"Tell me, have you ever thought of writing for a living? Rather than preaching?'
‘I don’t think I have the talent.’
'Talent shmalent. You should see the stuff that gets published. But you must hike up those sex scenes; today’s cash customers demand such scenes wet."
Robert A. Heinlein - Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984)
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"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian
literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were
produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport,
crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with
sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical
means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There
was even a whole sub-section--Pornosec, it was called in
Newspeak--engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was
sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those
who worked on it, was permitted to look at."
George Orwell - 1984 (1949)
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“Now, concerning this vidshow.”
“Tuf and Mune? You’ve seen it, then?”
“Indeed,” said Tuf.
“Goddamn,” Tolly Mune said, grinning crookedly. “So what’d you think, Tuf?”
“I am forced to admit that it evoked a certain perverse fascination in me, for obvious reasons. The idea of such a drama has an undeniable appeal to my vanity, but the execution left much to be desired.”
Tolly Mune laughed. “What bothers you the most?”
Tuf raised a single long finger. “In a word, inaccuracy.”
She nodded. “Well, the vidshow Tuf masses about half what you do, I’d say, his face is a lot more mobile, his speech wasn’t half as stilted, and he had a spinneret’s musculature and an acrobat’s coordination, but they did shave his head in the interests of authenticity.”
“He wore a mustache,” said Haviland Tuf. “I do not.”
“They thought it looked roguish. Then again, look what they did to me. I don’t mind that they took fifty years off my age, and I don’t mind that they enhanced my face until I looked like a Vandeeni dream-princess, but those goddamned breasts! ”
“No doubt they wished to emphasize the certainty of your mammalian evolution”
[...]
“To my best recollection, at no point was carnal knowledge of your body included in my terms, Portmaster Mune. [...] the purpose of this melodramatic albeit daring voyage was to return [my cat] to my custody, as per the terms of our agreement, and not to deliver up your body to my” he blinked “lusts. Furthermore, you made it perfectly clear at that time that your actions were motivated by a sense of honor and fear of the corrupting influence the Ark might have upon your leaders. As I recall, neither physical passion nor romantic love played any part in your calculations. ”
Portmaster Tolly Mune grinned. “Look at us, Tuf. A damned unlikely pair of star-crossed lovers. But you’ve got to admit, it makes a better story.”
Tuf’s long face was still and expressionless. “Surely you do not defend this grossly inaccurate vidshow” he said flatly.
The Portmaster laughed again. “Defend it? Puling hell, I wrote it!”
George R.R. Martin - Tuf Voyaging, Second Helpings (1985 - a decade before he started publishing "Tits and Dragons")
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Hey, internet, wanna know one of my deep, dark, thick and stiff secrets? In addition to this crap I've also written pornographic stories (under a different alias, so don't bother searching (I said stop that!))
I toyed with the notion and scribbled a few paragraphs here and there for about a decade before working up the nerve to post a few to a free site several years ago, in a fit of desperation over my lack of productivity in writing other fiction, and over my lack of talent in my many additions to this blog. This was it, I thought, this is all I'm good for, this is the best I can do, the lowest possible dreck, jackoff material, so I might as well.
And it worked. Where I can't even bring myself to finish a "true" work of fiction beyond a couple of pages (growing ever more painfully aware of its worthlessness with every shuttle of the cursor) the porno-tales didn't matter, didn't scare me, and by now have accumulated a combined word count in the five digit range. Worse yet, hit counts revealed even my least popular such sodden yarn was ten times as successful as my most viewed page here on the blog... which isn't saying much, but in context still twisted the proverbial knife. Seems if I want to be heard on any topic from politics to food to space travel to primitivism, I'm better off doing so in between typographical hip thrusts. Kerning your brains out, so to speak.
I had, in other words, made a startling discovery: sex, it would appear... sells!
At least I find myself in abundant company along my slide toward the lowest common denominator. When Ghost in the Shell wanted to convey its status as not children's animation, it did so within five seconds with a naked chick backflipping off a high-rise. Netflix made a decade's worth of profit marketing ridiculous teen sex comedies, then when it wanted legitimacy gained it by more complex shows like Dark, starting every other episode with a teen sex scene. Cyberpunk 2077 may have bugged out at release whenever you shot... or drove... or picked something up... or breathed, but they made damn sure the customizable hoo-hoos and ding-a-lings were fully operational, I tell ya wut, and tossed a naked chick at you as soon as you start. Also, yes, I am quite the vivid eroauteur. Thank you for noticing.
But to me this topic has become inarguably symbolized by George R. R. Martin, largely because I was a fan of his older works long before I got into A Song of Ice and Fire in the early 2000s, and I was more aware than most of his keen ability to impart both gut punches and food for thought without the need for any of Boobs and Dragons' sex and little of its violence. A Song for Lya or Dying of the Light for instance tied their entire plots around a sexual relationship as did to a lesser extent Fevre Dream's cusp of mate protection, but in each case it is enough to know the characters in question are horny for each other (or... not) for the relationship to impact the rest of the narrative. Lya's tame sex scenes even seem gratuitous for its length at a couple sentences each. Precisely because of its universality, reproductive behavior requires no lengthy explanation or illustration. While Hooters and Dragons has plenty to teach about mythopoesis, historical revisionism and the willful ignorance of medievalism, the need for a sense of proportionality and antithesis in fantasy fiction, political factionalism and fractionalism, personal fables, superweapons and overdependence on same, religious idolatry, the tragedy of the commons, etc., you would lose none of that by dropping the half of the epic minutely describing people taking their pants off. Any more than anyone remembers anything else from those books about punching Martian goblins besides Dejah Thoris' wardrobe, or anything from the later Dune books besides the Honored Masturbators.
And yes, I get it: ASoIaF was written to sell, and it certainly did, a half-sordid, half-brilliant nest egg toward the end of an otherwise respectable career. But, just as I realized I can't promote my sociopolitical or aesthetic views in erotic stories whose target audience will skip any paragraph not detailing the conjoining of groins, I doubt the watered-down Seven Kingdoms manage to impart any meaningful impression beyond that to the vast majority of an audience who just came for the hawt codpiece clanging, and the author of The Sandkings deserves to be remembered better than "that Melons and Dragons dude."
As for us plebs scuttling about in the shadow of such colossi to our assured dishonorable graves, we should keep in mind the issue of gratuitous sex is only part of a larger spectrum of dishonesty in artistic expression. Resorting to sex scenes to hold the audience's interest is merely a sign of poor writing, a glaring lack in developing your other themes to stand on their own. In fact, one of my observations upon taking a serious look at erotic story sites (aside from the surprising abundance of incest themes - Freud was apparently more right than he knew) is the common albeit sparse attempts to pervert sexuality itself into propaganda on some hot-button political issue like firearms or abortion or marijuana. Almost invariably, it makes for poor eroticism illustrating the pitfall of engorging any secondary consideration to subvert a work's main interest, be it political or religious pandering, shilling to some financial backer, sport, crime and astrology, etc. Sex is merely the most obvious such trap for its lowest-of-the-low common denominator status and its role as the most frequent source of cultural taboos across time and space.
And having reached that topic of demonization, I shall shelve the remainder of this discussion for the second half:
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