I fail to understand why it’s necessary. In my opinion, it doesn’t add anything to the book. Yes, sex is a part of life and literature portrays life but why would the author emphasize it or go into detail. I’m not sure why I am annoyed by this as I hold no beliefs that forbid nonprocreational physical intimacy.
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I recently read “The UnbearableLightness of Being”. The book and the characters had interesting thoughts, but it seemed to me that sex was one of the main motivations of the characters. To me that seemed boring. I’ve never read Murakami, but I have heard that detailed sex scenes are a reoccuring theme in his books.
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What are your thoughts? Why do you think it is important? What does it add to the book?
by Vististi
28 Comments
I think an aversion to sex in art and an inability to separate artistic depictions of sex from pornography is something not exactly normal.
Sex is pretty much the driving force of all binary beings. And it really depends on the sex scenes. Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were far from what today is even considered mainstream, yet they were banned. If you read anything by Sarah Maas or JD Ward you’re going to blush.
The former two actually had meaning. The latter are purely for women’s prurient interest. And they don’t make any bones about it. But we’re talking literature versus easy read novels. Both have their place.
I’m asexual so it gives me the ick. I’ve read one of murikami’s books (Norwegian wood) and yes there was sex but not too graphic or gross.
I mean a lot of people are sex motivated. Just because you find it boring doesn’t mean it’s not a legitimate analysis of life and humanity.
There are two approaches to sex scenes:
1. The sex adds to the artistic merits of the book in some way, usually as a depiction of the passion of physical love or the corruption of lust.
2. It’s there to make people, uhh, “happy.”
It’s usually obvious which it is and I’ll leave it to everyone else to decide what they want to read.
>I fail to understand why it’s necessary.
I mean, a lot of things in books aren’t ‘necessary’. Like, technically we could just give someone a beat sheet of all the important events in a book and that summarizes the plot just fine. We like having prose and dialogue because it’s interesting and adds more flavor to what we’re reading. Sex scenes are similar, they’re just added flavor. Some people don’t like that added flavor because they feel it’s excessive, some people do because it’s exciting to them.
Also, Americans, and maybe Canadians (but I can’t be sure cause I’m not Canadian), have a weird relationship with sex. Decapitation and torture? No problem. Sex scene? … I’m uncomfortable.
All that said though, a poorly written sex scene is a nearly universally disliked thing.
Sex is a motivating factor in most people’s social lives. And that’s not only true in the process of finding a partner! Even for long-established couples, the ways they are intimate (or not) with each other can tell us a lot about their emotional state. To exclude this aspect of the human experience because some readers have objections would be puritanical and silly.
>sex is a part of life and literature portrays life
You answered your own question.
Like any other topic if you don’t want to read about it then don’t pick up books with it.
I don’t hate it, but I find it boring and predictable. This is how I read those scenes, “He touched her hair and ran his hand… blah, blah, blah. Skim skim skim, blah blah blah.” Finally! Back to the story. Lol
The biggest reason I usually dislike them is that writing a good sex scene is clearly a different skill than writing other stuff. I’ve read lots of good sex scenes in fanfiction but generally am unimpressed by what ends up in books. It is entirely possible to portray that sex is happening without going into the details of what’s going on. So while it isn’t something that I hate, I don’t usually think they add much, and usually they distract me from whatever else is going on because I think writing good sex scenes is a skill most authors don’t have.
aside from the horrors that you see in r/menwritingwomen i don’t have a problem with them and tbh i don’t understand why they cause so much discourse. if books only contained things that were absolutely “necessary” or added something they’d all be like twenty pages long
Sex scenes just for the sake of sex scenes are bad, yes. But if it serves the narrative then it can be very illuminating to the story
Are you referring to “Unbearable” by Kundera? Sex is important and central to character development. The eroticism can be viewed as a declaration of existence in the face of censorship.
The internet and social media has detached us from the physicality of our bodies and lowered our virility and thirst for life. I’m not sure people were so sex negative before the digital age
I think how awkward it it depends on the level of detail in the rest of the book.
If the rest of the book goes into detail about what characters are wearing, how they move, and what the world looks like, then glossing over a sex scene calls attention to the author skipping it.
If the rest of the book glosses over descriptions of things like setting, facial expressions, or what characters are physically doing, then a really detailed sex scene calls attention to how much emphasis the author is putting on it.
Sometimes sex is relevant to plot or character progression. Whether or not going into detail about it is weird depends on the rest of the book around the scene.
This perspective feels… not great.
A. Sex scenes titillate. People enjoy them. Characters ALSO enjoy sex and are motivated by sex.
B. Sex scenes can move the plot forward.
C. They can demonstrate dynamics between characters, a milestone in a relationship, a character’s attitude toward themself and their body. They characterize.
D. Sex is a part of life.
E. Most of a book is “unnecessary” by your standard. Description of the setting? Unnecessary. Why describe what a character looks like? We should summarize what is established by dialogue instead of just writing it out.
F. Society is scared of sex and demonizes sex. Writing about sex liberates and normalizes.
Adds passion and intimacy to the scene, but mostly because it is profitable.
Except for erotic books, I personally also find most spontaneous sex scenes unnecesary, but depending on the context, it does show more intimacy and romance between the characters, still, I also can’t find a reason why it has to be written in explicit detail apart from it being profitable.
I wrote a book recently which contains two sex scenes, each a couple paragraphs long. They’re absolutely integral to character development and the dynamics between them. Not to mention a demonstration of desire and grief.
There’s rarely a need to describe the entire scene, but there is a lot of emotion expressed in sex. Most people are at their most vulnerable, or not, and that says something.
Unless I’m reading a book specifically for the romance, I tend to skip them. It just doesn’t hold my attention otherwise. That said, I have no real problem with them, they’re just not for me.
There’s the bad sex in fiction awards:
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bad-sex-in-fiction-award
There’s little mainstream critique or discussion about how to write sex scenes well.
Somewhat related, romance is the most read genre but maybe the least regarded in terms of awards and cultural discussions.
I think the quality of sex writing would improve if people discussed/ wrote about them more openly.
As it said in one of my literature textbooks in school, “Everything is about sex, except sex.”
I think there’s plenty of reasons to have it in there, from characterization to pure enjoyment of smut. That said, it’s all contextual, and in general, I prefer my smut separate from things I’m reading for plot.
The best sex scenes reveal something about the characters. Maybe read a little closer?
i hate them so i don t read books with such scenes. as you said, they add nothing to the story. useless.
babe wake up r/books is doing puritanism again.
In all seriousness the idea that sex scenes “add nothing” is just the direct result of the very Christian and very puritanical idea that sex is just something that satisfies urges, like a chore that you get through every once in a while before returning to purity, and that it must then be either completely vanilla sex between a married couple or completely meaningless robotic masturbation-like casual sex. This is the framework that allows sex to remain hidden and be considered as something that does not entail any sort of humanity but rather an animalistic instinct.
In reality sex can be an infinite number of things, it can be tender, sweet, turbulent, casual, meaningful, something to be remembered, something to be regretted, something that was easy, hard, taboo, liberating, constraining, etc., etc. This is all relevant to a person’s life and it can show us a lot about the characters or the context of a story.
The explicit or implicit quality of a sex scene is also not a direct indicator of an author’s pedigree (funny how this sub hates talking about what is “good literature” and whines about snobs, unless it’s about qualifying how clean and sexless a book is like the fucking inquisition). Julio Cortázar, for example, wrote one of the most creative surreal scenes ever precisely about sex.
Some books should have it and some shouldn’t. It all depends on what the author is trying to do. To just ignore the erotic altogether across all literature would be absurd but by no means does every book need to go there. When I was younger I found it pointless, now I feel it’s like anything else. It does seem to be one of the more challenging things to write well.
It depends on the sex scene. I don’t read romance novels and I find the sex scenes in those books silly and cheesy and unrealistic, based on the excerpts I have seen online.
However, I have read some books that have truly breathtaking sex scenes in them, scenes that are moving and transcendent and heartbreaking, scenes that explore sex as part of the shared human experience. Just as an example, one of my favorite novels An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine has a beautiful scene in which the narrator thinks back to her younger years and remembers how she agreed to have sex with a man in exchange for a weapon to protect herself. She muses on how sex is like art or like literature, in how it opens our souls and connects us to others. She thinks, “sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one’s walls, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.”
So yes, I think sex is a very important part of literature, it just depends on the particular book, the particular writer.
Using the word necessary is anything to do with art requires further reflection.
You can pretty much call the whole of art unnecessary or any element unnecessary if you like.
Just say you don’t like sex scenes and move one. Every one of your preferences doesn’t have to project to some kind of universal statement.
I don’t particularly focus on them but unnecessary? They are simply a part of the story the author chose to tell.
Sexual desire is one of the core foundations of human psychology and sexual relations are a rich repository of interpersonal stakes and drama. It is superfluous or prurient in some books and in others, essential for character development and setting stakes. I don’t know what else to tell you.