What's wrong with sex?
This was in a review for Percentile's recent fic, Five Foot of Snow: "And I like how you implied that this isn't the first time they've done it, like some magical seasonal hormone thing, but something they do without words. A bonding moment rather than just sex." The first sentence is not relevant to my point (I don't know what magical seasonal hormones are), I only quote it to give context to the second sentence. In this story, Kyle breaks into Stan's house at 4am on Christmas morning, they go for a walk, then have sex in the snow at Stark's Pond. But the actual sex is either not present or is extremely vague. I'm not sure if "icy skin against icy skin" is merely a precursor to the unwritten sex, or meant to serve as unexplicit imagery for it. I'm guessing the former because of the page break.
Back to the review - would explicit sex have taken away from the sentiment of the story? I think sex can certainly be more descriptive than what Percentile has done here without distracting the intended mood. For instance, I'm not going to write a whole paragraph about Stan's effervescent cockhead if it's sad sex. There is a lot you can do with writing sex, because there are a lot of different kinds of sex. With Stan and Kyle, it's pretty frequently also a "bonding moment," and if that's an established premise, more details have never made me think, "Oh, this is 'just sex.'" I think sex in fic can feel "scripted" sometimes, i.e., bland narration after well-detailed emotion building up to it, but I find that far less suffering than having the sex skipped over. It's frustrating for me, as a reader, to have so much leading up to a sex scene and then being let down. I'm speaking generally here, because I see now that Percentile's fic is rated K+, but then, did it have to have that rating? I don't understand why a lower rating is something to shoot for. (I have actually done this myself, and I don't know why. I have no plans to do it again.) Also, I'm not just like, some horny bastard lamenting that I got jipped out of porn. Or maybe I am, but these page breaks that work as placeholders for the sex also really disrupt the flow of a story for me.
My question is, why do writers of slash fiction either not write sex at all, or skip over sex? Here are my theories:
Back to the review - would explicit sex have taken away from the sentiment of the story? I think sex can certainly be more descriptive than what Percentile has done here without distracting the intended mood. For instance, I'm not going to write a whole paragraph about Stan's effervescent cockhead if it's sad sex. There is a lot you can do with writing sex, because there are a lot of different kinds of sex. With Stan and Kyle, it's pretty frequently also a "bonding moment," and if that's an established premise, more details have never made me think, "Oh, this is 'just sex.'" I think sex in fic can feel "scripted" sometimes, i.e., bland narration after well-detailed emotion building up to it, but I find that far less suffering than having the sex skipped over. It's frustrating for me, as a reader, to have so much leading up to a sex scene and then being let down. I'm speaking generally here, because I see now that Percentile's fic is rated K+, but then, did it have to have that rating? I don't understand why a lower rating is something to shoot for. (I have actually done this myself, and I don't know why. I have no plans to do it again.) Also, I'm not just like, some horny bastard lamenting that I got jipped out of porn. Or maybe I am, but these page breaks that work as placeholders for the sex also really disrupt the flow of a story for me.
My question is, why do writers of slash fiction either not write sex at all, or skip over sex? Here are my theories:
- Writing sex can be hard. Writing about sex between two guys when you're not a guy can be particularly hard. And while it's not true that if you're a virgin you can't write good sex, it does make it a lot harder. So where do you start? Well, you could read stories with sex, not just fan fiction, but general erotic fiction, too. Do research - many of the pages for sex positions on Wikipedia have fun CGI graphics! Then do some more research - how far up is the prostate? This is, of course, if you even want to write sex.
- People think sex is gross and it really does strip away the emotional content, or that it "cheapens" the story as a whole.
- They can't strike a balance between overly vague sex and gratuitous smut, so they play it safe and don't write sex at all.
- They don't want to ward away readers who may have a preference for who tops, or the author doesn't want to create the perception of an "imbalance" in the relationship based on who tops, although this idea is faulty and, for lack of a better word, heteronormative.