Micah Zarin's Blog

To be honest, I would never read a book about mice. At least, not a piece of fiction. That is, assuming these are regular mice. If the mice have human-like characteristics, if they talk, scheme, or philosophize, then perhaps something interesting could be done with them. But ordinary mice scurrying around in their ordinary mouse-lives seem too far removed from what literature usually aims to capture. I think that’s because literature, in all its guises, is really about humans, or at the very least about human-like entities. And when I say human, I don’t mean a strict biological category, but rather anything that behaves as a human might: creatures that struggle, desire, betray, imagine, or even despair, whether they are elves, robots, or yes, occasionally, dressed-up mice.

Which brings me to the title of this post: why is there so much sex in literature? Put simply, it’s because humans have sex, and literature is about humans. But the answer doesn’t rest at that plain and almost tautological observation, because sex in literature is not present in the same way as bread or taxes or rain, though those things, too, belong to the domain of human life.

This is due to the fact that sex covers so much of what literature aims to capture. Think about the things that novels, poems, and plays have always tried to get at: the tension between individual desire and social convention, the experience of vulnerability, the hunger for connection, the fear of mortality, the intoxication of pleasure, the bewilderment of identity. Each of these has an axis that intersects with sex. Desire is obvious, but so is mortality: sex is entangled with reproduction, with the continuation of life, and thus with the awareness that our bodies are both finite and generative. Vulnerability is unavoidable: to be naked before another, not just in flesh but in emotion, is to occupy a space of danger and intimacy that no metaphor can quite capture, and yet literature tries anyway. Power relations saturate sex, and literature thrives on exploring power—between men and women, between classes, between those who have control and those who do not. To write sex, then, is to write human existence condensed into its most volatile and revealing form.

The very act of reading about sex, even when the description is brief or veiled, places the reader in a peculiar position, half voyeur and half participant. Unlike a battle scene or a courtroom argument, sex invites the reader’s own body into the act of interpretation. You cannot read about desire without feeling, however faintly, the stirring echo of your own desires; you cannot watch fictional characters entangle themselves without recalling the textures of your own experiences or your own imaginings. This is why the presence of sex in literature has always provoked unease and censorship, from the Victorians with their prudish deletions to the modern controversies about what belongs in school libraries. The unease comes not because sex is alien to literature, but precisely because it is too close, too revealing of the reader themselves. It is the mirror held too directly in front of us, and literature, despite all its disguises, is always a hall of mirrors.

One might ask whether sex in literature is overemphasized, whether it is simply pandering to prurient curiosity. And certainly there are lazy uses of sex in novels, the perfunctory scene tossed in for titillation. But the very fact that such laziness is possible demonstrates sex’s unavoidable symbolic density: it can be used clumsily or powerfully, grotesquely or beautifully, but it cannot be neutral. A story about betrayal can unfold in politics, in war, in friendship, but when betrayal occurs in the context of sex, it is instantly magnified—suddenly the betrayal involves not just trust but the most intimate fabric of the self. A story about longing can involve money, power, or adventure, but when the longing is erotic, it carries the weight of biology and psychology fused together. Sex is literature’s shorthand for intensity, because sex in life is never without consequence, whether physical, emotional, or existential.