We’ve all encountered it, the (not so) elegant attempts to cloak anatomical terms in metaphor during steamy sex scenes. The sword and sheath, the tower in the valley. Sometimes they’re intentionally ridiculous—think My Lady’s Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel, which was too cringey for me—but more often, I think, they are unintentionally ridiculous, or, too frequently, unintentionally doing harm.

Maybe this is obvious, but I find that romance novels have, in generally, much less cringey sex scenes than other books. Sex scenes in literary fiction often try to be more literary, more metaphorical, than they need to be, and this, for me, often ruins the scene.

(For anyone looking for a laugh, the Literary Review magazine has a yearly “Bad Sex Award” for the worst and weirdest sex scenes published each year. They’re usually lit-fic, and they’re always appalling.)

In the best romance novels I’ve read, the terms used for the character’s anatomy are understated. The terms are not the point, which allows the interactions and the emotions to take centre stage. Like with speech tags, when you spend too much time