Good Lord. I only made it through a third of the comments before I gave up. I think it all goes back to what you said earlier -- if a sex scene doesn't serve some useful purpose like advancing the plot or showing another dimension to a character or providing motive for a later action, etc., then the writer should just say "...and then they had sex." (Ditto for fight scenes.) In the case where the scene is necessary, then the writer's choice of terms should fit the rest of the book. If I'm writing in first-person about a twenty-something man with some learnin' to do about women, he's not likely to use terms like "love-flower" or (as one male reader pointed out after reading an early draft) even "breasts." This reader said, "Your guy sounds like a Hallmark card sometimes!" You can believe I went back in and lost the flowery terms, toot sweet. :)

PS. Note to self: since my character is Ukrainian, I owe it to myself to use "kielbasa of love" in future. Hee hee.

My favourite part of this thread is the poster who argues that:

"The solution, for me, is to not reffer to it at all. Call it "it" or "length" or what have you. "What was between his legs," or "What he held in his hands" or "What was unveiled" and so on.""

I've realized that, for me, part of the problem (apart from the fact that, as someone else replies, it's "horribly tacky and 'oh-we-must-not-speak-of-it!'-y") is that these phrases tend by their nature to imply an element of surprise or incongruity: i.e. that what was in fact between his legs, when unveiled, turned out to be something *other* than a penis.

It's as if an author referred relentlessly throughout a scene to "what was under his hat" - one would assume that they didn't just mean, say, his hair.

So "what was between his legs" leaves me in suspense, with a small voice in my brain crying out "What? *What*? WHAT WAS IT?"

This problem that's not a problem for some people - is the difficulty in describing sex organs the same in other languages? We hear often that the english language is clumsy and imprecise in its terminology. It's often said that "love" in english confounds foreigners wondering if you are really meant to love a hotdog the same as a person. Maybe a bad comparison. To love a purse the same as a grandma, then.

Then there's just the whole North American cleanliness theme regarding sex. As in "eww...too icky, let's talk about something else" - well if we never talk about it, how the heck are we to develop meaningful and appropriate words for the conversation, when it crops up? Crazy. I wonder then if the rest of the world handles written love scenes differently, and if so, how differently - could some of those techniques be applied in english I wonder. Makes me think, also, of how movies that work overseas (either side of us) get altered, sometimes hilariously, when they are re-filmed for an english audience. We say to ourselves, 'well, some things don't translate' - but now I'm wondering if the translaters tried hard enough.

Well, if this isn't synchronicity, I don't know what is ... over at Maud Newton's blog I found this link:

http://tinyurl.com/4rww2

"Bad Sex Was Just Good Irony, Says Wolfe"

At the end of the column, there are links to the "ironic" passages of the book.

Enjoy. I think.

(I do love words, but I'm not sure "otorhinolaryngological" really qualifies as one.)