Chastity (1998 essay by torch)
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Chastity |
| Creator: | torch |
| Date(s): | August 28, 1998 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Rant table of contents; Chastity |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Chastity is a 1998 essay by torch.
Some Topics Discussed
- the role of sex in a story
- slash without sex
Excerpts from the Essay
[at it again]
All slash stories are not rated NC-17.
There seems to be a common expectation or preconception that slash equals smut, that a slash story isn't a slash story unless the participants achieve at least one mind-blowing orgasm each, and preferrably two inside of thirty minutes. This expectation can lead a beginning slasher to think that if she doesn't put in a steamy shower scene every five pages, she can lose her license. Or her audience.
Do we need the sex scenes? I'm not so sure. I know a lot of people who'll read the buildup and skip over the actual body contact. They feel that the sex scenes are repetitive, or boring, don't add anything... maybe that going into excruciating detail doesn't feed the fantasy but takes away from it, reducing the romance to a list of body parts. And there are times when I feel that they're right. A lot of sex scenes read like how-to manuals with a few familiar names scattered among the various positions. And a lot of sex scenes read like how-*not*-to manuals, but that's a later rant.
How a reader feels about a sex scene is very much a question of personal preference; one person's tasteful smut is another's total squick. And sometimes I suspect that romance would be enough for most slash readers a lot of the time. I know it often is for me; there's very little sex in Plaidder's Garak/Bashir stories, or JiM's Houseboat Variations, and I adore them.
What are the advantages of writing fade-to-black sex scenes, or leaving them out altogether? For one thing, you can be sure your readers are concentrating on your lovely dialogue and not skipping ahead to the smutty bits. For another, you don't have to fret about coming up with new and interesting positions for the guys to do it in, and new and interesting ways of describing those positions. For a third, not everyone likes to write explicit sex. And those who blush at the thought of typing certain words and deeds shouldn't feel forced to do it; if you're not comfortable, leave it out.
[let's talk about]
Still, when I write, I like to include sex scenes. For several reasons.
When you're dealing with two people who are getting emotionally involved and physically attracted, it's a pretty safe bet that sooner or later, they're going to have sex with each other. And if you want to try to give a reasonably complete description of the relationship between these two characters, let's call them M and K, it might be useful to include a few details about their sex life. Sex is a major part of a beginning relationship. (In the case of characters M and K, sex may be the entire relationship.)
Sex scenes aren't necessarily speed bumps in the narrative. The people who are having sex are still themselves with the same problems, interests, and attitudes towards each other that they had on the previous page. What people do and say in bed has a lot to do with who they are. Ideally, sex scenes should work as part of the story, giving deeper insights into the characters' psyche. A writer can convey a lot in a sex scene, through gestures, body language, what the characters do and don't do, notice and don't notice, that can be difficult to explain in other ways. The characters don't always say what they feel, and frequently they don't even *think* what they feel, so the writer has to find other ways of showing what's going on. Physical interaction can be a good way of doing this.
And physical interaction can be pretty damn hot, too. There's certainly nothing wrong with skipping ahead to the smutty parts if that's what you're in the mood for. There are times when the most stunningly well-formulated and in character dialogue just isn't what the reader is after.
[like clothes, they only get in the way]
What I have discussed here is sex scenes in a story, not stories that are, for all intents and purposes, sex scenes. Those are obviously something completely different. The reason I'm talking about sex within a longer narrative is that those are the ones where you're faced with the choice of adding a sex scene in or leaving it out. A PWP without a sex scene would be... well, hard to imagine, for one thing. Short, for another.
Brief but possibly necessary disclaimer: I'm not picking on PWP's in any way. I like PWP's. Nor do I feel that sex scenes absolutely *have* to serve some lofty purpose of character development. I prefer smut that's reasonably in character, because, as I said in the characterization rant, I like to know who I'm reading about, but we all know that definitions of 'in character' vary quite widely.
Personally, I often end up with a longer narrative no matter how hard I try, and it becomes a question of fitting the sex scenes into the story, rather than creating a framework of story around the sex scenes. I guess I divide up slash, in my mind, into two categories: material written chiefly for the pleasure of creating a hot sex scene, and material written chiefly to work out an issue between two characters.* In case anyone was wondering, it's only category two I'm talking about here.
* Actually that is not entirely true. I often say that I tend to divide up slash into two different categories, but they're never the same categories from time to time. I think this says more about me than about slash.
If you're writing a story of the second type and you're tired of doing sex scenes, or if you simply don't feel that the next one would add anything to the narrative, I think leaving it out is a perfectly acceptable alternative. The expectations of sex in slash that I mentioned earlier can, I think, push people into adding sex where no sex is really needed...
[look, no hands]
Then there's the type of story where sex doesn't enter into it at all--where it's not a question of fading to black, because the participants don't get it on in the first place. Maybe they don't even have a relationship. This is where people start to ask themselves if it's still slash. Occasionally they ask me, because I wrote a long story where Our Boys didn't get any physical satisfaction.
And my answer is, hell yes. To me, the defining factor isn't whether they do it, it's whether they want to do it. They can be repressed about it, they can be unhappy about it, they can even be in denial about it, as long as the reader can clearly see that it *is* denial. They can angst about it until the devil wins a skating championship, and decide to take vows of chastity and/or undergo chemical castration--if they want to do it, it's slash. (As you can see, I'm not a great believer in the concept of pre-slash. To my mind, it's either slash or it isn't. If it isn't, it's not unlikely that it's smarm, which is a whole other animal, despite some superficial similarities.)