Six Sex Scenes

Six Sex Scenes is a first-person narrative told from the perspective of a young woman. It has been described as "the story of a young Jewish woman's dysfunctional love-life, with frequent flashbacks into her equally dysfunctional childhood".[1]

Six Sex Scenes consists of many lexia: individual webpages with a few paragraphs of the story. While some contemporaneous web hypertext fictions used in-text links, Six Sex Scenes presented the links at the bottom of each screen. Each lexia has 3-4 links to other lexia, allowing the reader to read the story in many different orders. "a menu of options at the end of each story-section. This menu is actually a contents-list for the story's next stage. If we clicked on a link that says ‘Bored’, we will find ourselves reading a section entitled ‘Bored’: so in a sense, although we may be unclear about the shape of the story as a whole, we are shown at the end of each section, in a relatively straightforward way, where we can go next".[1] This means that Eisen "allows us to read a section all the way through before reminding us that there are multiple choices to be made".[1]

Mark Bernstein writes that Six Sex Scenes uses counterpoint structure and avoids the cyclical structure common in many other hypertexts.[2] Adrian Miles described the episodes as "largely unmotivated in terms of realist or literal narrative conventions",[3] although Bernstein noted that the counterpoint structure emphasised contrasts or links between childhood and adult experiences: "Greenheart’s hypertext habitually alternates time frames: a writing space describing a childhood scene tends to be linked to scenes of adult life, and adult scenes tend to be linked to stories of childhood."[2]

A sequel titled Making Scenes was published as a print novel in 2001.[4][5][6]

Six Sex Scenes was one of the winners of the New Media Invision Awards in 1997.[7]

• Archived version of Six Sex Scenes.[8]
• Entry in ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base[9]