ahahaha yeah the repetitive nature of sex is SUCH a problem for writers. When I'm having penetrative intercourse, the thrusting bit is awesome to experience as one of the participants...but to outside observation, it's just the same movement over and over and over. Or honestly, any of the actions for stimulating any erogenous zones, it's just some variation on repetitive stroking for minutes at a time.
18 years of reading fanfic and romance novels, 10 years of writing fanfic myself, and I still struggle to make that part interesting. I don't want to gloss it over completely, since from the POV of the participants the repetitive stroking is in fact the main event -- but at the same time, I'm running out of synonyms and creative phrasings for "bit rubs over other bit for the 50th time" here.
[And I think this is a specific instance of the greater class of problem that we don't have a great language for discussing or describing internal bodily sensations]
OH MY GOD THIS. Porn that relies too much on straightforward description of actions leaves me cold because I want to know how those actions are making the characters feel. But at the same time, one can read about "heat coiling low in the gut" only so many times before one starts to wonder if we might not need to start looking for new metaphors and similes for those internal bodily sensations.
Especially orgasm. It throws me off when a smut scene devotes thousands of words to the actions and emotions of a sexual encounter, expertly crafted, really getting into the characters' sensations and feelings, building the tension up to a fever pitch...and then the literal climax gets relegated to "she came with a cry" or "he came all over himself" with pretty much no exploration of how the actual orgasm feels to the character(s) experiencing it. Even though orgasms are a fairly large part of why people have sex in the first place.
I realize this phenomenon might be a backlash to bad sex scenes with awful purple prose and faulty metaphors. But it doesn't actually solve the problem.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
Re: F'in the Inf'able
Date: 2018-12-10 06:01 pm (UTC)18 years of reading fanfic and romance novels, 10 years of writing fanfic myself, and I still struggle to make that part interesting. I don't want to gloss it over completely, since from the POV of the participants the repetitive stroking is in fact the main event -- but at the same time, I'm running out of synonyms and creative phrasings for "bit rubs over other bit for the 50th time" here.
[And I think this is a specific instance of the greater class of problem that we don't have a great language for discussing or describing internal bodily sensations]
OH MY GOD THIS. Porn that relies too much on straightforward description of actions leaves me cold because I want to know how those actions are making the characters feel. But at the same time, one can read about "heat coiling low in the gut" only so many times before one starts to wonder if we might not need to start looking for new metaphors and similes for those internal bodily sensations.
Especially orgasm. It throws me off when a smut scene devotes thousands of words to the actions and emotions of a sexual encounter, expertly crafted, really getting into the characters' sensations and feelings, building the tension up to a fever pitch...and then the literal climax gets relegated to "she came with a cry" or "he came all over himself" with pretty much no exploration of how the actual orgasm feels to the character(s) experiencing it. Even though orgasms are a fairly large part of why people have sex in the first place.
I realize this phenomenon might be a backlash to bad sex scenes with awful purple prose and faulty metaphors. But it doesn't actually solve the problem.