Res ipsa loquitur

I've read it a million times; I've written it myself: two guys are getting ready to fuck for the first time, and one says, "Do we need a condom?" and while they do that little dance of "I'm clean" and "I've been tested" and so on, I'm saying, "Noooo! It's not difficult or painful! In the time you've spent talking about it, you could have done it and gotten on with your sex scene!"

And -- I mean, now I can't believe I was surprised that people would kick up a fuss over wearing a mask, is what I'm saying.

I got a nifty challenge in email this week: someone read my old notes on How To Write a Sex Scene and asked for more examples of what I mean when I say a sex scene has one zing and shouldn't have more than one.

So I'm looking for a story that has multiple sex scenes and does a good job of having each one do something a little bit different. If it's a newer story, of course it wouldn't be a hardship to read it, but really I'd love it if it were one of the old fandom classics that I would already be familiar with.

Anybody have suggestions?

Things I'm thinking while reading sex scenes (in ascending order of frequency)

1. Not thinking at all. Laughing, crying, aroused, and elated. OMG. Wow.

2. Eee, this is just what they need! This puts back together the heart that the first part of the story broke. I'm so happy now!

3. This is really well done. Wish I'd thought of it.

4a. What, all that buildup for two paragraphs that don't even tell me what specific act they're doing?
4b. What, two paragraphs of buildup and the entire rest of the story is finger-by-finger detail of sex between two people who are already aware they're in love?

5. Wait, you don't mean to tell me he's going to reward that sort of behavior? Oh, lord, he is.

6. [skim skim skim]

7. Nope. [back arrow]

8. Hm. Other people's arms must be a lot longer than mine are.

From veronamay, a meme on "kink in fic." Or, in other words, an invitation to muse at length on what turns me on. No, that doesn't appeal in the slightest, does it?

Creature/Aliens: If this is in the sense of Aliens Made Them Do It? I'm a fan, and I've already yammered on about why, and posted recs.

If this is in the sense of characters loving aliens? or of characters becoming or being aliens? (which would cover some forms of wingfic, pon farr fic, etc.) -- still a fan.

I love the idea of a human learning his/her way around an alien's body and sexual response. I love the amount of experimenting, talking, questioning that this would require -- "Does this work for you? What happens when I do this?"

I also love the idea that an alien among humans would be craving someone with whom to be honest, someone who could see him as he really was.

Creatures/Aliens rec: Anna S.'s SGA story "An Aesthetic Solitary Thing."



( Read more... )

I was thinking today about slash tropes that I love and ones that don't do it for me, the way you do, when suddenly it occurred to me that a whole bunch of the ones I love the best are actually a sort of double cluster around a single zingy center: a gap between intimacy and sex, so that you have one for a time while you yearn for the other one.

Here: Sex first with no intimacy. That would cover:

• Sex pollen/pon farr/accidental aphrodisiac
• Aliens make them do it
• Undercover as gay (well, OK, that's usually just making out without intimacy, but still)
• Marriage of convenience/forced marriage
• Fuckbuddies + secret yearning

I suppose that if I mostly read het, I'd have to add "sleeping together only to conceive a child."

And if you turn it around -- unusually high levels of intimacy without sex -- you get:

• Hypothermia
• Last two people on earth/safehouse/forced into hiding with only each other
• Some forms of hurt/comfort
• Some forms of slavefic
• Truth serum/character rendered unable to lie/Truth or Dare
• Telepathy/bonding
• Circumstances force them to share a bed
• Body swapping

I mean -- that's a great list! That's like 60% of the stuff I love, right there.

(Now I don't understand why I don't care for rentboy stories. They fit squarely into Category One up there.)

Now you: What does your kink terrain look like?

About 20% of the sex scenes I read happen with someone's pants and/or underwear around his ankles. And what I want to know is: Why??

I mean, do people find this hot? Is it just me who finds a person with pants around his/her ankles to be desperately, laughably un-sexy, almost as bad as a person wearing black socks and no pants?

Edited to add: Oh, god, shocolate has put her finger on what's so very unsexy about this: Guy with his pants around his ankles = guy sitting on the toilet.

I've moved this series to my webpage. You can find it here.

I've moved this series to my webpage. You can find it here.

First a random comment. Starbucks Chantico? Basically a nice big hot cup of Hershey's syrup. Though if you poured it into a cup of coffee, it would probably be pretty good.

Now the actual question.

Something I've noticed in a lot of slash is that the path from first kiss to naked about forty-five minutes, tops. They're pals and partners when the doorbell rings, and then before the pizza's cold they're doing things that involve latex.

This doesn't offend me. Sometimes it's really, really hot. And often it makes more sense from a narrative point of view, because once the two of them have done the really tough thing -- recognized that they're sexually attracted, and actually gathered up the guts to act on it -- it's really difficult to pull back and make them go slow without messing up the nice clean arc of the story.

What I'm curious about, though, is whether this is a purely narrative convention, or whether that's really the way it is in real life.

Because, see, I've never dated as an adult. The spouse and I met at eighteen, and immediately figured out that we were probably the only two people in the world who were this particular brand of odd, and that therefore if we stuck together we'd be making four people's lives happier. So I really have no sense of the proper sequence and duration of the stages of getting-sexually-involved, except the way teenagers do it.

So tell me what you think.

[Poll #501150]

littera_abactor has written an absolutely hilarious Aliens Made Them Do Something Other Than The Usual Slash Cliches story here. Stargate, with the best butchering of the English language I have ever read.

Also, if you haven't read all the comments on the Aliens Made Them Do It post, don't miss them, because there are fabulous comment stories by makesmewannadie, _aerye_, brighidestone, marinarusalka, valarltd, pandarus, and me. It's like a mini-fest!