Sex is something that is as difficult to handle in fiction as in real life. Its use or misuse inevitably divides an audience, at best alienating only the prudes, at worst retaining only a handful of perverts. Everyone reacts differently to different portrayals of sex. I would like to talk about what I find acceptable, off-putting, or indefensible. I think that it is a position which can be generalized to different people with different tastes.
To begin, here is my favorite definition of "pornography": pornography is any media in which the audience immediately loses interest after masturbating. I judge sex in fiction along similar lines. Sex in fiction loses me when it seems as if the author was masturbating as he or she wrote it. Masturbation and the thoughts accompanying it are probably the most personal things in life, and as much as I don't want anyone else in my head while I'm pulling it, I don't want to be in anyone else's while they do. My prurient interests will almost never overlap fully with an author's. Sex scenes or other sexual content in a story will pretty much never provoke arousal or anything akin to it in me. There has to be more to it, contextually. If the sex does not advance plot or character development, then all it leaves me with is an uncomfortable surplus of information about the author. This is especially true when the sex is presented as it would be in pornography, as the main event. Basically, sex in fiction should be like plot in porno...sex should advance plot as plot advances sex.
On the subject of porno and erotic fiction, there are several key differences between them and regular fiction. The big one is that, as fractious as fiction readership is, it is downright monolithic compared to porno. In sf, for instance, a space opera fan will generally be able to stomach cyberpunk or post apocalypse or whatever...or other genres entirely, even if they do have their tendencies. Niches exist but they don't usually get carved too small, and stories usually aren't tailored specifically to present a single fetishized image. In erotic fiction, erotic art, and porn, they are. There are writers catering to every sexual fetish you ever heard of and many you never thought of and probably can't even comprehend let alone enjoy. Furries and exhaust-pipe-fucking dragons are just the tip of the iceberg of biological impossibility. There are lowest-common denominator things in porn that are designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, but this is usually at the cost of irritating a portion of the audience, even if not enough to scare them off. Porn is usually specialized.
It's also a lot less dependent on building context than non-erotic fiction. You can just skip to the good parts and not feel like you've missed anything; if you need a narrative you can construct your own. A lot of (most?) porn is more or less narrative-free these days, possibly in recognition of this. There aren't many novels that can be distilled into a handful of animated gifs.
When i go looking for something to stimulate my baser interests, i have a very limited set of things I'm looking for at any given moment. While my sf interests may be broader, my prurient interest hasn't broadened to match, and me being in the mood for space opera doesn't mean I'm in the mood for alien catgirl fucking, because I'd never be in the mood for it anyway. I'll accept it if it is a critical element of the story, but not if it is inserted in such a way that it seems the author is just using the story as a delivery vehicle for their own wank fuel. I'm into your story, Mr. Author (and in these situations it is probably a Mr.), else I would not have read this far. That doesn't mean I am into your unrelated sexual fetish. The typical sex- or sexually-charged-scene in a science fiction novel affects me in roughly the same way that seeing a random dude jerking off on Omegle or Chatroulette affects me, and I believe the motivation behind it is also similar.
All of this goes double for any sexual practices or proclivities that I find abhorrent. What is abhorrent, of course, will vary quite a bit, but I presume others feel analogously worse seeing gratuitous depiction of things I like that they don't as I do about their perversions.
The short version of this is: sex in fiction fails when it is in its own service rather than in service of the story; and when it is included more for the author than for the audience.
Sex can be used quite effectively in a story, of course. If it is in service of plot and character development, particularly if it is essential to them, then the inclusion of sex is entirely acceptable.
I have two examples in mind, one of sex done just godawful horribly, the other of it done flawlessly.
The first, the works of Leo Frankowski. If you're not familiar, he wrote a series of time travel alternate history novels in which a young Polish self insert engineer named Mary sue travels back in time to Poland right before the mongols invade. Half the teenaged girls in Poland throw themselves at him and he just can't get any work done! When he's had enough of being a creepy pedo, he ends up marrying a beautiful non-child and keeping another around because that's what Leo would do. Later in the series another character encountered a tribe of south Americans who all literally look like little kids and who all want him to fuck them.
Now in between all the creepy misogynistic pedophilia, there's a lot of engineering fiction (which is almost as masturbatory) that makes for a pretty entertaining read. Hell, id go so far as to call it a decent YA series were it not for Frankowski displaying his desire to fuck that audience at least once in every book. Do you know what you get when you mix a spoonful of shit into a barrel full of ice cream? You get a barrel full of shit.
Frankowski was clearly a very broken person. It comes through clearly in his books, on his blog, and was reflected in his life. Ideally, I should not even be able to form an opinion about a person based on their fiction. Frankowski not only ruined the immersion and suspension of disbelief in his stories through his ham-fisted kiddy porn, he made himself look bad for having written it and for putting it out for a general audience, presumably with the expectation that the audience would approve. It would be disgusting if it wasn't so sad.
On the other end of the spectrum (as you may have guessed by now), Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita." If you know it only by reputation, it is about a man who seduces his 12 year old stepdaughter and sexually exploits her for several years. He knows society and the audience will disapprove, but he desperately wants to be the hero. The sexual situations in Lolita are a lot more believable than in Frankowski's, what with the teenage girl being a lot less sure that she needed some protagonist dick than Conrad Stargard's harem were. But the main reason sex in "Lolita" worked while "The Cross-Time Engineer" it did not isn't that, nor is it the overwhelming superiority of Nabokov's prose; or even the fact that Lolita is a profound, chilling work of psychological fiction with broad implications and deep insight while Frankowski wrote about technological dick-waving. The reason the sex (which was, iirc, less explicit than Frankowski's) worked in "Lolita" is that the main threads of the story required it to be there. Frankowski's novels would have been better without it, while Lolita would have fallen flat.
Furthermore, I think most people would agree grown men have no business fucking 12 (or in Frankowski's case 14) year old girls. I think I'm pretty safe in calling this sex abhorrent. Nabokov presents it as abhorrent. Frankowski presents it as "hey, awesome! The perks of the engineering profession, right guys?" One is written with the expectation that you will hate the protagonist, the other could have been written by that loathsome protagonist, if he were lobotomized.
I know how ridiculous this comparison might seem, but both authors present similar sorts of sexuality, or at least, sexual situations that push many of the same buttons; but one of them manages only to offend, accomplishing nothing by doing so; while the other transcends that offense, and demonstrates the necessity of it. One of them mixed shit into ice cream and made more shit, the other mixed ice cream into shit and made more ice cream.
What made me think of this, and think back to Leo Frankowski, was listening to some of Steve Eley's editorials and some of the more sexual stories in the early EP episodes recently. There was a bit of the service to oneself rather than to the audience in some of that; nothing even close to the level of Frankowski, but enough to get me thinking about it. 'Course, short fiction doesn't lend itself very well to gratuitous sex, so Escape Artists is never going to be much of an offender. The stories aren't long enough to shoehorn a sex scene in between the rest of the plot and character development, unless it is part of the plot or character development, so it's pretty much always going to work at least as well as the plot and characters do. So we're not going to find bad examples, but there are some good ones.
MINOR SPOILERS FOR ESCAPE ARTIST STORIES FOLLOW, STORY TITLES IN BOLD:
I had some other examples in mind as I started writing, but at this point the only ones that stuck were EP367, Vylar Kaftan's "Lion Dance," and Pseudopod 326, "Bunraku," by David X Wiggin.
In "Lion Dance," there isn't any explicit sex, but an issue is made of the sexuality of one of the main characters. The fact that he's a homosexual teenager in a relationship with an older man probably puts a lot of people on edge, but it's handled tastefully, and is important to the motivation of this character, which drives much of the plot. Without bringing up the character's sexuality, or without having him be homosexual, you could still produce the same plot arc, but you'd probably need a lot more context and explanation. The cultural context allows the character's homosexuality to be shorthand for all the circumstances that cause him to act in a particular way; meaning the author doesn't have to explain it.
In "Bunraku," there IS explicit sex, but it's so goddamned weird you almost can't believe you're hearing it. Just the novelty of the situation would be enough to justify it, without meeting any of my other conditions, IMO. But it DOES meet them, and boldly. The sex in the story is important to the development of the protagonist and antagonist, and their jealousy toward one another. There would be no way for the story to work without it.
Anyway, does sex (implicit or explicit) in fiction (any format) ever bother you? Under what conditions do you think it works or does not work? What are some egregious instances of it not working, or exemplars of how to do it right?
I think some discussion of Heinlein might go well here. Also anime. Or both together.
