"In some ways, writing about sex seems more easily accepted in the contemporary literary world than writing about being a person of faith."

"What has been your experience in trying to explain why you believed for so long?" an interviewer asks Nicole Hardy, author of "Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin." She answers:

The sex part is difficult to write about. The verbs are terrible, and the nouns are worse. But the emotional act of writing about faith is difficult, more exposing. Anyone who has had a positive experience in any religion understands the ways that faith can be a buoy and a comfort and a joy. But it is sometimes hard to explain the exact feelings you have when you’re having a sexual experience.

I was surprised by Hardy's answer, which wasn't at all what the questioner was trying to elicit. The truth is it is hard to write about sex. The verbs are terrible, and the nouns are worse. 

Ha ha. Have you ever tried to write about sex, like actually describe a sexual experience in detail? It's hard. The adjectives too, as well as nouns and verbs. That's why there's that annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, where they embarrass writers of prestigious novels for writing things like "Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her."
Now, actually I don't think that's bad writing about sex. It's writing about bad sex. And the author of that winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award agrees with me:

[Rowan] Somerville says he was actually trying to paint a picture of bad sex in his novel....

"He has no idea how to actually make love. It's totally cold and inhumane... His sexual identity is profoundly scarred by his trauma."

When writing sex scenes, Somerville says, jokes come with the territory.

"I think you're never going to be able to integrate sex into a novel in a way that cannot be ridiculed," he says. Even citing sex scenes from Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel Lolita sound silly out of context, he adds.

Even? Especially! That's the point. Too blunt?