Writing erotica from a female POV

[NotWise]

There's a current thread, that for some reason I couldn't find when I looked for it, that diverted into how a man can authentically write how a woman feels during sex. The standing suggestion was to watch cam girls very closely.

That made me laugh, and I'd like to hear other ideas. The most obvious source is to talk to your friends and lovers, but that can be awkward.

The best article about sex I've ever seen was an old plain-text document that summarized the discussion on the newsgroup rec.sex. It was written by a woman.

I've found a number of blogs in which women talk to other women about how it feels. They're useful, and they make it clear that "how it feels" is often unique to the individual. What impressed me was that (aside from ejaculation) women described their own orgasms in much the same way that a man might describe his own.

As far as how it looks, if that's what you're concerned about, there are/were two websites that were largely about what women looked like while they masturbated and climaxed: "I Feel Myself" and "Beautiful Agony."

There's also an art project site, that I can't remember the name of, that filmed women sitting at a table and reading a literary passage of their choosing while someone under the table went at them with a vibrator. I think there were ten videos. My take out of all the videos was that a woman's orgasm is a beautiful thing to see, whether she was young or old, slim or not.

I think I've written a man's view of his lover climaxing simply with "and she was beautiful to me."

 

[HectorBidon]

I think I've written a man's view of his lover climaxing simply with "and she was beautiful to me."

Exactly. We can't directly experience what our partner is experiencing, but we can be captivated by it. Most of my stories are told from a first-person perspective, and so they often feature the narrator's observation of his partner's passion. To me, this is an integral part of sex. Here is the way I tried to describe this in one story: "Her eyes were fixed on a horizon far beyond the walls of the room. Her face had become utterly slack, no longer with the peaceful serenity of sleep, but with the stark abandon of ecstasy. I could not take my eyes off her. She rode and rode and shuddered and rode and saw at last the full, glorious, radiant, undiminished object of her quest. She slackened her pace, but she did not stop riding for another good mile at least."

 

[ElectricBlue]

There's also an art project site, that I can't remember the name of, that filmed women sitting at a table and reading a literary passage of their choosing while someone under the table went at them with a vibrator. I think there were ten videos. My take out of all the videos was that a woman's orgasm is a beautiful thing to see, whether she was young or old, slim or not.

http://hystericalliterature.com

 

[Bramblethorn]

- beaten to it by EB -

 

[Rustyoznail]

There's a current thread, that for some reason I couldn't find when I looked for it, that diverted into how a man can authentically write how a woman feels during sex. The standing suggestion was to watch cam girls very closely.

Yeah, that was me in the coffee shop. And I was serious. Full anonymous disclosure - I’ve only had sex with 3 women. Ever. I made sure they came first though. Seemed only fair. Trying to remember reactions from 30 years ago is a problem so webcams are a good refresher.

Russ

 

[ElectricBlue]

- beaten to it by EB -

Great minds... .

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

Yeah, that was me in the coffee shop. And I was serious. Full anonymous disclosure - I’ve only had sex with 3 women. Ever. I made sure they came first though. Seemed only fair. Trying to remember reactions from 30 years ago is a problem so webcams are a good refresher.

Russ

They could work, but there's always the risk of the women putting on a show rather than showing how they truly feel. I never really got into the whole webcam thing until you suggested it, but I watched a few out of curiosity and saw quite a difference in authenticity. For some it was obvious they were exaggerating or trying to keep more people tipping rather than giving honest reactions.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Some girls are there for the money, some just for fun. I find the less viewers the more authentic, but I may be totally wrong.

 

[NotWise]

Some girls are there for the money, some just for fun. I find the less viewers the more authentic, but I may be totally wrong.

My assumption on all cam girls and other porn is that they are acting, and there's nothing at all authentic about it.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Maybe read more stories by women authors?

 

[MelissaBaby]

My assumption on all cam girls and other porn is that they are acting, and there's nothing at all authentic about it.

Good assumption. But you wouldn't believe how many men think sex workers fall in love with them.

 

[SimonDoom]

Maybe read more stories by women authors?

The best advice of all.

 

[SolarRay]

Believe it or not, I once asked for female volunteers for a private survey through Lit. I had made a list of twenty or so questions designed to cover some things that I had been thinking about recently in terms of female POV. To my surprise I got a bunch of brief "I'd be happy to take your survey" responses. I proceeded to poll them respectfully and ended up getting a whole bunch of really fascinating answers, anecdotes, confessions, etc. I wasn't sure how many people would actually open up and share pretty personal stuff but it was an interesting and informative experience that has helped flesh out some details in my stories.

 

[Voboy]

Maybe read more stories by women authors?

Good advice, except that “women” and “women authors” aren’t monolithic. And I’d no sooner use cam girls for research than believe a stripper who told me I was hot.

I write mostly FP, and my early stories are all male because I am too. But I found myself wanting to tell the stories from the standpoint of the female lead, largely because her motivations were the ones I found more interesting.

So? I just simply started “writing female.” I didn’t do anything special in that story, except that I included a vignette I’d seen my wife do when she couldn’t decide which underwear she wanted to wear; other than that, I basically wrote a female version of myself.

It was very well-received, I did a few more, and Bob’s your uncle. Or Roberta’s your aunt. Now I do more female FP than anything else, probably. I suspect that if you use FP and make your protagonist interesting and layered enough, its gender won’t greatly matter.

As for orgasms? Describing a female orgasm realistically isn’t more difficult for me than describing a male one.

 

[JerseyGirlDownUnder]

http://hystericalliterature.com

But back to OP NotWise's question on ways to learn authentic experiences.... Yes, interviewing women, preferably a group of good friends share a couple of bottles of wine, would be good. But they would have to really trust you. Don't have other men around, because they'll interject... better yet, provide the bottles of wine and leave a recorder running and clear out. I agree that SolarRay's idea of having questions to answer would work the best.

 

[LoquiSordidaAdMe]

In general, I prefer first-person Lit stories from a woman's POV. Not always, and there are obviously plots where the man's perspective is the more interesting, or at least the more narrative.

But when a man narrates, the climax is almost a foregone conclusion. The story won't finish until the man does. No matter what his partner does, a man will get there.

When a woman tells the story, there's always a shadow of a doubt - will she or won't she? It adds an extra layer of suspense.

 

[jehoram]

Maybe read more stories by women authors?

A woman friend of mine referred me to Anais Nin's work and Nancy Friday's writings about women's sexuality. I've found them helpful.

 

[gordo12]

I like to watch amateur couple videos where you can clearly tell they're amateurs. If she's having a good time there's lots to be learned by us males

A lot of my sex scenes are based on that although to be honest I ramp them up for Lit.

Cam girls or any other "professional" aren't going to give you anything normal.

 

[SimonDoom]

I've always believed that a good writer, with enough imagination and attention to detail, can write from any perspective, including the perspective of someone completely different. You need to try to put yourself in that person's shoes and feel empathy for that person's perspective. It's doable. You don't have to get it right down to the last detail. A few details usually will do the trick to win over the reader.

I think reading erotic stories written by women is the number one thing to do. What I take away from reading female authors of erotica is that, in general (though not always), they don't focus a lot on descriptions of their own bodies, certainly not in the way a male would; they DO focus on the things about a male partner that are attractive, and not just naked body parts (hair, shoes, the fit of his clothes, breath, scent, his confidence); they are more conscious of the power dynamic, because more often than not in erotic stories the man is in the more dominant position; they have a different perspective on the process of seduction, because they are more likely to be the pursued than the pursuer.

Another source of information on this is books and online sources that compile and analyze women's sexual fantasies. They are very different from men's fantasies.

 

[Madelyne13]

deleting

 

[NoJo]

I came to the conclusion years ago to "write what you know". I don't really know that much, especially not about women - except in an almost Machiavellian sense of understanding how they behave and react.

I've read Anais Nin and concluded that she was basically a nympho, and who did not, to me, display a very typical female sexual character.

The good news is that, by and large, it's often safe to assume that men and women aren't all that different.

The biggest insights I've received about women's sexuality actually come from a gay male friend of mine, who has a very "female" brain (unlike me, and unlike his partner).

Jane Austen's writing tells me a lot more about women's attitude to sex than many so-called erotic female POV novels.

As regards the basic biology, I've been pleasantly surprised that women seem to enjoy sex pretty much the same as I do: I'm quite happy to assume the the "female orgasm" is pretty similar to the male orgasm, despite the verbiage to the contrary. It's all the OTHER stuff around sex that's very different.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Just about everyone with power among the human race, assumes that THEY and they singularly, have a guaranteed insight into everything to do with power...

Women are exactly like men in that sense. They have power, and among 'them' (lol, me no gonna sa-a-a-y) there is the whole entire profile of diversity: at the base are some fairly ignorant people, in the modal center are a lot of people who believe they have a top-notch working knowledge of their own sexuality and their own sexual power and with a nod and wink are happy to let everyone know this, and towards the right hand side of the sine curve are a few humble women. Or at least who strive to be humble even though by their own experience they realize they have MORE, do BETTER, and ATTAIN FULL AND COMPLETE SEXUAL SATISFACTION IN THEIR PHYSICAL CAPABILITIES - which are virtually unrestrained and technically considerable.

So, 'from a female POV' might possibly be dependent on where on that profile you expect to be writing your character situated in.

And by implication, even in terms of the 'senses,' the feelings, the physical feelings and emotional tidal waves or calmer pleasant waters - these are all dispersed across a spectrum, or maybe, a 'normal distribution curve.'

As far as technical pseudo factoids related to the actual orgasm parts of sex - it's like throwing up. Although it's 'upside down' in the placement of the physiology but otherwise it's just a convulsion that is uncontrollable at some point - so you want to know that what you are eating is what you like, and that afterward the mess is not going to be all too much for you to clean up and can be justified on the basis of cuteness, handsomeness, money, usefulness or something else your mind values highly enough.

 

[Athalia]

I've read Anais Nin and concluded that she was basically a nympho, and who did not, to me, display a very typical female sexual character.

That's an interesting comment. She was sexually progressive, which makes her a "nympho" because she was female, whereas a man who was that sexually liberated would be considered an absolutely normal man. Do I see a double standard here

But it's true that she wasn't "typical" for her time. We sometimes forget how sexually repressive that era was for women, and how much has changed since then.

As for how orgasms feel for men vs. women, well, an orgasm is an orgasm, and I suppose that, at their core, they're pretty much the same...a loss of control, a crash of endorphins, and usually a feel of lassitude afterwards. Kinsey and company established that much. But I get crashing orgasms, smaller but sustaining orgasms that keep me floating for a while, and some that just sort of bubble up and disperse. Is it a matter of degree, or of kind?

I wish I knew how a man's orgasm felt to him. Most male authors, I find, aren't very good at describing them. They just assume that the reader (who is probably another man) can just fill in the blanks.

 

[NotWise]

I wish I knew how a man's orgasm felt to him. Most male authors, I find, aren't very good at describing them. They just assume that the reader (who is probably another man) can just fill in the blanks.

As far as I can tell from reading women's detailed descriptions of orgasms, a man's orgasm feels different from a woman's mostly because of the ejaculation.

 

[NoJo]

Not so sure about "liberated" - but I admit it's kind of unfair that "nymphomaniac" is invariably used only to describe female sex-addicts. I've met male "nymphos" too, who engage in a kind of agitated, joyless pursuit of sexual pleasure. In fact I was one for a while. Understanding what happens in the brain during sexual arousal and release, and how fear, anger, anticipation and pleasure can get mixed up, helped me get into a healthier behaviour pattern. Most of it is not specific to male sexuality.

I've yet to experience a series of small orgasms - but I get something of the kind, when I "edge" for a long time - a sustained and heightened level of dopamine that feels close to ecstasy. I imagine that also isn't a peculiarly male experience though.