As I often do, I was puttering around Something Awful earlier. And as I often find, there was a subject that struck my interest.
Sex in fantasy.
A vast number of people seem to consider this a bad thing.
This subject caught my attention pretty rapidly, owing to what I’m working on at the moment. Not that I’m in the midst of a throttling sex epic (or sexpic), mind you, but as I continue to grow as a writer, I discover that the more important developments in a story happen between people, in relationships, in stares that linger too long and the heat of breath upon bare skin.
And I wondered why I’ve come to this conclusion and more people haven’t?
I wondered why, exactly, it was that sex in fantasy was such a subject worthy of such scorn. People like sex, don’t they? Vast swaths of books are sold that heavily involve the subject. Sex is realistic, isn’t it? Aren’t we always looking for ways to enhance our realism in fantasy? Sex is important to human development, isn’t it? And at the core of every book beats something human.
And as I wondered why, I realized that there are probably a few reasons. I’d like to address them here.
Sex is Gross
The complaint I most often hear about this subject is that it’s just “there.” It has no purpose in the story, no real reason for it to happen, no relevance to the plot. This always makes me think of a scene in which someone is screaming: “It’s no use, Barbara! The bomb is sextivated! The only way to disarm it is for us to engage in rousing coitus right now or the entire world is DOOMED!”
That’s silly, of course. I tend to see most peoples’ points when they bring this up. Sex oftentimes feels shoehorned in by the author, as though the author sat at his or her desk and went: “…and there we are. ‘The end.’ Oh, snap, I forgot to add in a romantic subplot. Hang on, let me go fix that. Aaaaand…done.”
That’s not too far from the truth. Frequently, it’s more like: “Oh, snap, I forgot to add in emotional development. Hang on, let me throw in a sex scene” or “oh, snap, I forgot to titillate someone. Hang on, let me throw in some kinky bondage.”
Here’s a protip for writers: if you ever feel you need a sex scene, you probably do not need a sex scene. It tends to just happen between characters, like most good writing, and there’s not a lot you can do about it.
And here’s a point for readers: Sometimes, indeed, sex does just happen. Sometimes it is meaningless. But in books, it frequently isn’t.
Quite often, sex is the raising of the emotional stakes between two characters, the evolution of their relationship from one stage to the next. It’s every bit as important to the plot, just less spelled out and more…naked.
Usually.
Feelings are Gross
Sometimes, people just don’t want to see the physical act. That’s fine. A lot of people don’t like violence, either. It’s good when those people can skip that aspect of it, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
A lot of people, I think, associate sex with that most horrible threat to genre fiction: emotion. Relationships instead of swords?! Kissing instead of stabbing?! In my fantasy? I don’t think so!
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to paint the entirety of fantasy readership as a bunch of underdeveloped children terrified of mushy stuff. But it’s been a genre standard for awhile that things like combat, worldbuilding and discussing economics have been expected to make up the lion’s share of the book.
But that’s the problem of desensitization. I’m certainly not going to say that action isn’t effective (I did write a scene in which a dragonman stomps a man’s crotch into pulp, after all), but if, indeed, so much of the book is action then the relationships and emotional content, by virtue of being less in quality, must have the greater importance and the stronger impact. This is simply how good plotting works.
And likewise, humans work fairly simply, too: we love action, we love fight scenes, but we have a hard time investing in it. Relationships, though, are something we invest in. They are something we feel ourselves drawn into because we can relate to heartbreak much more than we can relate to broken bones. This is why we can look at an explosion and barely register it in an action movie and find ourselves obsessed with the meaning of two people holding hands.
Authors are Gross
If you read closely enough, you can tell the exact point in the prose where the author started touching themselves.
–Source Unknown
This is harder to defend against because, for the life of me, I can’t easily disagree with.
The truth is, across all genres, every work of fiction, a lot of us authors are accused with the wholly-accurate charge of writing some really, really, reeeeeally creepy sex scenes.
Sometimes, it comes across as weird self-gratification in which our superman self-inserts fuck a dozen supermodel elf queens in quick succession. Sometimes, it’s wildly descriptive phrases done with a butcher shop’s thesaurus in which m’lord’s meat was taken idly between arachnid-cool fingertips and slid tantalizingly between m’lady’s pair of hams. And sometimes, it’s morally vile, such as when someone tries to make a rape scene titillating.
No doubt, we authors have a long way to go when it comes to this.
The thing is, though, we’re never going to know what’s going right or wrong if we don’t experiment, if we don’t try and sometimes fail, if we don’t give it our best shot and see what really didn’t work and what some people somewhere just didn’t like.
Also, sex is really fun to write. So bear with us a little. We’ll get it right one of these days.
Conclusions are Gross
I could bring up economics. I could say that the success of weirdness like Fifty Shades of Grey justifies writing sex as a sound business decision and that more people enjoy reading it than don’t.
I could bring up social change. I could say that we have an obligation to push the genre forward and, if it is indeed mired in conservative thought, to push it and the fanbase out of that.
I could bring up realism. I could say that characters do get messy, do make relationships that aren’t clean, do sometimes have sex just for the heck of it, do make mistakes with each other.
These are all less than ideal reasons, in my opinion, to write sex.
I write sex because it’s important. It’s important to the characters and, thus, important to the story. If it were not important, I probably wouldn’t do it.
And that, my friends, is your anticlimax
I think the largest reason is that most fantasy are slated as teen novels, and we happen to still live in a puritanical society. It’s changing quickly, but here we still are. I have 3 examples of sex in fantasy that stick with me. First is a very poorly written bit of fantasy erotica I happened across in my early 20’s. Demon phallus and everything, not recommended. Before that, though, there was Salvatore’s Dark Elf Trilogy, wherein Drizzt encounters sex in the drow sense. It’s cast as a very negative thing because sex for fun or power falls into the darker end of the morality spectrum, at least in the aforementioned puritanical point of view. The third (and yes, I powered myself through the whole series) is the Sword of Truth series, Terry Goodkind. In that it wasn’t a “scene” in the strictest sense of the word, but eventually the primary characters get it on because there is all the emotional and relationship development occurring. That series, however, gets away from reading like it’s written for teenagers.
The morale? I just ramble most of the time. But if you write adult novels, it’ll happen because that’s what adults do. If you write a teen novel, be careful if you want to think of your teenage daughter being engaged in what you’re writing. I think.
Ah, yes. The whole “think of the children” angle comes up a lot in these discussions. Or rather the whole “parents won’t let their children read sex” angle comes up a lot. And yet I note a lot of YA books have sex these days. It tends to be just that, though: a culmination of the emotional tension between the characters and dealing with the consequences that follow. Because, when you’re young, this is usually what sex is about and when you’re young, other people are your entire world. It’s only when we get older and cynical enough to think about it and weigh it against everything else (career, ambition, etc.) that we start to treat it as a hobby.
Ultimately, it’s up to the parents. I encourage them to read my stuff first and see if they’re okay with their kids reading it. If they aren’t, then oh well. If they are, then great. I can’t really limit myself based on that.
I can’t remember my mum ever having an opinion on what sort of books I wanted to read past the age of twelve… I think I was thirteen or fourteen when my mum gave me this Swedish teen novel about finding yourself and figuring out your sexuality and stuff. It was written for kids of the age I was at the time, but it had a lot of fairly graphic descriptions of sex and masturbation.
Most of the books I read in my teens were books I’d picked out myself at the library or, later, when I had money, at the local fantasy/sci-fi bookshop, and I don’t think my mother even knew what most of them were, and she never asked. I think she was just happy that I was reading genre fiction… She pushed Earthsea on me when I was twelve.
I guess I find it sort of weird when parents want to censor what books their kids read. I get it when we’re talking younger children, and I get it where movies are concerned, but telling your teen that they can’t read a book because it has sex/violence/drugs/death/magic just makes me think police state. For the most part, in my experience, it the book is too grown up, the kid will get bored before they even get to the sexy parts.
Yes. To pretty much everything you said.
Mainly i think are just critical because they arent happy unless they think they’re contributing something. Sex is just another dart board to throw overcritical or prudish darts at.
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I was linked to this article in a forum, and I have to say you make a great point, Mr. Sykes. As a bit of a “child” myself, I kind of know exactly how people react when they see me reading adult books such as Joe Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy (who uses sex well, by the way) or A Song Of Ice and Fire, for that matter.
I really liked this article. I’m probably gonna follow your blog regularly now. xD
“If you read closely enough, you can tell the exact point in the prose where the author started touching themselves.”
Sometimes, closer inspection of a work will lead to the conclusion that the author was touching themselves all along.
I love writing sex scenes. I don’t often put them in my stories, and when I do it’s because it’s important, but sitting down to write a really detailed sex scene is a really fun exercise. And, as I recently discovered from writing a rather disturbing horror short, I love writing things that make people uncomfortable. Not that I write just for shock value, but much like with any art, if you get a strong reaction you must be doing something right, because the only bad art is art that people feel indifferent towards.
This topic comes up an awful lot on forums, and I think that what it comes down to is that our culture (particularly US culture – the UK is less uptight in this respect) is incredibly puritanical about sex whilst being remarkably blasé about violence. It’s not confined to fantasy – you’ll see violence in a PG-13 movie that would scare the crap out of you in real life, but ZOMG nekkid people showing their privates? Slap an adult certificate on it in case it corrupts minors!
The other thing is of course that a lot of writers are just too embarrassed to write sex scenes. They’re hard to do well, and then there’s the worry that readers will assume either you’re writing about your own experiences or have been doing some very shady research! (At least nowadays you can do it online…) And writers have mothers and grannies and other relatives who might read the book and wonder if the writer shares their characters’ proclivities…you’re opening up a part of your life that is normally only conducted behind closed doors, and that’s frankly scary.
I admit that my first book was pretty tame on the sex front, though I got a bit bolder with the second (due out in December if you’re curious…). If readers want to skip the sex scenes in my work, fair enough – but they’ll be missing out on character development and maybe even an important plot point, because I don’t write gratuitous sex (if it’s not important to the story, I fade to black). I do feel, though, that you’re selling your characters, and yourself, short if you hold back from exploring this ubiquitous facet of human behaviour.
“If you read closely enough, you can tell the exact point in the prose where the author started touching themselves.”
Sykes quoting Sykes is scary.
Shit, did I say that? I couldn’t remember.
WELL NOW I LOOK LIKE A DOUCHE.
I had to come on over and read this 🙂 I am all for NO sex in fantasy. Why? Well I read historical romance, paranormal romance and all that jazz, and I skim the sex scenes, sure they can be hot and all, but they are boring and add nothing to that plot. They are fillers and at least in those books it feels that the authors throws them in for some hot action that span over several pages
I used to think this, but I think it’s unfair to say that a sex scene adds nothing. A sex scene is merely a dialogue with verbal cues. It’s an emotional apex to a character’s arc (not the only one, but it’s certainly there).
I think there are authors that certainly DO write sex scenes that add nothing, but not all of them are inherently worthless.