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Saturday, November 28, 2009

The Boner Line.

There's a lot of bemoaning the inability of media to include sex without being all weird about it. Books, movies, and TV shows tend to fade to black or to tasteful montage even if it completely clashes with the style. Video games have to be even more circumspect, and even mentioning that sex exists in a game is pretty much a guarantee of scandal or disreputability. For the most part, a creative work is either erotica or totally non-erotic, and there's little integration.

Some of this is societal hangups, there's no question. And some of it is justifiable; a lot of the time, we don't really want to know exactly what fictional characters do in bed, not down to specific body fluids and muscular contractions. But I think some of it is also due to the Boner Line.

Because, I don't know about everyone, but I don't really watch or read porn. I use it. I don't just sit there thinking "yep, that's some sex there all right," I get physically aroused by it and I masturbate. Consequently, about five to ten minutes in I'm not going to want to find out about how the characters' relationship has changed or where their adventures take them next; I'm going to lose all interest and probably want a nap. Or if I'm looking at porn somewhere I can't masturbate, I'm going to feel very awkward about my arousal or have to devote a lot of attention to suppressing it.

There are few questions more awkward than "Should I be masturbating to this?", when I'm watching or reading a work of fiction. It's a significant gearshift. An action scene may feel different than a comic banter scene, but at least neither one physically takes me out of the story.

So I don't think it's sex-negative or buckling under to Moral Guardians to leave sex out of art--while it may be wrong to tap-dance around the very existence of sexuality, if you try to present sex as matter-of-factly as you'd present an intense conversation, you run into the Boner Line. If you don't want to badly distract your audience, you have to do a little tap-dancing. Sex and non-sex can never completely be integrated in art, not while audiences are susceptible to boners.

7 comments:

  1. Books, movies, and TV shows tend to fade to black or to tasteful montage even if it completely clashes with the style.

    For a long time, my wife and fiancee used to refer to lesbian sex as "giggling and fading out", because that's how it was almost invariably represented on TV, even in explicitly lesbian programming.

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  2. *delurks for a moment*

    I still don't think it's like that for everyone. As an active member of the fandom for, um, gods, years now, I can tell you I know more people who'll read through an extremely steamy sex scene without even blinking, if it's a part of the story than not.

    And then, we'll discuss why said three characters can or cannot have a double anal as a foreplay to fisting over a cup of tea. :P

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  3. I've never had that problem. I'll get aroused if that's the entire purpose of me reading it, but if I'm just reading a book and it's there, it never actually affects me.
    Perhaps I'm weird.

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  4. I wish I could find a link, but I recall some director discussing how having an audience actually literally sexually aroused is not good for story telling.

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  5. I used to read a lot. Like 8 hours a day during the summer... and through university when I should have been reading texts, I read smutty fiction. The masturbation sessions broke up the day nicely.
    ~lush

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  6. Sex between two characters we just met is boring. There's just no emotional compnent. As you can probably guess, I don't care much for porn. On the other hand, watching sex between established characters doesn't disrupt the narrative feel for me even when it's a bit of a turn on.

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  7. I knew something was wrong when, about halfway through Jean Auel's Pleistocene Porn Epic, I started skipping the sex scenes to get to the good stuff.

    Graphic descriptions of Jondalar's cock tended to yank me right out of the story, and so it was either A) Read the smut or B)Continue learning to knap flint. I figured I could always come back for the smut.

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