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| SFReader Forums > SFReader > Anything Goes! > Men and sex | Forum Quick Jump
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Firlefanz
Sage
      
Date Joined Mar 2007
Total Posts : 1246
| Posted 5/31/2007 9:39 AM (GMT -5) |   | | | |
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BethS
Adept
Date Joined Jun 2004
Total Posts : 750
| Posted 5/31/2007 10:08 AM (GMT -5) | |
cussedness said...I have a new editor. however, she had one compliant that I was not certain about. So I thought I'd ask you guys out there. My new editor says that the young males in my most recent novel think about sex too much. I was always under the impression that young guys, in this case between the ages of 16 and 21, spent a lot of time thinking about sex and chasing girls. I'm not presenting them in a negative light when I do it, but still... Is that true or am I stereotyping them?
This is just a guess, but maybe her complaint is not so much that your characters aren't accurately portrayed, but that their "obsession" with sex distracts from the actual story. I.e., in fiction, a little goes a long way and maybe you overdid the realism. 
Edited to add: I should've read the thread first before responding. Sorry for the redunancy.
~Beth | | Back to Top | | |
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Frank
Adept
Date Joined Aug 2005
Total Posts : 629
| Posted 5/31/2007 11:16 AM (GMT -5) | | | And why isn't there more sex in high fantasy? | | Back to Top | | |
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nathan
Sage
Date Joined Mar 2006
Total Posts : 2122
| Posted 5/31/2007 11:44 AM (GMT -5) | |
Jeff Stehman said...
Nathan, I'm reminded of the Buffy episode in which she could read minds. Specifically, I'm reminded of Xander's thoughts. Well...TS Elliot said: Bad Poets Borrow, Great Poets steal but as soon as you wrote that I remembered that episode and snorted some Red Bull up my nose. Buffy was a such a classic show.
You know I couldn't write a Bolan like that (he's all serious like Bat Man) but I could write a couple of characters in a Stony_Man with that style. Of course having that thought-interruption-pattern occuring during the disarmement of a warhead might be pushing the envelope...
Thank you everyone for the validation Stuck at home with my wife on bed rest before the baby comes has left me cutting up with only the boys for an audience. Now they think I'm hilarious but the bar is set kind of low for a 6 & 4 year old.
VIEW IMAGE"Writing the wet dreams of teenage boys" - Lindsey Llyod, Tangent Reviews
Tarantino himself has been forward and unapologetic about his influences. In a 1994 interview with Empire magazine, he said, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." | | Back to Top | | |
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Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 5/31/2007 11:50 AM (GMT -5) | | And why isn't there more sex in high fantasy?
***
All SF is sexual, just often phrased in symbolism and archetypes that *seem* apart from straight eroticism. Under it all: sex and death, that's the main offerings on our cosmic menu here in this vicinity and as far out from it as we've managed to send probes or radio waves.
What? Don't you find cosmic background radiation sexy?  Black holes, superstrings, neutron stars....
And of course, in fantasy, dragons, succubi, demons, swords, and magic wands.... Herr Freud?
Daniel | | Back to Top | | |
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darkbow
Rabbit lord
Date Joined Oct 2005
Total Posts : 1711
| Posted 5/31/2007 12:03 PM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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BethS
Adept
Date Joined Jun 2004
Total Posts : 750
| Posted 5/31/2007 1:36 PM (GMT -5) | |
Frank said...
And why isn't there more sex in high fantasy? I'll take a wild stab at answering. I think (and I could be wrong about this) that most high fantasy is written by men and while men think about sex a lot, they apparently aren't as comfortable writing about it as women are. If you doubt that, just crack open a typical romance genre novel. Women are, in their own way, just as sex-obsessed as men.
Now why many male writers tend to shy away from writing about sex, I couldn't say. I have a friend who offered the theory that it's because when they start thinking about sex (a necessary prerequisite for writing about it), their brains short circuit. Or to put it another way, there's an old saying: When the penis stands up, the brain lies down.
And everyone knows men aren't good at multi-tasking. {g,d, & r}
~Beth | | Back to Top | | |
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nathan
Sage
Date Joined Mar 2006
Total Posts : 2122
| Posted 5/31/2007 2:41 PM (GMT -5) | |
xiaotien said...
nathan, i found this post highly offensive. i mean really!!! why was there no mention of legs or ass? i don't have boobies. men!!!! i swear. 
While participating in a panel discussion at Yale University, he was confronted by an angry woman who accused him of being "nothing but a breast man." His immediate reply:
"That's only the half of it."
I fear to go too much further down this line
VIEW IMAGE"Writing the wet dreams of teenage boys" - Lindsey Llyod, Tangent Reviews
Tarantino himself has been forward and unapologetic about his influences. In a 1994 interview with Empire magazine, he said, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4546
| Posted 5/31/2007 3:21 PM (GMT -5) | | I dunno, I do my best writing with my brain lying down. Sometimes anyway. And there is plenty of sex in High Fantasy, if you read the right fantasy (try C.S. Friedman). But men are so often accused of thinking about nothing else, they learn to guard against it.
Experience tells me nothing I do with sex in my writing will be right. Someone will be offended, be convinced they know _my_ sexual proclivities, which will then be judged, in public, to be wanting in some manner. I have enough grief in my life, thank you. Its happened to other writers (and not just John Norman). Heinlien gets it all the time, with everything he wrote judged not by the standards of his times but by ours. The constant complaint of the Heinlien superwoman is enough to set my teeth on edge. He's derided for the unrealistic and unnatural portrayal of females, yet he was the first writer in genre I'm aware of to even give females credit for competence. He came of age in an era of women portrayed as swooning adornments and ended up writing books like Friday, but some how doesn't get credit for changing (for the better) the way women are portrayed in genre. Sad.
Its not just him. Every male writer I've ever read or met who has a noticable amount of sex in his work gets called on it. And the callers are seldom happy about it, no matter how he dealt with it. Women do not get held to this standard-- when they write about child rape, incest, sadomasochism, auto-eroticism, prostitution, beastiality and bukaki they are judged to be being erotic. Men are judged to be promoting whatever acts are portrayed. At least they certainly draw more flack for it. So many male writers either avoid it or "tone it down", IMO.
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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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4546
| Posted 5/31/2007 4:41 PM (GMT -5) | | Let me clairify;
I'm not saying they wouldn't get published, I'm saying they get more flack from the public over it.
An established writer can include a horrific amount of sex in a book, especially if the last book sold well. But the men writers who do so seem to get a disproportionate amoun of grief from it. An example-- John Ringo wrote an S&M man's adventure novel series (Ghost, Kildare, others I don't recall the titles of) and it was published (as SF) by Baen because Jim Baen had made damn good money from everything Jonny'd put out and he didn't want him peddaling the Ms elsewhere. The books sell very, very well. Sex is 40% to 70% of the plotline, the rest is anti-terrorist mayhem. Lots of eastern european underage sex slaves in the series. John gets creamed over the sex, just reviled, on web boards and at conventions etc.
Its not innacurate-- niether the BDSM nor the state of the sex trade in eastern europe, it is frighteningly accurate in some places (I know, I helped collate some of the research). John tells his story in a certain way but the details _are not his fault!_ Yet to hear some people talk about him, you'd think he invented the sex slave trade, personally. Now John's skin is very thick and dense, like iron, but even he tires of the endless flack over teenage hookers in Budapest. He was in Budapest, he saw the hookers, he worked them into his story (with a heavy hand, I admit). Sometimes you'd think he got caught smuggling Romainian childeren into a Thai brothel.
Yet an author like C.S. Friedman can put out a fantasy like _Feast of Souls_, with its bleak perspective of all men being child rapist and all women forced into whoring (or very nearly) and it passes without comment. It is refeered to as "a very dark fantasy" and I'll bet she doesn't get half the reaction Jonny does. The casual and inevitable brutality inherit in her stories is appalling, though they are well told and engaging, but the outcry is muted. I posit that the author's gender has at least something to do with that.
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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darkbow
Rabbit lord
Date Joined Oct 2005
Total Posts : 1711
| Posted 5/31/2007 6:05 PM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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