geoviki | Gratuitous overuse of the frog analogy

Current Mood: numb

Gratuitous overuse of the frog analogy

A recent book review in our newspaper read:

Wallace Stegner writes ... that the difficulty with explicit sex in novels is that it invariably usurps all else that the author is attempting to accomplish:

"The trouble with excessive sexuality, in novels or in life, is that it is so compellingly interesting and attention-holding that it makes everything else seem tame or dull; it crowds off the page whole areas of human experience and human feeling that belong there but can't maintain their foothold."

Such is the case in Sue Miller's newest novel, Lost in the Forest. Although Miller's exploration of grief and self-discovery is both compelling and insightful, the sexual trysts of 16-year-old Daisy are so unforgivingly explicit that Miller's attempts to uncover the depth of who Daisy is are muddled by a nipple here and an arched back there....

I thought this over and decided that somewhere, I had crossed over to where this wasn't true for me. I've noticed that after reading fan fiction for nearly two years, I no longer find excessive sexuality all that distracting. It's like the classic analogy of the frog in slowly heating water: little by little, I no longer notice the erosion of my ability to be shocked, tittilated, or even surprised by graphic writing. I have become comfortably numb.

How about you?

~~Aside: Does anyone have an mp3 of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven that I can, er, borrow?~~ Got it. Thanks, Paula!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

I agree with you so much. I'm looking for compelling stuff. I never read many romance novels - a few of the classics at the time when I hit high school, but then I lost interest. But recently I leafed through a book on how to write a romance novel, and it seemed so restrictive. It didn't offer much room for innovation. Everyone was stuffed into a role, and the reader's expectations of what was permitted seemed to be overemphasized. In other words, no squidfic allowed.

I've noticed that after reading fan fiction for nearly two years, I no longer find excessive sexuality all that distracting.

Well, I wouldn't say that I've gotten to the "comfortably numb" stage yet. But yes, I know what you're referring to. Actually, reading so much great fanfiction with good sex scenes has mostly just made me much pickier about the quality of the erotica. To really pull me in and interest me, the sex has to flow out of strong characterization, and be very well described (and also be used as a "tool" in the sense that [Unknown site tag] means, above, in terms of carrying forward the story).

I didn't used to have such high standards before I joined this fandom. Of course, this fandom has more high quality porn/erotica than I was ever exposed to, before.

I agree that the sex shouldn't be "insert tab a into slot a" *kiss kiss* talk of randomness, *snuggle* repeat.

It should have a plot. Then the sex scene should fit into the plot, be molded by the plot and affect the plot itself.

Sometimes I skip to the sex. Sometimes I skip *over* the sex. A truly great fanfic, to me, makes it all work together beautifully.

I'm not numb to it. But if it doesn't have a plot, ok, yeah, I'm numb to it. I've probably read something just like it before, yet with a plot and meaning. Same with the smutty pictures. If there is a short story to go with it, or even if the picture is from a fanfic I'm reading, that makes it *SO* much better...

Oh hell yes. I barely even notice it anymore. I've had people point it out to me and I'm like, really? But I'm sort of glad, because it means that I can concentrate on stuff that I found more engaging in the first place. And two years nothing, man. Wait till you've been around six or seven.

here via the daily snitch.

i've had a similar experience to

iulia_linnea in the sense that i have become so accustomed to explicit descriptions of sex in fic that i find everything i see in published fiction completely dissatisfying. i'd never noticed before how many writers use a fade to black even if the description of the scene would be crucial character development. in those cases, i feel that important information has been withheld from me. if i've learned one thing from fanfic, it's that what kind of sex characters have, how they relate to each other in that moment, what goes through their minds etc. can generate complex insights into those characters. if that gets left out, something is definitely missing.

i'm not saying that each story/book needs to have explicit sex in it, just that if the author makes sex an important component of the relationship between the characters, i'd like to know what's going on there. and in more than three sentences.

completely unrelated to this, i saw that you said in another comment that the sequel to a thousand beautiful things will be posted next week! *twirls* i just rearead that story, and found it to be just as enthralling and marvelous as the first time i read it last summmer. i'm so excited for the sequel :)

SEQUEL??

Oh, happy day!

The romance genre is *so* restrictive! I read so many of them during my early adolescence that I know the formula by heart. I think it's possible to break out of the box though--I think I did when I wrote my romantic novella. I think it ended up being a combination of all the things I liked about romance novels and the exact opposite of the things I hated. I don't know that I could've sold it to one of the formula romance publishers, but it did get a few positive reviews!

Me too! The last few sex scenes I've written have been quite purposely off-kilter, I think because I was quietly rebelling against the same-old-same-old, you know? I'm intrigued by frottage, and fingering just for the sake of fingering, and maybe letting one person get off while the other chooses to wait and save it for later. And I totally agree with gilded_kage that it's the emotion and personalities that make or break a sex scene for me. Tab A meeting Slot B may have lost all of its titillation power, but I'm still hooked by a scene that lets me in on what the characters are thinking. For example, to my mind it's far sexier to know how Harry feels intellectually/emotionally about the sight of Draco on his knees, about to suck his cock, than to know how Harry feels physically, all turned on and hard and ready, knowing that his cock is about to be engulfed in Draco's hot mouth. (If that makes any sense??)

It makes worlds of sense!

how Harry feels physically, all turned on and hard and ready, knowing that his cock is about to be engulfed in Draco's hot mouth.

Because that's exactly the kind of thing I've read over and over and over (and sometimes even in those precise words) so that it's lost its impact. Whereas the intellectual/emotional background is where the author takes the story and makes it sing. Or cry. Or whinny for that matter.

*is speechless with joy*

Really?!! Mwahhhh! I'm insanely excited, Viki! Seriously! :) (In case that wasn't clear yet... ) :) So looking forward to that! :)

You know, I find that I'm very critical of sex scenes in profic now. It's been a long time since I read a sex scene in a novel that I thought was half as erotic as what I read in fanfic every day. Many sex scenes in profic come across like newbie PWPs, with too much emphasis on the action and not enough on what it means for the characters involved.

So does that mean that I'm numb to it, or that they don't write it well? Maybe it's a mixture of both. Maybe you have to be fairly numb to the shock of reading explicit sex before you can step back from it and analyze what makes something hot and what makes it mechanical, what makes something work for a character and what seems out of character.

If that reviewer was distracted by the sex scenes, I'd be inclined to think it's probably his problem to an extent. If he isn't used to reading that sort of thing, I can see how it would be distracting. OTOH, maybe it really wasn't well-written smut, either.

Have you read the book in question?

If there were more novels out there like At Swim Two Boys, I'd probably read less fic. Great story, wonderful romance, good sex. That book had it all. Pretty rare, though.

The main reason I read slash, though, is because I want to read more about my favorite characters, so there's no comparison between fanfic and an original novel. The latter will always be lacking if what I want to read is more about certain characters.

Never had a problem with excessive sexuality in fiction, unless it's the kind that shits me off (uber-dominating masculine OMGIANTPENISSS!!11one kind of 13-year-old-male-writer crap), but I was like that before I read fanfic.

I think they do...lol. I learned it when I played back in High School. It sounds pretty on the guitar.

...to comment on not your main point.:)
"Stairway to Heaven" is so very much what every kid who learns to play the guitar learns that it's a kind of in-joke cliche among amateur guitar players -- the movie Wayne's World made a joke about it -- a placard on the wall in the guitar store saying "NO STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN." Particularly for those of us of a certain age, it was profoundly hilarious and dead on.

I think I know what you mean. Even though I primarily write het and have usually faded to black when it comes to slash sex (I keep getting mental images of my gay friends pointing and laughing at anything I might write in this regard), my experience has been that many readers--whether pro-sex or anti-sex--feel inordinately distracted by the sex I've written, regardless of the fact that it is R-rated sex, not NC-17, and that it's a minute percentage of my output. The point that I think they've missed is that I've never included sex when it wasn't important to the plot/characterization, chiefly by illuminating one or both of the characters involved or foreshadowing something important, but the character illumination and plot foreshadowing seems to fly over most people's heads while they are either thinking, "All right! More sex!" or "Good grief! Why can't this woman lay off the sex?"

What I've written isn't ABOUT the sex, but loads of folks (pro and con) don't seem to get this. As a result I'm fading to black with the het sex now as well, because what I'm writing about has always been ideas bigger than slot A into slot B. I think it's possible that if the reviewer of the book in question had looked a little deeper into the character having all of the sex he/she would have seen that there is a reason for the sex (at least I hope there is). It could be that the author thought that some people would be drawn into the story to be titillated and leave with a lesson that was slipped into the story in a stealthy way. I think that that is a valid use of sex in writing, as much as drawing a reader into a story for the adventure, mystery, etc. Unfortunately, for the reviewer, the big "idea" seems to have been lost amidst all of the moaning and orgasms, but then I'm getting the impression more and more that JKR's big ideas are being utterly missed by a load of folks who are fixating on the adventure and mystery of it all. The ideas are being served by that stuff, not the other way around. Ideally the same should be true in a story with sex, and if the reviewer is that distracted by something that is the author's means to an end there's either something wrong with the balance in the story or (more likely) with the reviewer's ability to analyze literature without being distracted by window dressing.

OMG! OMG! OMG! Are you the Dark Rhiannon of the whole "Breaking a Slayer" fic? I LOVE you! LoveEleventy-one!!!

You are now returned to your regularly scheduled discussion...

Oh, I don't know if I'm so much "blah" about the sex, as I am more interested in the psychology of it, particularly in darker or more extreme situations. I think I maintain appreciation for well-written regular sex, but what I really look for is kind of an explanation of *why* and *how* the activity works for the participants. Ack! Did I just say I was into the emotion of it? Ack! ::washes brain with soap::

It's interesting, Henry Jenkins notes in <ahref="http://news.com.com/2008-7337-5690595.html?tag=yt">'Star Wars' and the fracas over fan films that "fandom is a place where people who care deeply about these characters can go to participate in that story. [It] becomes something that the public adds on to, expands, enriches, pushes in new directions and can feel a part of." (I'm quoting him somewhat out of order.) Jenkins: "Well, let's look at this at the most basic level. As human beings, stories matter to us. We want to tell stories about great heroes. This is something Lucas understands very well. He likes to talk about Joseph Campbell and that tradition of heroes that emerged through the folklore or the mythological process. For thousands and thousands of years human beings have told stories about their shared heroes. The ancient Greeks told stories about shared heroes. The African-American slaves told stories about Brer Rabbit. The railroad workers told stories about John Henry. So these stories are deeply embedded in our culture. So the need to tell those stories, and to connect those stories didn't disappear just because we decided we were going to privatize storytelling in our country, commercialize it, turn it into a commodity and put it in the hands of massive corporations. People still want to connect to those stories, they still want to tell them and they still want to imagine possibilities that the primary storytellers never thought of. And that's the way to think of fan creativity in general. It's a creativity that's basic human nature, it's something that's gone on for thousands of years. What's shifted is not that people want to tell stories about heroes. What's shifted is that we now have corporations who believe they can own those heroes lock, stock and barrel, and prevent anyone else from telling their stories." He also notes that female fandom differs from male fandom generally in the types of stories that we tend to create: "Historically, women have created fan fiction. Fan fiction gets inside the head of a character and begins to explore the world from their point of view, and leads to a dramatic expansion. Men have been much more uncomfortable historically with acknowledging that level of emotional engagement with the characters. They've been much more comfortable expressing their fandom through parody, which holds (the characters) at a distance and sort of makes fun of them, says, "I don't really take it that seriously." So there's a different level of emotional connection to the material that's expressed between those two modes of production. Is there any authorized outlet that's more geared toward women? Jenkins: No. By and large, "Star Wars" has tried to shut down fan fiction, which has historically been an outlet for female expression, and has tried to shut down non-parody fan video, which is another outlet for fan female expression." Now, how does this relate to the topic at hand? While sex for sex's sake is fine, and all of us can agree that sometimes it's just all about the pretty, most of us are writing fiction in the context that Jenkins discusses above--as an outlet for our interest in exploring a deeper dramatic connection between characters in whom we are interested. When the sex gets out of hand, I think we lose that connectedness and find ourselves awash in, well, body fluids. Sticky, but ultimately unsatisfying on an emotional level unless we can connect them to some deeper dramatic arc. I suspect this is why hurt/comfort is so prevalent--it's a quick and easy way to establish an emotional (or at least physical) need between two otherwise antagonistic characters. -Rhi (who really didn't start out to write a treatise here--sorry!)

Everyone said it all in the comments, really, and I agree - but I wouldn't say being 'numb' is as negative as it sounds. To me, it's rather that I've learned to separate the wheat from the chaff. Before I'd read much erotica/porn, I would devour anything with sexual content and be happy for the most part. I just wanted to read about sex! But now sex has been returned to its rightful place in the narrative, as a helpful tool.

glossing and

musesfool put it very well here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/musesfool/854899.html?thread=12065907#t12065907):

'Sex gets elided *so* frequently in the canon/mass culture that fanfic's become for me an awesome window on an entirely ignored dimension of the characters.

Yes, exactly. It's the stuff we rarely get to see (or see done *well*) and it's an important facet of characterization - how does this guy behave with his girlfriend? The stranger he's picked up in a bar? The first time he has sex with another guy? His ex? etc.

And in boyslash, especially, where there's often little room for deep discussions of feelings, the act of sex can tell a lot about where the character is emotionally - content, desperate, angry, numb, etc.

also, sex is so badly written in published (non-erotic) fiction that I think people tend to minimize its importance. We'll often see the resulting fall out from people having sex (divorce, revenge, murder, depression, etc.) in fiction without seeing the cause from which these effects sprung, and what it says about the characters.'

been a while since I've read a book with anything more than "she's had many lovers, but none as exceptional as him" or some such, but I have noticed that while watching movies I don't want the characters to have sex.. like, The Interpreter - I was just so happy that all they did was hug! Not sure if that's related..

I believe all they have are membranes -- no openings at all. ((had to look at loads of dead frogs last semester))

At Swim Two Boys was the first thing I thought of when I read the opening quote! Because in At Swim it doesn't usurp the other parts of the story, but fits in perfectly with the rest of the story. Deliciously smutty at times, but the sex is always there for a reason.

*sigh* I love At Swim so much....

Oh yes, definately all about the 'mind game' side of sex, and I agree completely that simple touch is far under appreciated in fic.

Friended you- love your taste in fics and was delighted to discover that I have read, and enjoued some of your work before- I'm looking forward to rediscovering it, and any I have missed.

Yay! When, when?

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 2 of 4

Gratuitous overuse of the frog analogy

Re: Romance, yeah!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Romance, yeah!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Sad that you are so rarely moved by the sex

no subject

no subject

Here via DS...

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

here through d_s

no subject

Re: Hello (hello, hello), is there anybody in there?