How Do You Write a Good Sex Scene in the Age of Ozempic?

Wait till it’s been at least a year since the last time you dieted. Five years is better, but sometimes we don’t have five.

There are almost no universal rules for writing, let alone for writing well about bodies that our world deems disgusting and without a legitimate claim to an erotic life. And yet you go looking everywhere anyway.

It is suggested you read Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen, so you go to your local library branch and read it for several hours. While you are reading about the main character, described as “the overweight person who was Marion,” approximately nine parents come and go, small children in tow. All of them, without fail, are fat—a thing that makes sense in Philadelphia, a majority Black city in a nation where four out of five Black women are fat. “Sexually,” Franzen writes, “there was no angle from which a man on the street might catch a glimpse of her and be curious to see her from a different angle, no point of relief from what she and time had done to her.” You put the book back in the stacks, spine in. (Sorry, librarians.)

Decide that you will write a story in which the main character’s name is Marion and the reader will be dying to see her from every angle. In this world, the world of the story, Marion will know that there are people out there who would mock and degrade her, and so she has moved to the farthest corner of the galaxy, of Pennsylvania, to a place near a state park called World’s End. She will have huge, enormous, pendulous breasts and a strange one-finned fish named Terrance. (Where did that come from? Where does anything come from? You’re tempted to make up an origin story about a doctor’s office, a tank of fish, but no such thing happened.)

Try and fail not to get turned on while writing this story. Take a shower. Turn on the overhead fan as high as it will go and let the air dry your skin, Marion’s skin, whoever you are. Masturbate, quickly, powerfully. Be unsure whether you are someone fucking Marion and giving her pleasure or if you are Marion. Decide it is okay not to know, or to be both on different days, in different kinds of weather.

The only thing you absolutely must avoid is telling the reader how much the character weighs. This is not only triggering but also boring and lazy craft. Can you see 200 pounds? Can you hear 300? Touch it, smell it, taste it? Text a friend and tell them this opinion and they will remind you that you went to a doctor’s office to freeze your eggs 14 times before the doctor ever weighed you. The moment they weighed you, things became a problem and you could not continue. When you asked why, if your weight could have been a problem and they hadn’t weighed you until now, the nurse said: “I looked at you and I didn’t think you were heavy enough for this to matter.” People don’t know what weight looks like or what fat looks like, you realize. What is written down and what is lived are two different things.

Your mother was a children’s librarian, so you first read Princess Furball, a fairy tale about a thin girl who becomes a fat ball of fur via a coat made of the skin from every animal in her father’s kingdom, under a library circulation desk, with your mother’s stockinged feet crossed at the ankles. In your own living room now, where your spouse is watching tennis on TV with the sound off, reread this book now and get struck not by what is said but by what is unsaid: This coat keeps her from being married against her will in exchange for 50 wagons of silver. Reflect on what you would buy, sell, or trade in order to feel your body was actually yours. Look up and see that the TV is playing an ad for a knockoff compounded version of a GLP-1 and Serena Williams is shilling for it. “I’m moving better,” Serena Williams tells you. “I’m feeling better. This is health care.”

You are trying to write something about your body or a body like yours that is erotic. That is the assignment.

Let a memory come back, unbidden, of going at age 12 with your mom to the Weight Watchers meetings above a Krispy Kreme on 23rd Street and Seventh Avenue, the one made famous in Sex and the City where Miranda “baby weight” hooks up with Tom “big boned.” Remember how it used to be acceptable for grown women and men to watch a child be weighed in public.

So many cruel things, you think, that were acceptable then are still acceptable, and so many things you were previously unable to imagine might become acceptable are now: GLP-1s being prescribed to children as young as you were then, for example.

Now that you are almost 40, many things that were once confusing have become shockingly clear, and one of them is that people do not care what things are true and what things are lies if the lies bring them closer to power.

Back at your computer, you must write something. The sun is going down on another day in Philadelphia. Out your window you can see the back two windows of an alley of rowhouses, and each house represents one to seven lives, one to seven bodies. How intimate for all these bodies to live close together. Your neighbor next door who was dying of lung cancer used to cough and cough into the night, except on Sundays, when the sounds of her coughing would be overtaken by the sounds of God blaring from a Jesus radio station. Your neighbors on the other side had a dog, a husky who howled and howled. Are either of these stories? You used to think not, but now you aren’t sure. Decide that anything, any life, any body at all is a story. Decide your story is not beginning and not over but somewhere in its meaty middle.