Sex Tips From Male Novelists
Hear ye, hear ye, young ladies of Christmas present! This holiday season, are you looking to recreate the romance of a pre-internet age? Let us take a visit to wordsmiths of Christmas past for a reminder of some of the classic sex tips of yore. Take heed, young lasses, of these timeless lessons from some of our literary forebears.
On female desire:
“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”
―Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
On being prepared:
“Sex, whatever else it is, is an athletic skill. The more you practice, the more you can, the more you want to, the more you enjoy it, the less it tires you.”
―Robert A. Heinlein, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
On foreplay:
“You keep runnin’ that mouth and I’m goin’ to take you back there and screw you.”
―Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
On pornography:
“A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance.”
―Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
On fetishes:
“Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.”
―Anatole France
On dry spells:
“It’s all overrated, man. Sex is only a great thing if you’re not getting any.”
―Charles Bukowski
On safe sex:
“I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It’s all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.”
―D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
On how to be appealing to men:
“I love doubt in a woman. It’s nearly as sexy as determination.”
―Irvine Welsh, Filth
On fear and intimacy:
“Alas! the love of women! it is known To be a lovely and a fearful thing.”
―Lord Byron
On whether men and women can be friends:
“A woman can become a man’s friend only in the following stages—first an acquaintance, next a mistress, and only then a friend.”
―Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya*
That seems extreme, anyone else care to weigh?
“Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.”
―James Joyce, Dubliners
On sexually transmitted diseases:
“Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.”
―Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
On using sex as a weapon:
“When you make love to a woman, you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life.”
―Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
There you have it, ladies! Go forth and prosper in all future sexual endeavors with this baker’s dozen of sex tips from none other than some of our greatest male novelists.
*Ed.’s Note: Fixed to correctly attribute the quote to Uncle Vanya (not Three Sisters)
