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Just my two cents, but.... the idea that any person should be limited in what kinds of characters/scenes they can write is patently ridiculous. If this was true, Stephen King's best stories would be about white male authors. In reality, his "breakout" story (and my personal favorite) is about a teenage girl hitting puberty. Sex scenes are like anything else. You just have to research... The problem is that sex scenes present some very unique problems with getting access to accurate information. For one thing, it's kind of hard to get access to "primary sources". If you're writing about a cop, you can ask to do a ride-along and watch the cop doing his job and learn about his world and how he interacts with it that way. It's kind of creepy to go around asking your friends to watch them having sex. ;p Even if you are somehow lucky enough to have friends open to that, it's like quantum physics. The very fact that you're observing it changes the dynamics of what you're observing (it becomes exhibitionism instead of regular one-on-one sex). Interviewing people is a good start, but it's limited by what they know about themselves and the world they inhabit. For one thing, people are very likely to tell you the truth about what they would like to think about themselves. They may be telling you what they think is the truth, but that's only a small part of their inner world. Remember, there are still females in this world with functioning sexual organs who think that the female orgasm is a myth. People's knowledge is limited by their experiences, and since the average person has few enough partners in a lifetime to count on one hand, and open talk of sexuality is often highly taboo.... Well, their opinion about what is "normal" is probably skewed, at least slightly. (Though interviewing people is useful for other reasons... You can learn their mannerisms, speech patterns, etc., and if the character is written in third-person, this may be all you need for non-sexual scenes! Besides, some of the most interesting conflicts revolve around the difference between what people think they are and what they actually are.) But let's say you have access to perfectly accurate information. You're still not guaranteed to write "good" sex scenes, because no matter what the purpose of the scene, it's very, very, very rare that what you write is going to resemble reality in any way beyond the most superficial without turning off readers. If it's erotica, well... Real sex is boring to watch and kind of gross if you aren't the person having it. (Zach and Miri Make a Porno demonstrates this delightfully. I highly recommend it.) If you're writing some literary fiction masterpiece in which the central plot revolves around a sexual relationship as a way of demonstrating some universal human truth (I'm thinking Lolita here, and books like it) then the reason is because you have to provide the audience with enough information to avoid pulling them out of your story, without being so graphic and realistic that they end up shocked out of the story. Either way, what you write is going to bear only passing resemblance to "reality". IMO, erotica really is one of the hardest things to write, no matter who you are. Everyone has had sex, so everyone thinks they know what it is. But at the same time, most people don't talk openly about sex with other people and generally don't have tons of sexual partners in their lifetime (certainly not enough to be considered a random enough sample for them to be able to judge what's "normal" in the general population). Sex is also one of those things that people are really terrified that they are doing "wrong". The result of all this complicated sociology is that people are often very opinionated about what's "right" without really understanding that sexual experiences are, in reality, hugely varied and individual. Even two people of the same gender, sexual orientation, race, socioeconomic status, and social background may have radically different approaches, attitudes, experiences, desires, and even anatomy! So even if you do all your "legwork" you're going to have people saying that what you write doesn't make sense because it doesn't match up with their own personal, highly unique experiences. My opinion on this is, If you aren't worried about artistic integrity (and many of us aren't, if we're writing erotica), focus on what turns /you/ on, and to hell with people who say it's not "real". Chances are very good that people who are like you will also be turned on by it, so someone, somewhere will also enjoy what you wrote. And isn't that kind of the point of writing for other people's entertainment? But let's say that I was really concerned about pleasing an audience that is very different from myself. For the sake of example, let's say that you're a gold-star lesbian who wants to write a literary fiction novel about a gay couple in which the sex figures prominently in the story without being intended to titillate, with gay men as your target audience. You have a two-fold problem here: 1) you need to know biologically how the male anatomy works, and how it's different from your own, and 2) you need to learn about gay male sexuality/desire and how it differs from your own so that you don't pull your target audience out of the story by writing something that's wildly unfamiliar to their experience. The easiest first step is to read a LOT of sex scenes written with gay male characters. If it were me, I would try to get a good dozen that are written with a female target audience, and then get another good dozen written with a male target audience (examples that were actually popular with the target audience, of course), and I would try to make sure to cross genres and "types" of stories in order to figure out what's common to the sex scenes regardless of plot considerations and genre conventions. After picking these apart (you don't get to just read them for funsies... you have to go back and analyze them for structure, character, and other elements), I would figure out three things: 1) What is common to all of these stories, regardless of target audience? 2) What is common only when the audience is female (red flag for things that either women think men are like, or that are specific to a female understand of sexuality), 3) What is common to all the stories that are popular with a male audience, but missing in the books for female audiences (red flag for things that are common to the male experience that women are unlikely to know about, and therefore aren't bothered when it's missing). Once you've done all that research, you probably have a pretty good idea of how to write a story that gay men will appreciate. You may not have as much fun writing it, if you're a gold-star lesbian, but if you do your research well and make sure and actually use that research, you have a pretty good chance of writing a story that a male audience will identify with and enjoy. All this being said, I've never once used this technique for writing erotica. I just write what I find to be sexy and if other people like it, then great. If not, then there are most likely piles and piles of things written by other authors that they WILL, so I just don't worry about it too much. That....was longer than I expected. Sorry! The tl;dr: Talking to people isn't always the best way to get into the minds of people very different from yourself. Sometimes the best way is to read fiction that is written for and enjoyed by the type of person whose head you're trying to get into.

Separate issues. Walker wasn't talking about making teachers pay for their school supplies, but making them pay into their retirement fund rather than having the state foot the entire pension bill.