Writing a Responsible Sex Scene

From past blog entries  you may have hypothesized that I have little experience writing sexual scenes. And you’d be right.

But “little” experience is not “no” experience, and I think I’ve come to terms with the potentially embarrassing part about writing about sex in fiction that real!people!I know! might read. What I haven’t quite figured out is how I feel about the ethical responsibilities of writing about sex.

In the Canadian culture in which I live, sex is often stigmatized, misrepresented, or ignored. Outdated or misinformed ideas about sex have real-life impacts on how people treat each other: if you don’t like sex/have sex/refuse sex/agree to sex/value sex/sell sex the way I do, you are wrong/sick/perverted/immoral/asking for violence/in denial.

But because our culture considers sexual activities and feelings to be inappropriate subjects for open discussion, many people get their ideas about sex from other places.

Professional educators, informative websites, and classroom material aim to give people information about sex, but most people get a sense of what sex is and what’s normal from less reliable sources. We listen to rumours. We look at erotica and porn and forget that the people we see are performing* sexual acts as well as sharing them. And, of course, we observe sexual acts in media like movies, TV, books, and webcomics–as well as our fellow fans’ reactions to those acts.

Not only that, but consuming all these narratives–what we observe of the sexual lives of the people around us, what we hear is the “normal” or “correct” way to be sexual, and what our stories tell us is romantic, arousing, or healthy–helps us to build our own understanding of what sex is or should be like.

For example, the Twilight series is rightly criticized for portraying controlling behaviours as attractive. But fans who read Twilight won’t think, “Welp, I wasn’t attracted to people stalking me before, but since I read this book, I am now!” What concerns thoughtful critics is that readers who identify with Bella might incorporate abusive behaviour into their mental image of what a healthy relationship looks like–which might mean feeling ashamed of or stifling reluctance to consent to those behaviours in a real-life relationship.

Likewise, members of the BDSM community worry that fans of Fifty Shades of Grey are trying out healthy BDSM fantasies in unsafe ways, based on the things Christian and Anna do in the books. It’s not that the people who try these things are stupid or careless — it’s that the only model they have of the kink that interests them is flawed, and because this author has earned their trust in other ways, they extend it to her description of BDSM methods.

Because healthy sex is inextricable from power dynamics–who gets to choose to have it, who feels entitled to it, who decides what consent is–I’m struggling with framing any sexual activities I put into a scene in ways that make me feel confident about how I’m showing sexual agency and whose agency I’m showing.

Plus, because I’m writing from my own personal social standpoint (white cisgender woman, Jewish, non-conventional gender presentation, middle class, in a heterosexual relationship, etc.), I want to be especially mindful of the way I write interactions between characters who share some of my privilege and characters who don’t. Power dynamics again–including some I have the privilege to not experience, which makes them dangerously easy for me to forget.

To complicate matters, the power dynamics in the particular scene in the MS I’m working on are even more complex: one of the characters has literally tried to kill the other. That’s… not a cool thing for a potential romantic partner to do, to say the least. The context of why that happened makes a difference, but it’s still something I have to keep in mind, particularly since neither character is in a position to recognize the very-not-romanticness of that fact.

But wait! I imagine some of you might protest. The point of a sex scene isn’t (just) to be ethical, it’s supposed to be hot! I don’t want to read a back-to-school special about always using protection and communicating well!

See, that’s what makes writing this stuff so tricky. In the context of my manuscript, I want sex scenes to:

• be hot,
• be responsible,
• fit with the themes I’m trying to draw out in the overall story,
• be in character for the characters involved, and
• fit into those characters’ story arcs.

All that together is difficult!

Well, okay: I guess the last four bullets on that list aren’t anything new: I’m trying to do those things with every scene I write. But the added criteria of making a scene hot/romantic/both poses unique challenges.

Because, of course, I haven’t learned about sex in a vacuum. I consume popular media too–there are things I find hot or romantic that also make me intellectually and emotionally uncomfortable (you can feel both at the same time!).

It’s easy to think of “arousing” and “responsible” as two different extremes of a scale. If I make the scene more responsible, it has to be less hot, and vice versa. But that’s not the case. I can write responsible, hot scenes; they may not feel like both for every reader, but I’m not writing for every reader. Foremost, I’m the one who needs to feel like I’ve done a good job.

Which means, like any other piece of writing, a ton of drafts, a lot of trust in critique partners and beta readers, and allowing myself to shift between creative thinking and a critical eye.

* I’m using “performing” in the sense that it’s often used in the humanities: roughly speaking, to perform something is to have the goal of communicating the concept of that action–to represent it. The presence of an audience and the need to communicate with that audience changes the action and its presentation.