This morning, while I was lying in bed and putting off getting up (look, I am eight and a half months pregnant, getting up is hard), I was scrolling through the MM Romance subreddit for recommendations. I ended up ordering something by Marina Vivancos and the thought process in my brain as I did was “oh I really liked her sex scenes”.
Which, I mean. It’s my money and my ten-year-old-Samsung-tablet-I-only-use-as-an-ebook-reader-these-days. Whatever. But it got me thinking about the book recommendation requests I see on that subreddit. There’s a weekly post where people can request specific sex acts/dynamics, but mostly when I see people posting for recommendations, it’s about the romance. “Bi awakening” or “Omegaverse mate rejection” or “Grumpy x sunshine where the sunshine needs therapy”, you catch my drift.
The other day, I saw someone posting on the romance subreddit (general, not limited to MM) about how the categories of erotica and romance have become kind of the same thing, how people used to want “Billionaire playboy falls for deserving housekeeper” but now it’s “Billionaire playboy with a daddy kink falls for deserving housekeeper”. And I got where that reader was coming from, the romance novel market is frankly overwhelming and messy and the way things are categorized makes little sense sometimes (this is a whole other post but imagine it as a coordinate system where the X axis is trope, the Y axis is heat level and the Z axis (for those of you that, like me, were dumb enough to take calculus II in college and have heard of that) is where the book falls on the content-craft scale).
But at the same time, I was kinda like…well, okay, but a lot of us specifically enjoy reading and writing about sex. Not even necessarily in a super horny way, although for sure that’s part of it. Reading and writing sex can just be really cathartic. To me, reading a well-done sex scene captures the feelings of the characters: the anticipation and rising tension in the build, the snap of it breaking, the release of the climax and the satisfaction of the aftermath. It’s just mental and not physical. I’ve always been someone who feels along with the characters I’m reading a lot. When I was twelve and read Wuthering Heights it took me about a day to figure out why I was in such a funk and it was because they were all extremely messed up. It’s no shock to me I enjoy the same thing about sex scenes in books.
And I’ve got to say, the romance market is about the only subgenre that delivers on that front. Reading sex scenes in more “highbrow” novels is often just mystifying to me because so often I’m left wondering why these characters have sex at all given they’re all vaguely disgusted by the mechanics and emotionally stunted about the meaning of it. Not all of course, but some books. There are also not a lot of that kind of novel that actually feature a full explicit sex scene, most fade to black or gloss over the physicality of it.
So with that in mind, over the next few days I’m going to try to put my thoughts about what makes a good sex scene in order, both as a reader and as a writer, on this blog. Not necessarily as a step-by-step how-to guide, because everyone’s different and all that, but as a series of categories to think about while writing and reading, to nail down your preferences as a reader and maybe iron out your weaknesses as a writer.
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