Cock and bull

A lot of sex is badly written because terminology and phrasing is very hard to get right. Think carefully about which words to use and which to avoid. There’s no blacklist, but there are obvious culprits – pumping, thrusting, etc. Some terms for body parts or activities may seem clichéd or pornographic, others too medical. There is, in addition, centuries’ worth of political freight attached to sexual language and congress, usually in relation to women. But what a word conveys, its associations and resonances, can work for an author. Think about who is narrating a scene or the episode in question, the characters involved and in what context they have come together. Stick to those metrics for wording, and, for that matter, logical interaction (or illogical interaction, if that’s appropriate; sex isn’t rational, after all). Slang can be deployed for a number of reasons – idiom, taboo, power, provocation. But if it’s being used simply because an author has reached for ‘the common language of sex’, while failing to create their own language, in keeping with the language of the surrounding text, this incongruity will show.