CONVERSATION: Sex Scene Dynamics and their Role in the Story
Janine: Hi guys. It’s time for a new conversation post, and this one is about sex scenes—their dynamics and their role in books.
Here are a few questions: How much does the emotional dynamic or tenor in a sex scene matter to you? Do you prefer that the sex in a sex scene be perfect or imperfect? Do unsexy sex scenes have their place in a romance? And what makes a sex scene impactful?
Layla: The sex part — while it’s made fun of by those who don’t read romance— is an important part of the story for me. Romance writers write sex scenes differently — they are attentive to women’s pleasure and also to sex as a part of an emotional relationship. I remember reading for example Philip Roth and the sex scenes were gross to me.
Janine: The emotional dynamic matters to me a lot. There’s no one specific emotion I prefer, but I like for the scenes to reflect what is happening for the characters and in the relationship. I want to see them make love as only these two people would.
I love when a character’s world is so rocked by how good the sex is that it alters them and/or the relationship, but an imperfect scene can be just as good, in a different way. In Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test, Khai is both neuroatypical and a virgin, and the first time he and Esme have sex, he’s so into it that he doesn’t wait to satisfy her or even fully understand what’s needed. I’m so used to sex scenes that end in the heroine having an orgasm that this scene really got my attention. Esme has made herself vulnerable and she’s hurt and upset. She thinks Khai doesn’t value her. Since she won’t talk to him the next day, Khai has to figure out what he did wrong and how to make things right. I read the book three years ago and still recall this section vividly.
Layla: I like perfect and imperfect sex— I recently reread A Lady Awakened, the Cecilia Grant book where the heroine hires the hero to help her have a baby and that book is 85 percent bad or imperfect sex. But it works!!! And when you get finally to the good sex it’s such a payoff. And meanwhile the emotional relationship between the two is growing. So sex is symbolic of a lot do things including the heroine’s upbringing and character. Mary Balogh has lots of “imperfect” or routine sex (she likes the word mounting a lot!) but it’s always in the service of advancing the relationship.
Jennie: I absolutely have a fondness for awkwardness or imperfection in sex scenes. It feels more real to me, as opposed to scenes that feel choreographed (the latter remind me of the author behind the scenes and that takes me out of the moment).
Jayne: Imperfect can be fun and more realistic.
Sirius: I love imperfect sex scenes when characters get to giggle some.
Janine: I like angry sex, which I know not everyone does. Laura Kinsale has a terrific angry sex scene late in her medieval romance For My Lady’s Heart. Melanthe betrayed Ruck, her husband, to save his life, imprisoning him to keep him from risking himself to try to save her from marriage to Gian, the villain (there’s no proof she and Ruck are married). After Ruck is released and Gian dies, Ruck is still furious and the sex shows all his anger at her disavowal and frustration at his helplessness to protect her when he was locked up. At the time I read it, it was one of my favorite sex scenes in the genre.
I also like sex scenes that are tender because one character could have died but didn’t, or because one of them is recovering from trauma.
Layla: I love love love when a sex scene has tenderness. Little moments of cherishing or love during intimacy make me swoon. There’s a scene in Meredith Duran’s Bound by Your Touch that makes my heart flutter— the hero is angry at the heroine but desires her so much and during the sex you can see he loves her too. He sees her vulnerability and fragility as a human and he aches for her. Swoon worthy!!
Kaetrin: I like all kinds of sex scenes – bad sex, good sex, unsexy sex, sad sex, angry sex, joyously happy sex – depending on their purpose in the story. As long as it is consensual, I’m good.
Famously my favourite sex scene (I wrote a whole post about it on my blog) is not remotely sexy. It’s from my favourite Mary Balogh novel, Heartless. It tells me so much about, in particular, the hero, Luke, and how much he cares for Anna, notwithstanding he’s supposed to be the heartless one the title references. I appreciate a hot sex scene but for me the ones I go back to tend to be where there’s evidence of a deeper intimacy, like the one in Heartless.
That said, there are plenty of ways to show intimacy and explicit sex isn’t necessary for it. Tigers and Devils by Sean Kennedy has closed door sex but is very romantic and deeply intimate.
Janine: I agree a sex scene doesn’t need to be hot to be a great scene. Emotional intimacy can bring so much to a story. Although, I have to say, there are scenes where a certain kind of non-intimacy is the whole point and those can be very effective too.
Since you bring up Balogh, Kaetrin, almost all her sex scenes are unsexy to me. In The Temporary Wife (one of her best books IMO), Balogh shows the gradual progression between sex where the hero holds back emotionally and sex where he and the heroine are emotionally connected. That’s even more true in Balogh’s A Precious Jewel, where the heroine is a prostitute in the beginning—there the early sex is not only non-intimate, but also unpleasurable and off-putting. These were all effective scenes because each showed what was happening in the relationship at that particular moment in time.
Jennie: I really like some variety in the level of emotion or connection in sex scenes – particularly when it’s used to show the progress of a relationship. For that reason, I don’t mind if earlier sex scenes are more about the physical rather than the emotional connection.
Jayne: Once a relationship *should* have some deeper emotion, I’d like to see that.
Janine: Agreed. Still, some sex scenes are so focused on the characters’ emotions that it almost doesn’t read like sex. The physical sensations don’t get much of the characters’ attention. Those kinds of scenes don’t work for me that well. No matter how emotional, I prefer for sex to still read like an experience that is also physical, at least if the scene is more than a quick summary. Otherwise I start to roll my eyes.
Kaetrin: I do want it to move the story forward. I don’t generally skip sex scenes but if they don’t seem to have a narrative purpose I might skim them.
Jayne: Good point, Kaetrin, about a sex scene moving the story forward and not being just “it’s time for another round of coitus” beat in the story.
Janine: When I was an undergrad, one of my Film Studies professors told us how, years earlier, she’d been hired by a director to interview other filmmakers and find out what the most memorable sex scenes were to them and then to search for a common denominator. She found only one: the cited scenes were all situated at turning points in the story. When a sex scene pushes the plot in a new direction, it can be riveting.
It’s your time to weigh in, readers. What are your favorite perfect or imperfect sex scene examples? What are your favorite sex scene emotions? Which sex scenes stand out most in your memory and why?
I read romance for the emotional connection. I skim a lot of sex scenes but I feel cheated by closed door romances because I feel I’m missing a key aspect of the relationship. A sex scene that manages to not feel like I’ve read it a thousand times before is usually a good thing. Even better when it’s a turning point in the relationship and makes the characters view each other differently. What I really don’t like is overly clinical descriptions or sex that is jarringly different in style from the rest of the book. A lot of MM romance seems to fall into these traps, in my opinion.
@oceanjasper: When you say clinical, do you mean unemotional, or do you mean that the vocabulary is clinical? Or both?
I like the way KJ Charles does sex scenes, because they often move the relationship forward or reveal something new about a character. But in many books, you can skip the sex scenes and not miss any of the story.
@Janine: @Janine: Both, in a sort of a way. I’m thinking of scenes in which there might not be clinical terminology used but there is detailed description of what the body parts are doing and nothing about the feelings of the characters while this is going on, even if the scene is written in first person. It often feels out of place in a book that up to this point may have had plenty of focus on the emotional connection between the characters. Given that a lot of MM romance is written by straight women, these kind of scenes feel a bit exploitative and voyeuristic.
My discomfort has nothing to do with social justice in real life; I’m a straight woman and I know that in most cases I’m reading a female fantasy of what a gay male relationship might be like. But I want to stay in the characters’ heads the whole way through rather than feeling at times like I’m watching from the outside. Not all MM authors write sex like this; if they did I wouldn’t keep reading the subgenre. But it’s the sex scenes in these books tend to separate the great authors from the average, for me.
I prefer sex scenes that show the relationship evolving. I particularly like romances where you see the main couple (or triad, etc) working together to figure out how to work together well, in and out of the bedroom. I think both Jennifer Crusie and JAK do this well. As does KJ Charles.
I think this is the thing that keeps me coming back to BDSM romances – I enjoy the negotiating and communicating about sex. Snowed in with Benefits by Misha Horne is a recent kinky mm erotic romance that I really enjoyed because in every sex scene the MCs learned more about themselves and each other.
I enjoy reading about people figuring out what they like and don’t like and owning those preferences. The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian is a good example of that.
That said, as I edge closer and closer to post-menopause, I find myself skipping a lot of sex scenes. I have very little interest in sex scenes where everything just magically works. I may still skip over the scenes where they have to figure stuff out but I do find them more interesting.
As a teen and even into my early 20s, I read romance secretly and almost entirely for the sex scenes. I perfected the art of skimming a book looking for the “good parts.” And I really wasn’t fussy about those good parts – reading about sex was just so weird and exciting and scary and intriguing then.
@Kris Bock: I don’t read KJ Charles, but I agree about sex scenes that do that–reveal something we didn’t know about the character. I didn’t think about that when we wrote this piece, but that’s a great point. Scenes that do that usually catch my interest.
@oceanjasper: I know what you mean–I have experienced that feeling that the author is being voyeuristic and exploitative with female m/m authors (not all, as you say, and thank goodness for that). For me it’s not so much about a lack of emotion–there is a emotion, and it’s often excitement or desire, but it focuses very tightly on male anatomical details (often with weeping, shooting, or glistening parts). At that point I sometimes start feeling that the excitement the author is conveying isn’t really the character’s but her own. As you say, I’m sure I wouldn’t feel that way if the sex wasn’t about members of a marginalized group that the author, because she’s female, isn’t part of. And again, I agree that there are many authors who aren’t like that.
@Cleo: I’m trying to recall Jennifer Crusie’s sex scenes and the only ones that come to mind are a couple from Welcome to Temptation. There is one on the docks that I vaguely recall but I think the second time I read the book it was less sexy to me than the first time, and I felt uncomfortable with the hero’s behavior, but I can’t remember why. The other one had light BDSM in it (handcuffs, maybe?) and the heroine took some convincing that it would be good. I did like that one. Other than that, I’m blanking on the others, and I read a few of her books.
I used to read a lot of JAK, her Amanda Quick books most often but also some categories, contemporaries, and one or two Jayne Castle books. The main ones I remember are a couple where the heroine was a virgin and her first experience with the hero wasn’t a comfortable one. That was pretty ubiquitous in the Quick books and I appreciated it because it was an example of imperfect sex. At that time especially, there were lots of books where the heroine, though a virgin (and often a twenty-five year old virgin, LOL), had a multi-orgasmic first time. Not that that never happens in real life, but I think I just appreciated an author doing something different.
I was fascinated by sex scenes when I was a teen. I would skip ahead to the “good parts” at the library and if there weren’t any, I wouldn’t check the book out. This after I got burned by a couple of Barbara Cartlands.
I love this question! I am really drawn to sex scenes in which character and / or conflict play an important part. Over the weekend I read Home Grown Talent by Sally Malcolm and Joanna Chambers. I thought it was a really sexy book, in part because the sex scenes were deeply about character in ways that went both with and against the grain of first impressions. I also like sex scenes that embody conflict between the characters. You’ve mentioned KJ Charles above. In my favourite book of hers, Jackdaw, there’s a scene that verges on non-consensual, at least from the POV of one of the characters. There’s so much angst and heartbreak and anger in this scene, it’s very sexy and it packs a real emotional punch. You learn so much about the characters and their relationship from it. And for me, the moral complexity of the scene adds to rather than detracts from its appeal.
@Gab: Hmm, I might have to try that book. I read one Sally Malcolm book and had issues, one of which was that the foreshadowing was heavy handed, but maybe having a co-author in Joanna Chambers helped with that.
Interesting what you say about the KJ Charles. Non-consensual scenes or scenes where consent was dubious were popular in the genre for a long time in earlier decades and I’m convinced that one of the reasons why (which is rarely mentioned when the why of it is discussed) is that they moved the plot along and told us things about the characters. They almost can’t not, if you think about it.