Why so much sex and violence?

I read about the harshest most brutal scene I've ever written at my writer's group last week. It was full of blood, sex and violence, and violent sex, and even bad language. I wrote a graphic scene of a female werewolf raping and savagely murdering a human male, and that worried me. To my surprise, reviews were glowing. I was still too stressed when I got home to even look through them, and waited for two days.

At this point, I can't afford to censor my muse. Right now, I try to write what comes directly from unconscious, and then work to get the phrasing right and tone right. That's the short answer. More to come beneath the fold.


I don't know why my muse has such sexual and violent scenes stored up. It's my unconscious and all I can do is guess about it. I think it has something to do with my childhood. The scene that followed had a person bleed to death, and I'm pretty certain that comes from a childhood trauma of watching my cat bleed to death in the street.

I choose to share the scenes and not keep them to myself because I don't have the words to waste. Writing's hard. It's apparently the only thing I can do well, and I must do it to keep my sanity. However, it's far better if people eventually pay me for it, and to reach that point, I have to see what's salable first. 

That's the selfish reason, but there are other reasons. I believe there are revelations to what I write. I have characters who do remarkable things under horrendous circumstances. It helps the reader to respect them and even love them if they know in detail what the characters have been through. Also, the reader understands the weight of some of the characters' guilt about the traumas they survive.  

As for the gratuitous sex, I believe sex in fiction is no more gratuitous than sex in real life. Sex is natural, it's usually a large part of people's lives. Not only that, unlike other acts, such as murder, sex is nothing out of the norm. A writer shouldn't have to justify depicting sex to anyone, any more than a mystery writer should be called out for depicting murder. To avoid writing sex "unless it's necessary" breaks a similarity between fiction and real life, and generally makes fiction less vital and (a later subject) useful. 

I think consensual sex is a totally good thing. I recognize no obligation to downplay sex or depict an ideal of it. Pornography isn't harmful. If it's psychologically damaging to watch or read about sex, than logically it would be harmful to participate in it. And if participating sex were mentally damaging, human beings would be the only mammal species for which that were true.

Therefore, I believe porn hurts no one. Sexual liberation didn't just happen in the '60s. Beginning with the printing press, there's been a debate over how media should portray sex or if it even should. This debate isn't going to end anytime soon. I'm definitely far on the liberal side of it.

My definition of pornography is very simple. For a written or visual work to actually be pornography, in my opinion, it has to be created specifically for the purpose of sexual gratification, usually as a masturbation aid. For this definition, it doesn't matter how the audience or readers use it. Sex is complex, and s surprising variety of things could arouse people. It's the way the creator intended it that matters, and you can usually tell that from the marketing. 

Now that covers pornography, but not sex scenes in works that are non-pornographic. A sex scene might help both the writer and reader to get closer to the characters, if the reader is receptive to that. You can show things about characters from sex. However, you have to ask the same questions about any scene: does is it move the story? Does it even fit?

Besides the usual shitstorms and censorship, there are challenges to putting a pornographic scene in a work of non-porn fiction. If you write it too well, the reader might read your scene, put the book down for a solo act, and then only pick your book up to read that scene again. (You probably put as much effort into the rest of the book.) Of course, they might also just put it down in disgust. Not every form of sex appeals to everybody, and for some the very act you describe can distract them from the rest of the work.

A funny sex scene can work well in a comedy. In dramas or horror however, you have to ask yourself, does this move the story or obstruct it? In horror, which is what I write, you're talking about sex nobody wants to have. The scene operates in the same way any other horror scene does.

With all of that considered, writing a sex scene is also difficult. I did read a short story that had one of the worst written and plotted sex scenes. I mean, it was at the beginning of the story, so I guess it was supposed to be the hook. The writing was dry and boring, there was no horror or foreshadowing during it, and the story didn't start until it was done. You have to use judgment about sex in a story.

Moreover, the description is challenging. English has two sets of words for sex, one is the clinical and medical, and the other is the funny and vulgar. The clinical words such as penis, vagina, fornicate, fellatio never sound pleasurable, and they seem to have been concocted to encourage chastity. The vulgar and funny ones like cock, pussy, fuck, blow job, and so on can make sex sound pleasant and fun. But one misuse or miscalculation on word choice or usage can turn the mood of a scene from pleasurable and erotic to hilarious. And readers do like to pass sex scenes around for ridicule.

So, I suggest to write sex (that is, pleasant sex), the writer has to be interested in sex acts depicted. If you don't feel it, the reader won't, so don't try to write it.

Violence is a stickier issue, in my opinion. Studies show it might be damaging. And wouldn't you know, people will give violence a pass through censorship before they'd give it to sex. From studies I've seen, I think violence has two effects: it makes people callous, and--like any fiction--it gives people a distorted picture of the real world.

I believe this country's population wouldn't have such a supportive attitude about capital punishment if it weren't for the dominance of crime drama and the prevalence of crime stories in the US news media. The reporting is out of proportion to how much crime there really is. How prevalent is crime? According to the Census Bureau, the total violent and property crimes in 2009 was 3,466 per 100,000 population. That means between three and four crimes out of a thousand people per year, and some of the victims would be companies, like for  shoplifting or embezzlement. Even in the most crime ridden neighborhoods, the odds are you won't fall victim to a crime by visiting. The chances in those areas go to about one in twelve of becoming a victim . . . over a year. I agree with Michael Moore from Bowling for Columbine. The depiction of the commonality of crime has a negative effect on politics. In ours, the harm ranges from capital punishment, to corporate prisons, to the militarization of police forces. It's a major factor. 

However, it doesn't follow that violence should be avoided in fiction. For one thing, it can be cautionary tale or a warning to people. Violence is always possible. Why keep that reality from people? If you do, the might not be able to handle it when it happens, even in an accident.

If you're writing fantasy--as I am--the violent scenes are things like a person being mauled by a werewolf. The assault is impossible from any standpoint; so there's no way the reader is going to be misinformed about reality. Might they become calloused? I think that's partially dependent on the response of the characters. Human beings are social, if they're not blase about it, the readers' response won't be.

From a writers' calculation, Chuck Palahniuk said about the violence in his work that he's competing against movies, TV and other media when he writes stories, so he uses everything in his arsenal. Of course, people do tend to buy sexual material, and combining it with violence tends to make curiosity.

I'll combine sex with violence and horror because violence is as likely to happen with sex as it is over a meal, more likely, in fact, because sex is so emotionally affecting. Sex is very primal; there's more anxiety to be examined with it than with other things.


However, all of this is just fakery by my conscious mind that's left to come up with the cover story for how my unconscious mind behaves. I don't really know why I write it. I might have guessed right by accident, however.

I am doing things with my novel that I hope are different. In horror movies, it's always the slut who gets slaughtered as a misogynistic comeuppance to being sexually free. In my novel, there's a young woman, a secondary character, who likes sex and comes up with excuses to have it with many guys. Then she hates them afterward, because she has a borderline personality disorder. She goes through a lot of suffering in the course of the plot. However, she survives, is made stronger, and if she's not actually the heroine, she does some heroic things by the end.

People have compared our society to Rome, due to our fascination with sex and violence. There's really no comparison. Romans actually killed people for entertainment, while our society takes pains to simulated it and not injure people producing it. Rome also raped people for sex, whereas in our society, that's a crime (when not re-defined by misogynists).

As for sex, societies change over time and are different from locale to locale. The sexual practices of Rome in the 1st Century BC are totally different than what people did in the 5th Century AD, after Christianity had taken over and brought chastity. The latter was, in fact, the century that Rome fell. Meanwhile, the lasciviousness of Pompeii--when it was destroyed by a volcano--was probably quite a bit different than the practices in Rome or Neopolis at the time.

Even in our society, if you read accounts of the sexual practices in the Colonies during the American Revolution, you would think of Times Square during the '70s. Puritanism had all but collapsed. Twenty years after the Revolution, the open licentiousness was all gone. Thaddeus Russell's book, A Renegade History of the United States shows just how fast social acceptance about sex can change directions, and then reverse again. 

Less educated Christians like to point to Pliny the Younger's warning that Rome would fall unless Romans stopped having so much frivolous sex and started getting disciplined again. And he was right: Rome fell, only four centuries later, and after chastity and monasticism came into fashion.   

And discipline really has nothing to do with sex, or violence, Plato notwithstanding.