Article written by Rory Hawkins
Before I say anything else, yes this is in part about smutty novels. I haven’t read anything more than exerts from these particular books (you just have to make sure you’re justified in taking the high ground), and I don’t think it disrespectful to say they’re nothing ground-breaking. But then, they’re not trying to be, they don’t need to be.
The release and success of E L James’ infamous Fifty Shades trilogy sparked a new wave of “sex-centric” romance novels. Since 2011, any regular shop-goer will have noticed that growing section. You know the one – lots of guys’ abs, women with slightly open lips, some with suggestive titles like Bared to You. Yes, it’s obvious that the staple demographic is women, and that’s the point: it sells. Even in books, sex sells.
Now, sex in books is by no means a new phenomenon. The earliest pieces of explicit sex in literature include the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Song of Solomon from the Bible – dated at 2100 BC and during the 1st century CE, respectively. However, these were taken as religious or cultural canon in their times.
For Western civilisation, sex in fiction didn’t make a proper emergence until the 17th or 18th century. But because of the rigid structure the elite and controlling classes applied to interactions between men and women within society (or at least presented, whilst doing whatever they felt like anyway), anything of a sexual nature was highly scrutinised. Sexual imagery in erotic poetry and narratives were naturally taboo – but doesn’t that just create even more of a cult following? Maybe that’s why even now there’s still an air of guilty pleasure connected to it. Maybe the marketing teams just know their stuff.
But why address any of this? Well, because sex sells books, doesn’t that mean it’s good? From a publishing perspective, it’s great for business: more sold means more money, everyone profits and more books can be in circulation. To be more idealistic, society inevitably benefits from this to some extent – a continued expression of new ideas, a wider conversation that changes how we think about certain topics.
Since the 18th century’s smutty novels, social barriers have been lowered considerably to the semi-comfortable conversation of sex. I’m not attributing any large part of this to erotica, but a reasonable conversation has to be started for that to happen, whether or not sex in literature is a tiny reason or just a result.
Big picture aside, the individual writer benefits from readers taking more interest in their work. First, the intrigue around another person’s sex life can be exciting. That’s why we read books: to be drawn into the lives of fictional others. The description around this can be evocative. Writing or not, your brain still releases those same chemicals. Sex good.
Secondly by adding this kind of content (to whatever degree an author thinks it will suit their narrative’s tone), the characters on the page can have that little more breadth to them. I think one of biggest goals for a fiction author is to make their characters seem more than just believable.
Done right, the added element of sexual tension or deeper relationships among characters only adds to how real they can seem to a reader. Being relatable is another trait that can draw readers to a particular character – relatable people, made up or not, still have needs.
The reasons book characters have sex is only reflective of the real world: people do things for an abundance of reasons. Those same shades of grey are still all too visible. How sex is portrayed in writing is up to the author’s opinions, on what it is or can/should be. Whatever writing techniques make one approach effective might differ to another. Thinking on it, I’ve simplified these into three magic groups: Erotica, Emotional, and Carnal.
Thanks to Fifty Shades, erotica is probably the first thing that springs to mind when you think “reading about people having sex.” Sex in erotic fiction is the core of why it was written; reading it is for the pleasure of finding the explicitly physical part of relationships enjoyable.
To stress this, writers dwell on the physicality: ‘He’s got both of my hands in a vicelike grip above my head… He’s pinning me to the wall using his lips… My tongue tentatively strokes his in a slow, erotic dance… His erection is against my belly’ (Fifty Shades of Grey, p78).
In both how the scene is staged and to what level of description, you can see what the piece is going for. By putting more focus on physical intimacy in sexual encounters, erotica underpins that it doesn’t have much in the way of emotional thought. Covering its tracks means even more literal details. Want to be complementary? Then erotica gives sex a heightened physicality.
Writing erotica well is a balancing act between too many physical descriptions and too little: the former campy, unconvincing or confusing; the latter falling short of arousing. Ultimately, the point is to provide a ready-made fantasy. Anyone tearing through the pages of E L James, Sylvia Day or equivalent probably wishes they were in some iteration of the scenes they’re reading.
But sex in writing isn’t all physical and wild – a centrepiece to the rest of a novel. There’s plenty of books that already had content that was considered steamy before the Fifty Shades. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series (the first published 1991) is a prime example. Also marketed towards women, the story takes the protagonist from her time (post-WW2) to 18th century Scotland; without a way home and considered an ‘outlander’, she is forced to adapt. Already there’s more to the story than just the romance – that’s one of the key distinctions between approaches to sex in writing.
‘His extreme gentleness was in no way tentative; rather it was the promise of power known and held in leash; a challenge and a provocation the more remarkable for its lack of demand. I am yours, it said. And if you will have me, then…’ (Outlander, Chapter 14).
Despite talking about sex, in the moment of it happening the piece takes more note of the emotional subtext behind the action. What is physically happening can be alluded to varying degrees, but the emotional stays the focus. This time, emotions are heightened.
In current prose trends, having a balance between what’s happening within and without a character makes an easier read. Readers can follow the developments of a character’s personality as the novel goes, because these little mental updates are explored in the narration.
But how is sex portrayed when neither physical nor emotional intimacy is shown? Between the two, there at least exists the idea of vulnerability: one touches on it here and there, the other can fetishize displaying it. But when sex is portrayed as carnal, it lacks intimacy or vulnerability.
If a person isn’t being intimate or vulnerable in sex, they aren’t using it as a means to try being either. The same stands in writing. Yes, ‘carnal’ is synonymous with ‘erotic’ but I stand by that the former has more connotations with just fulfilling need or selfishness. Writing sex this way frames characters more objectively than they or the narration might try to.
Before their country’s revolution, the “great” Russian writers achieved this to shocking effect. The works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov (among others) display the sexual repression of their time. Without them explicitly criticising that standpoint, it’s easy to examine any of their work and see where repression only leads to abuse.
Many of them were, at least for part of their lives, self-confessed sex addicts and womanisers. Tolstoy’s work in particular takes a very cynical and narrow-minded view of sex, yet doesn’t identify that the piety towards it only continues the cycle.
Anna Karenin (considered one of his best novels) is a great example of this: the titular character’s affair drives most of the plot but highlights the failings in her character for being so superficial in affections. Like Tolstoy’s other works, it’s a thinly veiled cautionary tale about those that stray from the prescribed “right”.
This orthodoxy frames sex as something that defines the quality of a person’s character without any further discourse into intimacy. Sex becomes an act unto itself, and so is a tool used to see character’s failings because they are too free with their liaisons or don’t have true intentions.
Current authors (like Haruki Murakami) still use sex to frame characters objectively, just minus the dogma. It sits for more self-reflective protagonists rather than tragic examples of sexual desire gone wrong.
Of the three, carnal strikes me as the most easily manipulated but the hardest to make look good. It lacks the flourishes of either erotica or emotional intimacy – but a writer can frame sex depending on the context of the rest of a narrative.
Regardless of writing any genre or aiming a narrative at a specific audience, a writer can still underscore a topic or behaviour with their thoughts. With a writer’s language, and understanding, sex becomes malleable. Sex! Just like outside the book, it can be a scarily unspecified number of things. And after the hormones have calmed down, it’s not just the message but the intentions behind it that really impacted you.
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