"Fucking Matters"

by Zoe Pollock

Benjamin Alsup chastises most contemporary writers for avoiding sex in fiction:

Writing about sex is hard. Some writers claim the best way to do it is by not doing it at all. Focus on the furniture and leave the bodies out of it. But I think that desire is easy and bodies are what's difficult. We need more bodies in our fiction. We need bodies on bodies in all the wack configurations that consenting adults will allow. Fucking matters. And when we ignore it or pretend it was something that can only be elided, or joked about, the joke is on us. Let's stop kidding ourselves. Besides, it's only sex. Which is to say, it's only the most important thing in the world, and nothing to get hung about.