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| SFReader Forums > SFReader > Anything Goes! > Men and sex | Forum Quick Jump
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WRJames
Stablehand
      
Date Joined Apr 2007
Total Posts : 49
| Posted 6/12/2007 8:53 PM (GMT -4) |   |
Nicholas said...
Damn, Mike, you got me thinking all psychological now. Several readers have noted that the more detailed, explicit sex tends to appear in female writers, whereas male writers are more apt to use the "camera fade." I'm thinking now about what all the pop psychologists say about differences in gender attitudes toward sex: men more often tend to think of it as a pleasurable physical act, women more often attach greater emotional significance to it (this is a blanket overgeneralization, of course--I've seen it cut both ways). But perhaps there is something of this at work here: a female writer may be more apt to consider the sex act itself as a significant emotional core of the plot, whereas a male writer will consider it inconsequential to the plot (maybe not the act itself but the details of the act) and thus be more likely to have it occur "offstage."
Interesting -- I'm definitely a male writer (a straight one, even, unlike most of my characters) -- but I write sex scenes exactly the way you describe the women doing it -- concentrating more on the emotional consequences than the physical details (but definitely without camera fades). I guess I'm like BH, sex and love are hopelessly intertwined, and it's my characters hearts that get them into trouble, not their genitalia.
My books on Mobipocket
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MysticWino
anarchist fringe monkey boddhisatva
Date Joined May 2007
Total Posts : 1570
| Posted 6/12/2007 4:37 PM (GMT -4) | | I was a fiend in my teens.
And twenties.
Into my thirties.
Now I prefer scotch - and tend to think much more about scotch.
In my twenties, I used to tell my friends a bottle was a poor substitute for a woman. Early thirties the girls were poor subsititutes for the bottle.
But in my teens, everything was about sex. How to get it. How to keep it. How to do it. I was raised funny, though, and had really strange ideas about love and commitment and all that. My parents, especially my mother, razed me to respect women to the point of worship. I put them so high on a pedestal that I was always jumping at them like a lapdog. I learned to write poetry for the sake of winning love (and therefore sex). I was sensitive to win love (and thereby sex). I was macho to win affection (and sex). Sometimes a rogue, sometimes gentleman, always a wannabe casanova. Problem was, I linked sex and romantic love so completely that I realized them (incorrectly) to be the same. And I always thought about sex, whether as a goal in itself or as the reward that came with winning the princess.
I'm really thirsty for that scotch now.
And if I'm taking the time to visualize the sex act, I'm usually too preoccupied to push keys. . . . I far prefer innuendo. And, I'm a leg man from way back (first time I learned what gravity does to the top  ).
Exile of my own dull vice. . . | | Back to Top | | |
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Nicholas
Adept
Date Joined Jun 2006
Total Posts : 977
| Posted 6/12/2007 1:30 PM (GMT -4) | |
Erazmus said...
I have one fairly graphic scene and a lot of camera fades, because usually the sex doesn't happen until the plot slows down and a (pardon the phrase) blow-by-blow account seems inappropriate. But in my recent reading I've noticed that this is a fairly male approach. Charline Harris has a lot more graphicly depicted sex than I do, often in places I'd have left it out.
Damn, Mike, you got me thinking all psychological now. Several readers have noted that the more detailed, explicit sex tends to appear in female writers, whereas male writers are more apt to use the "camera fade." I'm thinking now about what all the pop psychologists say about differences in gender attitudes toward sex: men more often tend to think of it as a pleasurable physical act, women more often attach greater emotional significance to it (this is a blanket overgeneralization, of course--I've seen it cut both ways). But perhaps there is something of this at work here: a female writer may be more apt to consider the sex act itself as a significant emotional core of the plot, whereas a male writer will consider it inconsequential to the plot (maybe not the act itself but the details of the act) and thus be more likely to have it occur "offstage." For a writer like Charline Harris, the graphic depiction of the sex is as significant to her as, say, the blow-by-blow details of a fight scene in a story by one of us male S&S writers. We've all heard the critic who says, "Why all the graphic detail of the violence--why not just say, they fought, and at the end of it, so-and-so was dead and so-and-so was alive?" Our answer, of course, is that the details of the fight are core to the type of story we're telling. Charline would likely say the same thing about her sex.
http://ozment.livejournal.com
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BethS
Adept
Date Joined Jun 2004
Total Posts : 748
| Posted 6/11/2007 7:42 PM (GMT -4) | |
erazmus said...Well, I like to say that my main character's sex life is her buisness, but as that is a statement of fact-- she makes a living as a web-cam girl, some sexual content seems inevitable. I have one fairly graphic scene and a lot of camera fades, because usually the sex doesn't happen until the plot slows down and a (pardon the phrase) blow-by-blow account seems inappropriate. But in my recent reading I've noticed that this is a fairly male approach. Charline Harris has a lot more graphicly depicted sex than I do, often in places I'd have left it out. The difference is her constant romantic subplots, which lend an importance to the sex that my footloose and free wanton slut of a mercinary doesn't have, usually. Is it just more okay to give details when the sex is more important to the character then? I've read a lot of novels, with authors of both genders, which have plenty of sex in them but I don't seem to have developed a good standard for when to g how far, and so I suspect I err on the side of caution. Mike
Fwiw, I think sex scenes fall under the same rules as any other scene: they need to have a reason to be. They must further the plot, deepen conflict, and/or develop character, or else they belong offstage.
~Beth | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4475
| Posted 6/11/2007 3:39 PM (GMT -4) | | Well,
I like to say that my main character's sex life is her buisness, but as that is a statement of fact-- she makes a living as a web-cam girl, some sexual content seems inevitable. I have one fairly graphic scene and a lot of camera fades, because usually the sex doesn't happen until the plot slows down and a (pardon the phrase) blow-by-blow account seems inappropriate. But in my recent reading I've noticed that this is a fairly male approach. Charline Harris has a lot more graphicly depicted sex than I do, often in places I'd have left it out.
The difference is her constant romantic subplots, which lend an importance to the sex that my footloose and free wanton slut of a mercinary doesn't have, usually. Is it just more okay to give details when the sex is more important to the character then? I've read a lot of novels, with authors of both genders, which have plenty of sex in them but I don't seem to have developed a good standard for when to g how far, and so I suspect I err on the side of caution.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Dutchman Rescue"in Continuum SF #6
www.continuumsciencefiction.com/orders.htm
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises:
www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php
www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php | | Back to Top | | |
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WRJames
Stablehand
Date Joined Apr 2007
Total Posts : 49
| Posted 6/11/2007 1:24 AM (GMT -4) | |
erazmus said...Leave it to college students to make an endurance event out of sex. But what is a good, middle-of-the-road approach to sex in a novel? I've read books with too much sex, no sex and enough sex, but it seems that enough for me is too much for some, and too much for me isn't enough for others. Is there a range for "just right"? Allowing that sex isn't driving the plot, when it does you naturally enough will have a lot of sex in that book. Mike
In my case, I didn't, in the beginning, set out to write an "erotic" novel. But probably my own tastes in what I like to read drove me that direction. Too many novels have characters that aren't believable because they never need to use the bathroom, never have sex, etc. Maybe you would not be interested in reading about details like that, but to me it's part of describing a total person.
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4475
| Posted 6/10/2007 6:44 AM (GMT -4) | | | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4475
| Posted 6/10/2007 6:41 AM (GMT -4) | | | | |
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von Darkmoor
Small Press Publisher (and Dancer still)
Date Joined Dec 2005
Total Posts : 2952
| Posted 6/2/2007 2:58 PM (GMT -4) | | BethS said...
Funny about the sex, though. I really don't remember... ~Beth
A large section of the book was devoted to pages that went something like this:
page (first locale) "I want sex with you."
page (second locale) - some action/commentary/intrigue
page (first locale) "I'll give you sex if you . . ."
page (third locale) - some commentary/intrigue, including the beginning of another sex-related subplot
page (first locale) "Close the door on your way out after our sex."
page (second locale) - some more action/commentary/intrigue
page (first locale) "Damn, did I have sex with -. Why/I remember when/what have I done/or some such"
page (fourth locale) - new sexual scene starting
page (third locale) "Can we have sex?"
Not one of those encounters was even remotely romantic - all were for barter or to exert authority, and each was so repetitive they only needed to replace the names of the characters involved.
As this thread has evidenced, this pattern is pretty much the way men think already. So, for me at least, that book was largely a waste of my time. I want something more to read about than a version of my daily existence. In my opinion, I learned 2 things I consider integral to the overall plot and experienced some pretty impressive changes in one or two key characters near the end of the novel. It is solely for those reasons that I still recommend the book, but ONLY to ASoIaF readers so that they may learn the few things it has to offer.
I also got to meet GRRM in Madison, listen to him speak and talk to him myself. So when all is said and done, I firmly believe he could have produced a complete novel not split asunder that still delivered those important components if he had been willing to remove both the countless conversations/events that revolved around sex or sexual acts and the 'treading water' traveling that many of the characters in Feast do.
I've said my last on this, as it's water way under the bridge and we've both other things to do. At least we somewhat agree that the book was not very memorable. 
~~~~~~~~~~
Jason M. Waltz
Fantasy Editor Staffs & Starships Magazine
~~~~~~~~~~
Ever waltz with the Devil? Or devil with a Waltz? Visit von Darkmoor's thoughts to find out (and read a review or two). | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4475
| Posted 6/2/2007 4:46 AM (GMT -4) | | So is there a different standard for men writers and women writers?
It just seems to me that when a man writes too much sex, he's peddeling pornography and when a women does it, she's championing eroticism.
A bit of perspective. I sit on the pajama panels at Mile Hi Con most years. Those are usually having to do with Sex in fantasy, erotic writing on the net etc. I'm on them because I give good panel, and my first pro sale was about a web-cam girl. Some of my copanelist write things that make me blush. Some write things I can't even work out without a picture book. All of the really hard core porn/ porn horror panelist are women.
I can't imagine writing a story centering around images like these gals work. I'd never hear the end of it. My byline is not welcome at most of the places they publish, because I'm male and straight. (or so is infered from the wife and three kids, how do they really know?) I'm not sweating the loss of potential markets, that kind of fiction generally pays even less than what I sell now, but I've _seen_ the men getting a hard time for writing things that would pass for mild amoung the ladies on the panel. A lot of that is in the nature of the audience-- we get hard core feminist who come every year to stridently demand all men bow to what ever goal they are currently pushing, while I've never caught a mysoginist ranting that women shouldn't pretend they can write books and go back into the kitchen. (I'm not saying such dinosaurs don't exist, just that they haven't gotten our Con's address yet.) You hear a lot about the religous rights disapproval(of everything), most second hand, we've never had a born-again preacher come rail at us in person yet, but I've bantered with disapproving feminist at more than one panel. For some of them, I'm not wrong writing about sex, I'm just wrong for having a penis. oh well, there are some lengths I won't go to to please an audience.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Dutchman Rescue"in Continuum SF #6
www.continuumsciencefiction.com/orders.htm
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises:
www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php | | Back to Top | |
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