Gratuitous (non) Sex
How much is too much in erotic fiction?
“Jerry” by Paul Cadmus (if this painting doesn’t make you want to further explore modern Irish literature, then you’re clearly without a pulse …)
A recent Substack article by Brandon Taylor got me thinking about sex scenes in fiction, both explicitly erotic and otherwise. (Incidentally, if you’re not reading Brandon Taylor’s fiction and Substack, you should fix that, now. He’s smart and funny and insightful, and he’s not afraid of a little spice in his stories.)
In his piece, Brandon discusses some of the recent trends in the new Puritanism sweeping the United States that suggest that there’s little or no place for sex in fiction or film:
The argument against sex scenes sometimes goes something like: sex scenes do not advance plot and do not advance character understanding and just serve to titillate the audience. Sex scenes also put a lot of strain on actors and sometimes the filming of such scenes can be coercive and gross and difficult and intensive emotionally for little artistic reward. Also, they make audiences uncomfortable. So why have them?
As an erotica writer, I see sex scenes as not just important, but absolutely necessary to my fiction — if I replaced the sex scenes in my stories with coyly closed doors, or even a matter of fact, “and then they fucked,” they’d be a whole lot shorter than they are, and probably a whole lot less interesting. Of course, to the extent that my stories “just serve to titillate” might excuse me: my stories could easily be classified as sub-literary, maybe even sub-literate, little more than random bursts of dirty words, so I’m really just helping to make the new Puritans’ argument for them.
But I also disagree, quite strongly, with the assertion that “sex scenes do not advance plot and do not advance character understanding.” While it’s certainly possible to write a sex scene that does neither — I’ve seen it done not only in explicit erotica, but also in mainstream literature — I contend that it’s actually quite rare, particularly when the sex scene is a good sex scene.
How a character fucks — with others or with themselves — very strongly reveals their inner self. In James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” for example, there are two noteworthy masturbation scenes: Leopold Bloom on the beach, watching the girls before the fireworks show, and Molly Bloom in bed, remembering Blazes Boylan. While “Ulysses” would certainly continue to be a tour de force with the first scene excised, it would hardly be the same book at all without the second (“yes I said I will Yes”). And in the beach scene, much is revealed about Leopold — his secret desires and outward prudishness, his attitudes toward women — that we would not have learned quite so directly and viscerally without his little wank.
Or think of the poetic description of climax in Ian McEwan’s “Atonement,” Tereza’s bowler hat in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” the quiet, intimate moments in Updike’s “Rabbit” novels: could we have learned about the characters with tamer versions of these scenes? Probably. But would we have lost something in those revelations coming in moments less intimate and vulnerable and erotically charged? Absolutely.
For erotic fiction, though, the problem is really turned on its head: how much of an erotic story should be taken up with non-sexual concerns? How much of a sex scene should be devoted to advancing plot or characterization, versus providing the titillation that we imagine the reader is paying for?
To which I say, are you sure you know what the reader is paying for?
While I suspect I have some readers who would be perfectly happy to read a series of dirty words describing sex acts between anonymous characters, that’s probably not the case for the majority. My stories that are consistently the most purchased and the most read — Throuple, The Night of the Storm, Off the Leash — are the ones where I think the sex and the character arc are most tightly tied together. Even in my silly gangbang stories, though, I’ve tried to make the sex and characterization mesh: Olive in The Pinball Queen’s Debauch goes about her gangbang very differently than Dani does in Beach Volleyball Bump, because they’re very different characters.
Lately I’ve been working on three stories that tell the same weekend from different perspectives — Off the Leash, Madeline’s Awakening, and my current live project, “Casey’s Story” — and I’m struck by how differently the characters approach sex, and how essential that is to their personalities. Petra is hesitant and a little anxious; Madeline is all in and then some; Casey is harboring a dark history that she’s been hiding from her friends but that informs everything about her experience at the SExC convention. I couldn’t possibly swap one character for another in the stories’ sex scenes: Madeline would never be so cautious, Petra couldn’t be so uninhibited, Casey is so burdened by her past that her friends have misread her from the start.
The sexy stories that I like best are the ones about specific characters engaged in specific acts that reveal something about their pasts or open them to a brand new experience. It’s crucial that the characters be in character when they fuck: whether the sex is good or bad, it has to be genuine to be effective in the story. Which means that there have to be some non-sexy bits, some building out of the motivations and struggles that have brought these two (or more) characters to this moment of intimacy. Then the sex can be truly hot.
“Manikins” by Paul Cadmus