The Birds and The Bees – or Bopping in Fiction

It’s The Time of the Season…

Ah, Romance.

A thing for the ages, no?

Its founded and broken empires, driven humanity to its greatest peaks and lowered us to our deepest troughs.

A bit odd, then, that it so often eschewed in modern stories in favor of base fucking, innit?

If you’re putting a sex scene in your story then you’d better do it right because while boinking is great and all if my only goal was to make my tingly bits feel good I’d just stop reading your myopic attempt at describing the opposite sex’s o-face and download Tinder.

Of course, we’ve all heard that men are from Mars and women are from Venus but my point is some authors take this so far it becomes comedic.

So often women are portrayed as a small flame running along a gunpowder trail on its way to a cartoonishly oversized powder keg. When it/they finally reaches the barrel it releases an explosive release that shakes the foundations of the earth and leaves everyone in a five mile radius dazed and unable to walk. They favor the slow burn with lots of buildup where every move is documented, analyzed, and stored away for future reference. Journey before destination if you will.

Men, meanwhile, are mostly personified as saying “fuck the journey, I have places to be.” Far from enjoying a salacious slow burn they are presented as more of a  human bottle rocket, not so much embracing as tackling sexual opportunity with the brutal efficiency of a slope-headed neanderthal.

Now, if the story is written by a woman any ensuing foreplay will more likely than not go on for so long you’ll wonder how the female character hasn’t managed to cum/ gone numb/succumbed to friction burns while if it’s written by a man then about the most subtle nuance you’re likely to get is some version of “This go there. That feel good. Keep do.”

I’ve seen so many authors stumble in their delivery here that its astounding.

Is it some smutty eagerness to describe sultry stuff or perhaps even shame at the same that causes so many stories to flounder in this area? Dunno, man, but it seems to either go on for way too long or comes outta left field entirely.

When I’m reading a grand adventure and randomly have to endure either a fifteen page description of someone rubbing against someone else or a one paragraph description of a dispassionate boning it just pulls me right out of the entire experience (no pun intended).

Oh no, dear hero, the dark lord is going to overrun the hills of- wait, what’s that? Oh, you’re fucking now. Nevermind I guess. This world’s incarnation of Satan will wait for you to finish.

Koitus interruptus and all that.

Like don’t get me wrong, dear reader, a tasteful sex scene or even the hinting of one can certainly elevate a story but if it doesn’t fit tonally or drags on for too long it creates a sort of cognitive dissonance wherein readers will start wondering whether A) the grand epic they were promised was actually just smut in disguise and B) whether the author is spending so much time on it because it gets them off.

Doing so won’t make your readers care more about saving the world of Dinglefarts from the evil wizard Kommschipple. It’s just going to make them want to wash their hands when they’re done reading.

The last thing you as author should want is pulling a reader out of your story by making them think about you touching yourself to your own writing. Unless you’re writing smut of course in which case…all hands on deck?

But I digress.

Prudishness and gratuitousness in the bedroom can deflate what would otherwise be an excellent work of fiction so if you’re thinking about including one ask first if it’s necessary and (if so) for the love of all that is sacred please undertake to go about making it more of an expression of character than an excuse to get down and dirty.

After all this is a piece of literature not HBO.