Problem Chylde: Learning & Writing

This review tickles me because I know exactly what the author is talking about:

Writers somehow lose their grip when the bedroom door is opened. I am not sure why this should be so. Sex is no less important, no less compelling, than it was in 1968. Yet they become afflicted; some affect a mimsy prose style with too many references to flowers — petals opening, stamens poking upwards, that sort of thing. Others become too voluptuous and overheated, and you have the horrible feeling they are writing with one hand only. The rest take the easy way out and play it for laughs. Perhaps it is because writing is a middle-class occupation and the middle class is useless at sex — but this seems a bit of a broad generalisation, a tad unfair.

If sex is like life, and life is what you make of it, what would you expect of a middle-class existence whose whole is almost always the sum of its picket fences and gadgets and accoutrements?  Some things can’t be bought, and an all-encompassing sexual experience is one of them. 

Or to put it snarkily, if a middle-class couple has sex — and there were no couples next door to hear it, no gadgets to advertise in the latest magazines, no mind blowing techniques to publish in the next book, no puritans down the road threatening to cut their bits off, no deviants to throw the boundaries of decency into flux — would it make a difference?  And if it does, why?

If you can explain why it would make a difference, then you can describe sex with the honesty it deserves.  Count yourself among the very few.