Published Work | Dirty Words

Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex

Excerpt from Ellen's Introduction

When my brother was eleven years old, my father invited him for a car ride.

"Where are we going?" my brother asked.

"Nowhere," my father said. "We're just going to drive around."

"I wanna go!" I wailed, ten years old and desperate for my father's attention.

"Boys only," my father said.

My brother flashed me a triumphant grin and the two of them marched out of the house and into my Dad's Rambler Station Wagon.

About an hour later, they returned. I was waiting on the front steps, imagining what wonderful adventures they were having without me.

They got out of the car and walked up the path. My brother avoided me. He had a smug, secretive look on his face and I was ready to kill him for it. They strode right past me and into the house.

I might have used torture; it wasn't beneath me. Somehow in the next few days I twisted an arm and extracted this information: they really did just drive around. But during that time, my father told my brother that he was going to tell him The Facts of Life.

"What's that?" I asked.

"I don't know," my brother said. "Dad told me I could tell him all the dirty words I knew and he would tell me what they meant."

"Did you?" I asked.

"Yep."

"And he told you?" I asked.

"Yep," he said. And he sauntered away.

This is my revenge. Instead of a car ride with Dad, swapping curse words for stories, I got a lousy pamphlet: Your Changing Body. No spicy language there – no fuck, no blow job, no slut. Who cares about fallopian tubes? Give me an orgy of dirty words.

This is my orgy of dirty words. You might learn the Facts of Life in these pages; you might learn the Mysteries of Life. I gave my contributors this assignment: pick a sexual word or term. Let it be your madeleine – let it summon up memory. Or take that word and toss it around, juggle it, work it through your teeth. I invited these remarkable writers to create stories or essays, rants or riffs, poems or persuasions. And they delivered the goods: a sexual literary feast.

This book is not porn or erotica, but tucked between these covers is some of the most erotic writing I have ever read. This book is not a social science textbook, but on these pages the sexual temperature of our culture is recorded – feel its heat. This book is not a dictionary, but in these essays and stories and poems, sexual terminology gets defined through bedtime romps, through word play and etymology and historical reference, through whimsy and happenstance.

I asked my contributors to offer up their musings in short pieces that would range from 250 to 1,000 words. I wanted them to boil down their material until they could offer us the essence of experience or thought. I wanted the heady rush of so much flavor – a taste that explodes in your mouth. I want the impact of that literary experience to linger, so that long after the book has been placed back on the shelf, the reader might still savor that rich concoction.

I gave my contributors the freedom to pursue their definitions in the format of their choice: fiction or non-fiction, poetry or play. This stylistic range seems fitting for the wildly different ways in which sex moves us, affects us, shakes us up, feeds us.

My contributors range in age: they're 24 years old and they're elder statesmen. I've learned that dirty words change with each generation. A year from now there will be new words and sexual curiosities to explore. If I've missed some words, let me know. I'll collect new words and missing words on my website: www.dirtywordsencyclopedia.com. This isn't a complete list – it's an offering, a smorgasbord. And I've chosen to include words that aren't dirty at all: kissing, monogamy, virginity, for example. In fact, in my mind, no words are dirty: that's part of my intention here. Let's put it all on the table and talk about it. Something surprising happens: the words are mere words. It's what they represent that so intrigues us.

Why did I choose to gather literary essays about sex? I think that in writing about sex, writers get a chance to tap into unexplored territory. They push below the surface of relationships, of passion, of our urges and needs and dreams. They reveal truth about human behavior and about our society. Sometimes they even get closer to that illusive concept: love.

Pick a word. Any word.