On reading and writing dirty

Oscar Wilde said something to the effect of when discussing the act of love, you have two choices: the language of the gutter or the language of science.

I encounter this often, in reading and in writing. I'm a lover of words, and I love nothing more than how words -- just words -- can turn me on. But I admit there's a distinct point where you cross the line from sexy to silly.

Case in point: In Zane's Buck Wild book, some of the words she used had be rolling my eyes. Mainly because people don't talk like that, but also because some of the words were just ... stupid. The body parts she talked about may as well have been plastic for all the heat they carried. What was supposed to have been hot quickly devolved in to hokey.

I like my dirty book-talk to be a bit ... humid. I mean, if the words do their job, they (and I) should be humid, which is defined as "containing or characterized by perceptible moisture especially to the point of being oppressive" and I'll add "but in a good way."

Zane's Buck Wild characters had none of that. They had the sex without the sensuality, which sucked.

I'm conscious of that when writing love and sex scenes (which are, in fact, two different things). And, going back to Wilde's words, I skew a bit more toward the gutter, depending on whose point of view I'm writing from. "His"/"hers" can be as sexy as "mine" and "me."

But, funnily enough, "vagina" is never sexy.