THE MOST important art form communicating sexuality, which succeeded the visual arts of drawing, painting, and sculpture, is creative writing: That is, poetry, and fiction in the form of short stories and the novel.
This literary addition to the human power of communication became a foremost value which elevated westernized societies into an exciting cultural self-awareness that was not simply based on an unchanging or repetitive definition of cultural values, but an ongoing or evolving self-awareness based on the exploration of logic, reason, emotion, sensuality and sexuality as they emerged in relation to humans in general, or diverse societies or nations not of one’s racial origin.
The literary art of creative writing led the way towards such an inclusive definition of culture. The addition of creative literature to the beneficial progression of civilization opened up new areas for understanding and appreciation among humans, including the cultivation of romantic love, and its development became one of the unique qualities driving westernized civilization, which is also the youngest or latest civilization to emerge.
The rapid dissemination of experiences and logical ideas via print culture, as McCluhan showed, enables westernized societies to resolve or overcome numerous social conflicts, while many other societies today without this emphasis and practise of the various freedoms printed creative literature offers, continue struggling to pacify or bring reason to the everyday lifestyles of their specific societies or nations.
When the art of writing, in the form of creative literature, began to discover the unexplored topic of sexuality, a more knowledgeable understanding and appreciation of the influence of sexuality in our social life began to emerge. Not to omit both the intellectual and sensual stimulation which came with this discovery, we grasp the significance of this discovery better by understanding its difference, seen in comparison to the invention and first uses of writing.
The invention of writing, which occurred in the eastern Mediterranean, in China, and even Pre-Columbian Meso-America, was secondary to the material progress of all these civilizations which had already advanced considerably through the skills of agriculture, visual art, architecture, and cuisine.
Such early writings has very little to do with the exploration of sexuality, and was concerned with mere power-related data, such as inventories, catalogues, censuses, laws and instructions, a point stressed by the important structural anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss.
Writing first rose to social use as an auxiliary method of power over others, even fanning the flames of prejudice and conflict by re-enforcing their utterance, rather than encouraging human intimacy and romantic love. Even the famous doctrinal writings of the most powerful religions are concerned with instructions for their followers, rather than with the literary exploration and discovery of imaginative and descriptive expression found in the best progressive creative literature, which looks deeper within the human psyche to achieve a more practical and thorough understanding of many social items, including the nature of human sexuality we all embody.
Oral culture lags behind educationally because it does not rely on literacy for communication. This sort of creative literary exploration naturally began to emerge as an extension of early data-based writings, as humans began to discover creative ways, beyond one-dimensional oral skill, to express their inner unuttered attractions, emotions, and pleasures. The classical Greek poetess, Sappho, a few thousand years ago wrote some of the first sexual verses, not explicit, but significantly concerning love between women.
Sappho’s poetry would foresee a whole new creative freedom for women, who, in most cultures, were the first slaves of men, their entire existence seen as inferior to male dictates, especially as the bearer of Man’s children, who in turn were often trained and expected to forever uphold some form of paternal lineage, whether racial or doctrinal.
Twentieth Century Western women writers of creative literature, like Colette, Simone de Beavoir,  Anais Nin, Erica Jong and many others provide some of the best sensual and sexual heirs to Sappho.
Because the experience of creative writing released the prior stifled freedom of unexplored human expression, a stronger and more educated understanding of human beings, male and female, and the world they inhabit gradually emerged, beginning with the antique Roman poets of sensuality, such as Horace, Ovid, the amazing Petronius, whose rollicking episodes of early Roman life were called ‘The Satryicon’, and is certainly one of the first examples of the ‘avant-garde’ novel.
Later came a ribald Renaissance Italian writer like Boccassio, and even before him the great old English poet, Chaucer, who preceded several Anglo explorations of sexuality, however immature, in novels by Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, Harriet Marwood, the famous lengthy ’My Secret Life’, an erotic Victorian autobiography, etc.
However, none of these writings really represent the true importance and necessity of sexuality in creative writing. In addition, even though Chinese and Japanese Geisha women wrote some of the first narratives related to the experience of sexuality, and the Indian Orientals produced detailed handbooks of sexual and romantic conduct such as ‘The Kama Sutra’ and ‘The Perfumed Garden’, it would be French writers, especially the Marquis de Sade, Emile Zola, Pauline Reage,  Anais Nin, and many others who would comprehend the use of written language to externalize human fantasies connected to human bondage, cruelty, debauchery, psychological manipulation, etc, exposing such secreted and secretive human desires and temptations via the therapeutic analysis of art, before they  can fester and escape as reality in the numerous abominable and hideous crimes of passion and power we see committed without comprehension in lesser educated societies of today.
Why is sexuality so intrinsic to the development of today’s modern literature? Because it is related to the origin of human society in its deepest aspects. Its theme throws open the locked doors to our inner racism — whether European, Oriental, African, Native Indian, or miscegenated — behind which the meanings of words we invent are nothing more than our own linguistic meanings, regardless of how we may irresponsibly claim it as a superior supernatural power handed down to us via our own various cultural traditions or inventions.
The true creative writer looks descriptively into his or her life, thoughts, imagination, sexuality etc, as well as the world outside themselves, and follows no already prescribed instruction and path, except in the sense of stylistic influence.
The vein of sexuality in such writing exposes our acceptance or rejection of others, and brings us face-to-face with human bigotries and biases we may feel, which prevent and ridicule human contact, affection, love etc, especially between humans of different colour, wealth, cultural background, nation, class, etc.
In the end, what is created by this process of literature is a continually fresh culture, based on the created work of art as a progressive object, whether painting, novel, poem, song, tune, play or film, which is no longer the predestined creation of a prior culture, but represents culture as an ongoing education and pleasure, not a stereotypical platform for smug stagnation.
D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover’, despite its did
actic anti-materialistic style, remains a classic of sexuality in modern creative literature, because it showed the relationship between written language and the sexual pleasure it can represent.
When Lawrence describes Lady Chatterly’s bodily orifices in the hands of the gardener, or when her feeling of orgasm is described, this is language pursuing the unknown; language giving descriptive visibility to the hidden, the ethereal, which is what sexuality as writing does by utilizing the careful contemplative power of printed culture, as opposed to any utterance of purely impromptu oral speech.
James Joyce, on the other hand, in ‘Ulysses’, easily one of the handful of truly great novels ever written, shows us the power of writing representing the delightfully sensual character of  the Irishwoman, Molly Bloom, by giving the entire final chapter of the novel to her voice, minus punctuation:
“The big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down….I put the rose in my hair like the Andalucian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes…”
That has gone down as one of the greatest pieces of prose representing sexuality in novel writing. Similarly, in the profound novels of Claude Simon, for example ‘The Georgics’, for which he won the Noble Prize in 1985, a prominent heroic and sophisticated general during the French Revolution saves an arrested and terrified aristocratic woman bound for the guillotine (she later becomes his wife), and takes her away with him to safety in his coach.
And during the ride, their sexual hunger, threatened by its opposite, death, comes to the fore in the midst of horrific violence and tragedy in revolutionary war-torn Paris: Simon writes:
“The jolts were throwing them roughly against each other, the closed dark, suspended box jumping and bouncing in the ruts (and perhaps possessing her just there ,without further ado, or rather mounting her, biting her mouth, her breasts, his herculean hand fumbling about under her long skirt, lifting it, tearing it perhaps in his haste, uncovering her white thighs, her belly, her dense pubic hair, sitting her on top of him, both of them still brutally shaken by the jolts, she leaning forward, her hair disarranged, undone, hanging in front of her face, clinging as best she could to the supports of the hood, or the door…guiding him, inserting  between two jolts this stake, this impaling post…”
Other modern French novelists like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Patrick Grainville, or Phillipe Sollers, whose novel, ‘Women’, is a brilliant mixture of intellectual musing and rampant sexuality, give us much pleasure via their ingenious texts.
Robbe-Grillet is a master of playful deceptive sexual description which makes his writing a visible tactile pleasure. In his delightful avant-garde novel, ‘La Maison de Rendezvous’, set in Hong Kong, he writes:
“Everyone knows Hong Kong, its harbour, its junks, its sampans, the office buildings of Kowloon, and the narrow hobble skirt, split up the side to the thigh worn by the Eurasian women, tall supple girls, each in her clinging black silk sleeveless sheath with its narrow upright collar….the shiny thin fabric is worn next to the skin following the form of the belly, the breasts, the hips, and creasing at the waist into a sheaf of tiny folds…”
Even in outstanding poetry, such as Octavio Paz’s, one of Latin America’s giants of modern literature, and the 1990 winner of the Noble Prize for literature, the pleasure continues. Paz’s poems ooze vivid and luscious sexuality like no one else’s.
In ‘Wind From All Compass Points’ he writes:
“Down there/ in the cleft/ desire covers you with its two black wings/ your eyes flash open and close/ phosphorescent animals/ down there/ the hot canyon/ the wave stretches and breaks/ your legs apart/ the plunging whiteness/ the foam of our bodies abandoned.”
Finally, it is the outstanding Black-American male writers who show the ability of creative writing to take us into and beyond the forbidden territory of inter-racial sexuality and love AS WRITING, often guarded by bigots, whether white or non-white.
Some of the best of these Black-American creative writers, like Clarence Major, Cecil Brown, John .A. Williams, William Demby, Chester Himes, Al Young, Trey Ellis, along with exciting black women writers in America like Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, and the Antiguan, Jamaica Kincaid, have all opened doors to greater self-awareness, understanding, appreciation of sexuality and love between    different races and individuals which no one has the power to close.