Gratuitous overuse of the frog analogy

[geoviki]

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!

Comments

[psychic-serpent.livejournal.com]

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.