What is the best sex scene or passage in literature? Today it would seem somewhat innocent to ask the question given the omnipresence of sex in society in visual format and the spread of pornography on the Internet. But books and reading have enormous power in the realm of the libido and have always stimulated the imagination like no other medium does. Who has grown and matured with books has a different relationship with eroticism.
The selection of the best sex in literature —in the absence of a popular vote that we encourage from here— must necessarily be a personal and reductionist matter. Partly because it is difficult to cover the universal literary production analyzed from that perspective, but above all because everyone has their opinion about what is best in sex. In any case, here are a few suggestions. some more classic and obvious, more obvious, than others, but all with the best intention of awakening and encouraging reflection and debate, and whatever. Some passages are from books considered to be of the erotic genre, but others belong to generalist novels and even some to science fiction.
Let’s start at the top with a great narrative classic, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by DH Lawrence (editions in Alianza, De Bolsillo, Austral, Catedra), which was better for sensuality than TE Lawrence, a man, the one with Arabia, more sand than dust (although some fragments of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom may surprise you). One of the erotic peaks of the novel —which we remember was not labeled obscenity in the United States until 1959— is Connie’s third clandestine love affair with the ranger Mellors when they arrive together at the end for the first time (somewhat better than your husband reading to you to Racine, as Clifford does to her). “I bare the front of her body and Connie felt her bare flesh against her as he entered her. For an instant she remained motionless inside her; shaky and turgid. Then he began to move, in the sudden and inevitable orgasm of her, and aroused in her a strange shudder that made her vibrate inside her. Vibrate, vibrate, vibrate, like the flickering flurries of feather-soft flames, rising to intensely bright points, melting everything inside her. They were like little bells that went up and up until the culmination.
Taking advantage of the fact that one of the numerous film versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was starred in 1984 by Sylvia Kristel, who had played Emmanuelle in 1974 with the same director (the illustrious Just Jaeckin), it makes sense to highlight a scene from Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel ( Tusquets, 2002), pseudonym of Marayat Rollet-Andriane, on which the paradigmatic film of soft porn was based quite faithfully. As you can imagine, there are quite a few risqué passages in that French response to Dien Bien Phu, but given the choice of one, that of the meeting in the shower of the liberal protagonist with her desired androgynous friend Bee, sister of the US naval attaché (for if the data adds something), it is funny that at least the heavy philosopher with the pants down, Mario, does not come out; neither did the Concorde or the squash. Emmanuelle puts her arms around her friend’s neck and kisses her on the lips. She moans with pleasure when Bee’s body clings to hers: the dripping freshness of her two skins is, by itself, a caress. She presses hers against hers her body, slowly rubs her pubis against his”.
And since we are with Arsan, let’s point out another novel by the writer, in which she goes much more to the point, Presentation in society (Alcor, 1990), about a young woman, Jade, who ends up in the real harem that has set up a Millionaire in Costa Rica and where the most outrageous hedonism reigns, and long live hedonism. In a passage that remains in the memory, the protagonist, her friend Gina and the driver for all Alejandro watch the giant tortoises make their sunset at night on the beach and, excited, the girls take off their clothes and stretch out on the shells. Then the three of them make love wildly on the sand surrounded by the great stupefied chelonians. “They lost their balance and rolled. Alejandro was on his back, with the two girls on top. The young women’s breasts hung over his face. His two lovers took it in turn.
Sometimes it is not necessary to be explicit to achieve great effects. One of the most intense moments in literature is when Emma Bovary (Madame Bovary, Alianza, Catedra, Akal) begins her affair with her lover: “The fabric of her dress caught fire on the velvet of the frock coat of Rodolfo; she leaned back her white neck, with a sigh, and, fainting, broken into tears, with a long shudder and covering her face, she surrendered. You have to see everything that fits in that last expression.
Boccaccio’s Decameron (Catedra, Austral, Penguin, Alianza), that book that was on a high shelf in many houses, but which you could reach if you climbed on a chair, contains many scenes that disturbed adolescence at a time when the The only way to see a naked female body was by chance or in the photos of Mama Burda in the German fashion magazine (of which a television miniseries has been made, by the way), and a male one undressing the Madelman. Some would prefer the tale of Alibech’s hell and the hermit determined to put his devil there, but others could not tell the story of the daughter of the sultan of Babylon, the beautiful Alatiel, shipwrecked in the land of infidels (Mallorca: today it would have been Ibiza). , and successively seduced by several men. The first episode was the most disturbing (satisfyingly disturbing): the lady is picked up by the gentleman Pericon de Visalgo, who is already a name, dear Giovanni, who finally manages to sleep with her by getting her drunk. And Boccaccio recounts that he entered her bedroom and she “warmer from wine than tempered by honesty”, undressed in the presence of the gentleman and got into bed. “Pericon did not hesitate to follow her but, turning off all the lights, immediately from the other part of her, he lay next to her, and taking her in her arms without any resistance, he began to enjoy himself lovingly with her. What when she had tasted it, never having known before with what body men charge, almost regretting not having acceded to Pericon’s flattery before, without waiting to be invited to such sweet nights.
In the early days of the Decameron read in secret, like the novels by Alberto Moravia, we also found torrid passages in unexpected books, such as Sinuhe the Egyptian, by Mika Waltari (Plaza & Janes, 2016) who at a bad time meets the courtesan Nefernefernefer; they make love (“he undressed and opened his arms to me, and I had the sensation that my body and my heart and my whole being were reduced to ashes”), but the memory remembers above all the girl showing off in the pond. “She started swimming on her back swaying slightly and her breasts came out of the water like two red flowers.” Ah, Egypt.
In a negligee (of bed) we can move on to something more contemporary. Plataforma, by Michel Houelllebecq (Anagrama, 2004), offers several passages to choose from, with more modern sex and that style left over from telling it about I was passing by, so French. You can argue which one is the best (the glorious meeting on the way back from Thailand? The one with the threesome with the young Cuban cleaner? The other threesome in the sauna?). The option that we value here, for elevation (why leave it in a threesome if you can do a foursome), is that of the quartet made up of the protagonist Michel, lookalikes of the author, his girlfriend Valerie and a black jazz drummer and his wife. In the passage, the two men double penetrate Valerie. “After a few seconds, I sank deeper into her. When I was halfway she began to rock back and forth rubbing her pubis against Jerome’s. I no longer had anything to do; she began to release a long and modulated moan, I sank into her to the root of her, it was like slipping down an inclined plane, she came strangely fast. She then remained still, panting, happy ”.
In The Magician, by John Fowles (Anagrama, 2015), we also find good sex, so to speak, in the hot scenes of the protagonist Nicholas with the young twins, Julie and June, who are sent to seduce him and confuse him by the millionaire Conchis . “I started to lose consciousness of everything around us. There was nothing but his tongue, his nudity against mine, his wet hair, the gentle rhythm of his hand under the water.
In another modern novel, The Dangerous Lessons, by Alissa Nutting (Anagram, 2015), the protagonist, Celeste, is a pretty 26-year-old teacher whose erotic interest is youngsters. Her obsession with them gets her into trouble that you laugh at Humbert Humbert in Lolita, a story of which this book is an illuminating inversion. The scene in which Celeste seduces her teenage student Jack in the car, which she narrates in the first person, is very intense. “Now it only required a slight oscillation of the pelvis. He leaned me over and, with a single movement, I sat on him, coupled myself on him, closing that wet clasp that crimped every inch he could offer me. It had happened. Finally, it had happened.”
Also from a female perspective, in the classic Delta de Venus, by Anais Nin (Alliance, 2021), we have numerous episodes to remember, many with the beautiful Bijou as the protagonist —by the way, the scene in which her Basque lover shaves her pubis the I recreate with her young Lulu the longed-for Almudena Grandes, in the girl’s first sexual experience with Pablo in The Ages of Lulu—. La Bijou de Nin visits a seer and black dancer with two friends and they improvise a trio. “She shook her body as if she were penetrating a woman and simulated the spasms of a man in the grip of the various shades of an orgasm. One, two, three… The final spasm was savage, like the one of someone who gives up their life in the sexual act”.
From Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue, by Sade, and The Venus in Fur, by Sacher-Masoch, if you like those things, to the popular Fifty Shades of Gray and its sequels or such suggestive titles as Licking Your Skin Under the sol de Kenya, by Noelia Amarillo, we could continue tracking passages. But we are going to leave it here with two unexpected works: one of science fiction, and… the Bible.
The first is The Lovers, by Philip Jose Farmer (Acervo, 1982), with the disturbing sexual contact between a man and an alien female, a lalitha, a kind of mimetic parasitic insect that takes on a human form. “I explored her body with an interest that was partly sexual, partly anthropological. He was delighted and amazed at the many small differences between her and Earth women. There was a small skin appendage on the roof of her mouth that could have been a rudiment of some organ whose function was lost long ago, in the realms of evolution.
And toujours the Bible, source of many erotic passages (not everything will be Job or Leviticus), from the Song of Songs and its Shulamite to the adventures of Delilah and Jezebel, not to mention Onan, so present in these lines . Or David’s voyeurism: “He saw from the terrace of the royal house a woman who was taking a bath and she was very beautiful. She did ask who she was and they told her. ‘She is Betsabe, daughter of Eliam, wife of Urias, the jeteo’. David sent people in search of him; She came to her house and he slept with her. It’s not very explicit, true, but there’s no denying that she’s horny.
