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Everyone’s in Love, but Nobody’s Horny
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Everyone’s in Love, but Nobody’s Horny
C.L. Clark discusses writing sex, desire, and queerness in Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite
By C.L. Clark
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Published on September 30, 2025
From the cover of Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite (Art by Arthur Haas)
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From the cover of Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite (Art by Arthur Haas)
“For the act of love is a confession. One lies about the body but the body does not lie about itself; it cannot lie about the force which drives it.”–James Baldwin, Another Country
Recently, I was on a panel at Oxford Literary Festival to talk about queer fantasy and one of the topics I wished I’d had the opportunity to speak on was why I write sex, particularly queer sex, and not “boot scenes” but full, explicit intimate moments. Why I write them, even when the “romance” of the moment is questionable at best.
We’re at a certain, oft-repeated cultural moment where sex and those who enjoy it are weighed for it, and art that depicts it, whatever the media, is critiqued for containing “gratuitous” amounts of sex (which is to say, any amount at all, because depicting the act itself is “unnecessary”).
I don’t believe in “gratuitous” as a reference to a work of art or entertainment. A piece is the piece entire, and should be examined as such, not cherry picked. That’s not how it was intended to be consumed. (You may skip whatever you like, but accept that you might miss something the creator wanted to impart. Partial experiences of art are still experiences.)
Even so, it is impossible to consider gratuitous anything that can explore such a wide range of human being. Sex manages to be a reckoning with the body, the self; with desire in myriad ways; a reckoning with the forbidden; with other people as adversaries and allies even when an encounter is consensual; and a reckoning with surrender. When these vulnerable moments are in the hand of a master, like Nicola Griffith in her novel Ammonite, sex is just as capable and, when done well, usually more adept at showing these moments of character than, say, a battle scene or a tea drinking scene.
My body is important to me. I do not exist outside of it. I don’t exist without it. My mind is a bundle of undercooked meat and electrical impulses that’s been rattled around quite a lot inside a mineral cage. When I have sex, or fantasize, or when I think about sex as a writer, it’s in reference to the body that I’m in—even if it’s in an attempt to escape this body, transform it, or imagine it otherwise.
There are (maybe, I assume, probably) schools of philosophical thought that say we can’t know that something exists—that we exist—unless it comes into contact with something else. And so contact is becoming. Sexual contact, then, is one such act of becoming. Of person-making. (Not that kind of person-making.) I touch, therefore, I am.
In sex, we—or a character—can examine how they feel about the things that their body can and cannot do in the world, in acting on the world. For some, this can be a powerful moment of euphoria, and for others it’s a quiet devastation. Sometimes, it’s both. We are capable of terrible things in our frustrations, especially when we feel we are impotent everywhere but in the bedroom.
It can also be a celebration of a body that’s often vilified or erased—the celebration of butch hands, of the strap, and of the many different cultures of queer sex that have sprung up across generations—often and still, generations of struggle to live and love freely, as an act of rebellion. If you are too masculine, too feminine, too fat, too disabled, or too not-white for others to see you as desirable, you can create, on the page, that desire. Manifestation that creates truth. To own your body and its story and declare that self to another, is as important a narrative moment as claiming your magic or your crown.
We often define ourselves in relation to others: this person is like me, this person is unlike me. When we name ourselves and our desires, there is now something another person may oppose—or collaborate with. Their desires and our desires meet, but because we’re two different people, they never align perfectly, not quite—not if you’re telling the truth. And so in that coming together, there’s new friction, interesting friction that rubs like a match on sandpaper.
We read for the flame. Not the heat of arousal (necessarily), but the way a story changes when two forces meet. Both things cannot maintain the same trajectory. This is Newton’s Law of Narrative (yes, I’m making that up right now). And so part of the story becomes the new tug of war between these two (or more, I’m certainly not judging) people (consenting sentients; again, not judging). By resisting or cooperating, a new relationship is made and that relationship changes a person—another kind of person-making.
Of course, sex, that greatest taboo, is a place where all of our other taboos go to die—or to be refashioned or to be accepted on our own terms. It’s a place where you can be filthy, where you can be punished, where you can indulge or be forced to abstain, and there can be pleasure in all of it. It’s a place where you can take and you can give, and that, too, is part of the process of person-making.
For ourselves and thus for our characters, indulging in the forbidden or surrendering to another force is a negotiation of power and status. I don’t strictly mean the different varieties of kink, though certainly that applies. To claim a pleasure that’s forbidden to you is to claim power, to deny that force which denies you. That could take many forms—taking a forbidden lover of the same sex or a different clan or a different species—but the moment of choice can be beautifully illustrated in a sex scene, and of course, all the scenes that follow as consequence of that transgression.
Likewise for a moment of surrender, relinquishing power or struggle and accepting what is. Often, that translates to an acceptance of self, whether that means an acceptance of the body or of one’s own desires (which may or may not be forbidden). With all of these moments but with surrender especially, we can achieve a particular kind of catharsis that you cannot find elsewhere. Surrender provides a new perspective, a new ability to move through space, around obstacles instead of through them, and sometimes that is the narrative necessity.
We are in a cultural moment that demands purity of characters, particularly characters in romantic narratives (whether the romantic storylines are primary or secondary). In book reviews, readers bemoan the “problematic,” and unequal power dynamics make them “uncomfortable.”[1] This insistence on only the most upstanding and unblemished unions erases all possibility of person-making, which is to say, growth and change. Instead, we end up with narrative corn syrup: an uncomplicated, saccharine meal that goes down fast but is, at the end of the day, unsatisfying.
There is a glorious and necessary specificity of worldbuilding and character building which requires work and attention on the part of the author to understand exactly who these characters are and how they would feel about the sex acts they do (or don’t!) participate in. The tropes of intimacy that have been joys and structural devices and genre indicators all, this “corn syrup,” serve to lull us authors into neutralizing our characters, balancing out their pH until they’re as inert as pure water. Instead of stopping at the generalization of a character’s type, we must imbue them with unique personalities driven by the specifics of their world—enough personality to be disliked by some, enough honesty to admit their desires, and enough humanity to make mistakes in the attempt to reach them.
This is partly why reading Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite recently felt like having real sustenance. Ammonite is about a woman named Marghe who comes from Earth to a planet called Jeep, where, due to a mysterious virus, only women can survive. There were romantic or erotic moments that made my stomach twist so hard I thought I would be sick even as I hoped for narrative release. There were moments so embarrassing that they were beautiful. It is an excellent example of what we can do with this medium of flesh made text.
Chemistry between characters is one of the key things readers seem to look for in their reading, and complain about in their reviews (this especially includes complaints about problematic power dynamics). Chemistry, as we all know, is about mixing different agents and reagents and seeking a reaction, that friction on phosphorus. (Interesting that another word for ‘character’ is ‘agent.’) But if the components are too neutral, they’ll have little reaction at all. They may float companionably in the same general substrate, but it’s not the frisson of story. Characters who are too smooth, made to be so likable that they offend no one, are not likely to elicit strong chemical reactions.
In Ammonite, the first frisson of romantic intimacy we get for Marghe is when she is taken captive by a tribe of women called the Echraidhe in the middle of an unforgiving winter. She is left in the charge of Aoife, who beats her, feeds her, shelters her, teaches her, and keeps her from running away. Aoife is, in effect, Marghe’s prison guard. And yet, she’s the direction Marghe cannot help but turn toward with desire and affection.
One night, in the dead of winter, all of the tribe of women hunkered down in a storytelling tent, Marghe notes that “The air was bright and thick with sexual tension” and she feels it herself, in her own muscles: “She could have taken her sexual energy and smoothed it down, but she wanted to let it burn through her, she wanted to enjoy being alive…. She winked at Aoife.” She proceeds not to have sex with Aoife but to make the equivalent of a grand romantic gesture, a storytelling performance that would make the tribe see her as more human—and perhaps, from there, a more eligible bachelor? The erotic energy here is what leads to Marghe taking her first great risk in the tribe, a new step in the making of herself, regardless of how it pays off.
Despite what would absolutely be labeled as a “problematic” power dynamic, she also grows to see the kinship they both share, and even the ways that Aoife has shown her something that, if not love, feels very near it, and Marghe returns the feeling: “Suddenly she wanted to put her arms around the small, fierce-faced woman and hold her close, protect her from more hurt.” This relationship grows more human, is more full of that true virtue, empathy, than it would have been with both characters on a level playing field. It is easy to love what is easy to love.
Then, as in science, after we get a reaction from our chemicals, we go on to adjust our hypothesis or form a new one: “Yes, I like this,” or “No, that’s not what I want.” It just so happens that this particular romantic or erotic advance blows up in Marghe’s face, so badly that she later thinks of the moment as “the stranger woman [herself] humiliating Aoife in public.” Not an auspicious beginning to any romantic relationship, and when you read the scene, I challenge you not to cringe in desperate, embarrassed horror.
Marghe knows that Aoife isn’t the best partner. She later reflects on this, telling another character about their relationship:
“She made this for me”—she showed Thenike the palo—“but she hit me more than once. Sometimes she treated me like I wasn’t human, but sometimes… Thenike, I know she cared! Sometimes I think she came to care more for me than she had done for anyone for a long time. But she wouldn’t let me go…. I belonged to the tribe, I was subhuman, even though everything in her heart told her otherwise.”
But desire leads us to act, sometimes unwisely, perhaps on poor judgment. We are complex creatures and sometimes we want what might hurt us, or that which doesn’t belong to us, or we pursue that want in a way that hurts others. That has to be allowed for (this is about writing, but perhaps it is not just about writing), and forgiven or, at least, accepted to some degree as human and permitted a stay of execution. Because without that human fallibility, the transcendent acts of nobility that desire can lead us to, the ones so often associated with narrative romance, flake off like so much gilt.
When you introduce desire, you introduce something that may be thwarted—or something that you will have to work for, strive for, maybe even change for. Another failure of craft is that too many of our characters suffer from the same thing many of us do—entitlement. The idea that they should not have to do too much too drastic to achieve a goal, that they should just declare it, do a quick training montage in summary, sacrifice perhaps the least desired thing in their inventory, and presto—they have earned their grail. It’s damning enough for a real person; in fiction, it’s abominable.
Griffith challenges this entitlement in another embarrassing episode between Marghe and a different woman, Thenike, who is part of the family that rescues Marghe from certain death in the snowy alien wilderness. Thenike is everything that Aoife is not: compassionate, wise, open to new knowledge. Textbook love interest.
And an almost textbook application of the bathtub trope:
Marghe sat in front of Thenike, as if they were playing the drums. Only this time, Thenike’s legs were naked alongside hers; this time, she felt Thenike’s breasts touching the skin just below her shoulder blades. This time, there was no mistaking the slow, heavy wave of desire that rose and sank through her guts. She could not help arching a little as Thenike stroked the brush over the small of her back. One of Thenike’s hands lay loosely on Marghe’s hips, and she could feel every palm line, every whorl, at the tips of those strong, lean fingers. Desire wrapped its arms around her and held her still, helpless, able only to breathe.
Thenike notices Marghe’s arousal and says, devastatingly, “‘I don’t think you should make sex with anyone. Not yet. Your body and your mind need to be clear, uncluttered, for what lies ahead. Marghe? Do you understand?’” In response, “Marghe felt embarrassed, stupid. She knew she was flushing. This was Thenike’s way of saying she was not interested.”
Ouch. Not how the romance is supposed to go. If I were Marghe, I would have sunk right beneath the bath water until Thenike was gone.
(Can we spare just one moment to notice Griffith’s attention to the body? Not the throbbing love muscle, but the whole, fragile, flawed, beautiful thing? That embodiedness that makes a person?)
The rejection is further complicated by Thenike’s earlier subtle but piercing judgments about Marghe’s very personality, asking of Marghe’s work as an anthropologist: “And these places you go, the people you find, do you come to care for them? Or do you only study them, like strange shells you might find on the beach?” It disturbs Marghe so profoundly that it haunts her; literally, fragments of the question appear over and over in the text, a refrain like a ghost of anti-colonialism until she must answer honestly (“to herself, at least”): “She had no friends, because whenever she began to get close to someone it felt like unknown territory, and it scared her; she ran away to a new place, to find new people to study, people to whom she did not necessarily have to be a person back.”
Though she acknowledges the truth to herself, it’s some time before Marghe is able to act on the self-awareness—and it is desire, sex, that brings her through to the other side. And even then, she does not know what it is: “Is this it?” she asks Thenike, thinking that the desire between them is part of her preparation for the internal vision-search she must go on. Thenike answers, “No. This is something different. Do you feel it?”
After that, they devolve into a writhing hunger, which Griffith depicts, ironically, as a losing of self, a temporary unmooring:
They searched blindly for each other’s mouth, clinging like fish, swimming slowly closer and closer, breast on breast, belly on belly, arms wrapped around the other’s ribs like great hoops of oak, breath coming in powerful tearing gasps. Marghe was not sure whose mouth was whose, where her thigh ended and Thenike’s belly began, all she knew was heat, a heat like the core of the world, like the energy of all living things…
Not only do we lose the sense of individual personhood, individual body-hood, but we get a sense of becoming something larger. It takes us back to that idea of sex as surrender, and also catharsis. In surrendering her idea of herself, in becoming lost in someone else, Marghe becomes a greater part of the world, enters it more fully.
When confronted with this moment of vulnerability, this true making of personhood, she runs away from it, as is her habit, abandoning Thenike in the warm afterglow of their lovemaking because the other woman now knows “more about her…than anyone else ever had.” But, like any good sapphic, there is the yearning. Despite her fear, she misses Thenike, and it’s that longing which forces her to the change that sets up the rest of the book: “[Marghe] turned around, marched back toward the house. She wanted Thenike—wanted to earn the name she had chosen for herself, to find out what it meant to be Marghe Amun, to be complete, whole. She’d be damned if she would give up now.” (Amun means “complete one,” as we learn earlier in the text.) It’s not until Marghe has undergone a significant amount of time and physical trial, though, that she’s even allowed to broach eroticism again—with anyone, not just Thenike.
Often in books where romance is central, our romantic leads come to the page with no apparent pasts—no exes, no awkward one night stands—unless, of course, those pasts are the villains or deliver narratively necessary trauma. They are narratively, if not literally, virginal. It’s yet another way that we, as authors, inadvertently add a chemical buffer to our stories. Is it because (or is this why?) the average main characters in SFF are the fresh and inexperienced age of 22-25 (max!) years old?
Griffith plays with this idea of youth when she has Marghe and Thenike get a ride from a sailor named Vine, who, coincidentally, was Thenike’s lover fourteen years before. The scene is one full of joy: there is an intimacy of touch between Thenike and Vine, a shorthand, and they finish each other’s sentences as only those who have loved each other can. We also learn that our wise and compassionate Thenike, who seems almost too good sometimes, was once tempestuous and temperamental—and that it might have been this very relationship that taught her the patience that is her present-day hallmark.
By the end of the scene, we’re left feeling much like Marghe: “[She] felt a sudden, fierce love for Thenike, and the heat seemed softer, the sea more blue, and the world more alive than it had been.”
Without our pasts, we lose out on transformation and beauty. We lose out on intimacy between ourselves and others.
Without our pasts, we lose out on love.
Despite what many may believe, there is no morality to horniness in and of itself. You are not morally superior if you don’t like sex or sex scenes, and you are not depraved if you daydream about jerking off to the hot evil general who is perhaps twenty years your senior. Likewise, you do not have a special superiority if you do enjoy sex, and those who are indifferent are not less human than you for that preference.
However, there is a great craving to be seen as good. To read books that will make people think you are good, to write books in such a way that people will know you are good.
But that is a lie.
We are not good, no matter our proclivities. No matter how “unproblematic” the characters we write according to the current moral zeitgeist. Not wholly good, anyway, though, one hopes, we average out on the plus side, and we’re certainly not pure, and when we write fiction with the aim of polishing all our flaws, we step into a failure of imagination and a failure of craft.
It’s possible, of course, that the stories that leave me wanting are not a failure of craft, but a feeling that the author needs to reckon with in themselves. Desire is a frightening landscape and to do it justice on the page, you have to turn inward and consider your own relationships with others (and not just the sexual ones). To be afraid of it is to be afraid of yourself, and if you run from that, if you avoid yourself, the intimacy you’ve created is a lie. Fear of others, fear of censure requires a similar inward look.
I am a writer. I am made to articulate. To reveal, to tell secrets. Sex reveals, tells secrets, our own and other people’s. When we write sex well, we expose the truths of our odd little human bodies—our hearts and minds, yes, but other parts, too. Hopefully messy truths. Truths we can’t neutralize or tidy up. Sex is a truth of life. No, sex isn’t everything; as Stacey D’Erasmo says in the slim volume, The Art of Intimacy, we still have “Spiritual enlightenment, transcendence, courage, ethics, what language is, the collective good, and, for that matter, the existence of evil.” Sex isn’t everything, but it contains so much of this life of ours.
And to tidy away always the messiness of life, to make it always palatable, that’s the most damning lie of all.[end-mark]
Further Reading:
Garth Greenwell, “Taking Offense: On Reading Through Bad Feeling”
Stacey D’Erasmo, The Art of Intimacy
Nicola Griffith, Ammonite
Buy the Book
The Sovereign
C.L. Clark
Magic of the Lost Book 3
Buy Book
The Sovereign
C.L. Clark
Magic of the Lost Book 3
Magic of the Lost Book 3
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The post Everyone’s in Love, but Nobody’s Horny appeared first on Reactor.
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