Summary

"Taming the Beast with Two Backs" defends the depiction of sex in literature. A reader once told Kingsolver that she wrote the shortest sex scene in the English language: One character tells another that they will get lucky if he has a condom in their shirt pocket. The line reads: "He did. It was" (223). Kingsolver has avoided writing sex scenes although she gets away with "inventing fantasies for a living" (223). She dreads that people will take her book for something other than literature or her for something less than a serious writer (224). She lists writers who have written beautiful sex scenes, mostly men. She wonders why someone should shy away from writing something so important to people, and that writers write about other private things, like love, family, spiritual faith, et cetera...