in the hay are “transformative” or “life-changing” or incredibly emotional landmark events. Sometimes it’s just fun and enjoyable, people.
I just want to know where are all the men who “snake their hands between them” at the crucial moment and manage to hit the spot (while encouraging “come on, just let go” to their partners) so that she can orgasm just before he does.
I mean, it’s nice to acknowledge that the vaginal orgasm isn’t the only option for intercourse. But all this snaking of arms and hands just sounds so awkward.
I’m trying to picture that in missionary, and it just involves a lot of twisting of wrists and arms that seems like it would take enough concentration to break the moment.
It’s always in missionary that it happens. And then I can’t think of anything else.
There is this one romance writer I love because she writes well-researched historical romances with African American protags and love interests and they are wonderful. EXCEPT. She is fond of having the women be able to come by NIPPLE STIMULATION ALONE. Each and every one of them. He plays with her nipples, she’s like ungh and “what was that?” and he’s like “an orgasm.” Siiiiggggh.
There is one scene in The Valley of Horses (a book so excellent it was featured in classic trash!) where someone must be missing a leg. Either that or Jondalar’s already history-changing member is also prehensile… and sentient.
Thank you – this is great! I’m so interested in depictions of sex, especially in woman-oriented media. I hate the semi-consensuality (at best) of so much romance novel sex, so sex scenes where things don’t go well help a little with the irritation, since at least the gross power dynamics aren’t being hyped up as Super Sexy One Million Orgasms All The Time quite as much.
I’ve never drawn a diagram, but I did spend a lot of time trying to parse what was happening in this literotica story someone sent me awhile ago. It’s a baseball team locker room orgy set in the future for some reason, and there is just so much going on in it! I read it aloud with a couple of roommates and there were a number of times that we had to stop and regroup, all “Wait, so, okay, Colt is going down on Wesley, Jason is jerking off watching Kyle and Felipe, and…” If anyone wants to subject themselves to it, it is called “Full Count, Bases Loaded” – but I must warn you that it’s funny at first and even seems to have the potential to be hot, but if you keep reading your soul will probably die.
I have read many a literotica story where I’ve gone “wait….what?” and had to back up and try to figure out what the hell is going on.
“ok, so his hand is there. She’s on her stomach. But how can her leg be doing that….”
“That’s…that’s not how knees work. D:”
“HOW can he be simultaneously banging her in that position AND grabbing her by the hair AND staring deeply into her soul???”
I have to ask, which romances are you reading currently or have you read recently with semi-consensual sex? The “rape first, orgasm later” model of romance novel heroes, is, for the most part, a thing of the past (though there are some authors who started writing back then and refuse to give up their rapist dickbag ahole heroes).
The Courtney Milan I’m reading now (Trial By Desire) has thus far featured the hero seeing sex with the heroine as “losing control” and being a lesser man, and the heroine trying six ways to sunday to get him to stick it in, which hasn’t worked so far.
In case you thought you didn’t want to read Welcome to Temptation, you’re wrong, one of the biggest plot points is a water tower shaped like a penis.
I remember that book!!!!! I think I still have it in my moving box of “books I’m too embarrassed to put in my actual bookshelves”.
Thank you so much for these articles!
I am only in the baby stages of admitting romance novels can be super fun and there is so much terrible stuff out there. I dump all these titles into my library website and read everything they have, it’s great.
Thanks! They are fun!
Like a frugal grandma, I feel compelled to point out that the Sarah Mayberry is a free download.
The sex scene in On Chesil Beach is the worst. I really appreciated the (vivid) description of asexuality which I think is relatively rare in any genre, but the whole novel is so uncomfortable. The word ‘penetration’ has made me wince ever since I read it.
Yes! I was just coming here to say exactly the same thing. It is excruciating to read and all the more so because so utterly believable.
My greatest literary achievement was writing down just the adjectives and adverbs from the sex scene in Birdsong. Sadly, this masterwork is now confined to the bowels of Facebook.
This topic makes me think of Possession (A.S. Byatt). It’s been a really long time since I read it (~6 years, I think), and I think it has some lovely romance aspects. Also a lot of realllllly long and look-how-literary-I-am pseudo-digressions. But what I’m thinking of now is the very sad image of the failed marriage-night lovemaking between Roland and Ellen, his wife (had to go look those names up on the interwebs, but I really remember the scene). Something totally freaks Ellen out, and she ends up crouching and shivering in a corner (in her nuptial, virginal new nightgown–*sob*) and she and her husband never make love ever again, basically. Or they try, maybe, but it’s always traumatic and disastrous and (spoiler alert, kind of) he end ups in the arms of someone more suited to his passions. There is some implication in the book that this failure in Roland’s marital satisfaction is at the root of a lot of the turmoil of the book, even though Ellen is otherwise very devoted. And though we hear from a lot of other female voices in the book, we never really learn what’s up with Ellen or why she’s so terribly traumatized. Or if we do, I don’t remember. But even though I was mostly glad I read that book at the end of it, poor wounded and dutiful Ellen. No orgasmic bliss for her. Only duty and trauma. =(
YES! There was something about how Ellen and Roland had been engaged too long (ie. waited too long to have sex) and somehow this had dried her organs up? Gah.
This passage has always stuck with me too somehow. “A young girl of twenty-four should not be made to wait until she is a woman of thirty-six and he flowering is long over.” Eek.
For more fun like this search the phrase “at once bovine and dolphin-like” (as if that isn’t enough of a preview) in google books!!
In this urban fantasy anthology, there was a story about Atlantis inhabited by merpeople or something and they’re all hundreds/thousands of years old…except they all talk like California valley boy surfers. And seven feet tall. Anyway, one dude goes on land, meets a shapeshifter woman (as you do) and they hook up. Every sex scene in the story (which were several, just as badly written as the rest of the story), the dude ROARS his orgasm into her ear. Every single time. And usually the roar involves something about how she’s his. I’m not violent, but some guy’s repeatedly roaring into my ear about how I’m his property is likely to get punched in the throat.
I remember reading some awful historical fiction/romance novel in 8th grade, that of course I can’t remember the title of now. It was about the French-Indian war, and some rich family that lived on a river (I have no idea which one, but it was somehow important), and a soldier…and obviously the daughter of the wealthy family and the soldier get together…but what always stuck out to me was the emphasis on her armpit hair and the fact that she was paranoid about her body odor! Even in 8th grade, I remember reading and re-reading that chapter, completely unfazed by the blase sex, and thinking “Seriously, lady?? You probably smell better than every other person he’s ever met! Get over it!!” It was an odd book.
This passage has always stuck with me too somehow. "A young girl of twenty-four should not be made to wait until she is a woman of thirty-six and he flowering is long over." Eek.
For more fun like this search the phrase "at once bovine and dolphin-like" (as if that isn't enough of a preview) in google books!!
Thanks! They are fun!
Like a frugal grandma, I feel compelled to point out that the Sarah Mayberry is a free download.
Oh man, I love this! I hate the romance trope where there’s no foreplay, and then he like, immediately enters her, and it’s all simultaneous orgasms and rainbows. IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT.
The best/worst sex scenes I have ever read are not technically from a romance novel (I mean, it’s not technically called one because I dude wrote it, but it’s pretty much a fucking romance novel, get over yourself, guy): Gaijin, by James Clavell. THE SEX IN THIS BOOK IS INSANE. I wanted to stop reading so many times, because it’s masive, but it’s so insane that you can’t stop reading.
I refuse to read any book with a virginal heroine because she always enjoys her first time, since the man is so skilled that she’s screaming with pleasure after 5 minutes. Yeah…right. I read a book last year that had a graphic scene involving fisting, that made me nauseous. The rest of the scenes were hot, but that totally pulled me out of the book entirely. Nothing I ever wanted to read about, yet without warning, there it was. I don’t mind anal play, yet that gets mentioned specifically to warn the unwary reader…I’d have liked some warning about that scene, so I’d know to skip it.
Years ago I read a paranormal trilogy that had a vampire who was seducing a virgin he’d been waiting centuries for (how totally original, right?) His tool was described as being wider than her wrist and as long as her arm from her wrist to her elbow. And not only did she scream with pleasure during their very first time, but very soon he was introducing her to anal joy, without lube, and she screamed through that too…as any woman would, right? But I don’t think pleasure would be on my mind. Making him really dead, not just undead, would be at the top of my agenda!
One of my pet peeves is erotic romance that never mentions birth control I usually have my heroine and hero discussing it before or right after their first time together, because I write contemporary, and that’s what respectful people do, right? Another name for folks who don’t use any birth control is parents.
I don’t want to ban any meme, since there are always readers who enjoy that, and as an English teacher, I am totally against banning any books, for any reason. But I deplore the “virgin-gazillionaire” meme as even more unbelievable than vampires. And I’m not particularly fond of bestiality scenes in shifter romances…I’m sure wolves have long tongues, (wink, wink) but EW! And pu-leeze, not every woman wants to be tied up and beaten until bloodied, or even have her hair yanked out by the roots. Not all of us enjoy pain to enhance our pleasure!
Okay, because of this post and these comments–and because the Governess Affair was free–I downloaded it yesterday and started reading it when I went to bed at 10:30 pm….AND STAYED UP TIL 2 AM TO FINISH THE WHOLE THING! Ahhh, it was so good! I'm downloading the Duchess War post haste!
Oh my goodness, I love this column and all the comments. LOL-ing so hard. LOVED that Cecilia Grant novel, and isn’t the romance all the more romantic for having gone through all the (real) bad sex?