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Smut pet peeve
Apr. 24th, 2004 06:37 pmThis isn't exactly in the category of a boring smut issue, but it is a smut pet peeve: Mixed male arousal signals.
I'll be reading a sex scene, and I'll get to a sentence like this:
He was nearly hard, his cock beginning to rise out of its nest of curls, already glistening with fluid at the tip.
Which, OK, I'm willing to be corrected if I'm mistaken about this -- my knowledge of the male sexual response is deep, but my sample size is quite small -- but in my experience, you don't get to "glistening" until you've already spent some considerable amount of time at "hard." Women are moist, in various degrees, pretty much all the time. Men, not so much.
A different, but related, smut pet peeve is when you've got a character who's under 25, and he's been necking for four or five paragraphs -- consensually, quite happily, with no hint of ambivalence -- and when the clothes come off, the author will describe his cock as "hardening." Because, in my again somewhat limited experience, a young guy will be "hardening" pretty much the minute a desirable partner says, "I want to have sex with you, all right?" and a kiss or two will finish the process nicely.
And, see, it irks me all the more because it's so unnecessary. I don't need a report from the cock barometer every paragraph. I don't need to know about it at all.
As a reader, I will assume that all relevant cocks have precisely the tumescence they need in order to do what the author tells me they're doing. More detail than that will sometimes add sexiness, but more often it subtracts it -- either because it sounds wrong, and thus introduces doubts ("Only half hard after all this time? Wonder if maybe he's changing his mind?"), or just because it's gratuitous ("Oh, great, next thing you know she'll be providing length and girth measurements").
And don't even get me started on the phrase "rock hard." Not unless you're a Discword writer who's slashing Detritus.
I'll be reading a sex scene, and I'll get to a sentence like this:
He was nearly hard, his cock beginning to rise out of its nest of curls, already glistening with fluid at the tip.
Which, OK, I'm willing to be corrected if I'm mistaken about this -- my knowledge of the male sexual response is deep, but my sample size is quite small -- but in my experience, you don't get to "glistening" until you've already spent some considerable amount of time at "hard." Women are moist, in various degrees, pretty much all the time. Men, not so much.
A different, but related, smut pet peeve is when you've got a character who's under 25, and he's been necking for four or five paragraphs -- consensually, quite happily, with no hint of ambivalence -- and when the clothes come off, the author will describe his cock as "hardening." Because, in my again somewhat limited experience, a young guy will be "hardening" pretty much the minute a desirable partner says, "I want to have sex with you, all right?" and a kiss or two will finish the process nicely.
And, see, it irks me all the more because it's so unnecessary. I don't need a report from the cock barometer every paragraph. I don't need to know about it at all.
As a reader, I will assume that all relevant cocks have precisely the tumescence they need in order to do what the author tells me they're doing. More detail than that will sometimes add sexiness, but more often it subtracts it -- either because it sounds wrong, and thus introduces doubts ("Only half hard after all this time? Wonder if maybe he's changing his mind?"), or just because it's gratuitous ("Oh, great, next thing you know she'll be providing length and girth measurements").
And don't even get me started on the phrase "rock hard." Not unless you're a Discword writer who's slashing Detritus.