Unrelatedly, is it just me, or are the Pods being overrun by prudes? So there was some naughty tentacles and some erotisized eating of human flesh? So she had a demon lover named Nathan - my brain, by the way, has for some reason decided that he must be Nathan Fillion, bad brain, no cookie - so what? I see worse on my drive to work every day.
As potentially one of the prude hordes, one might also see that Pseudopod has earned itself a widely diverse following that includes tolerances, interests, opinions, beliefs, and preferred styles of entertainment that are different than your own. As a member of the audience at large, it seems to me that the podcast invites commentary from its listeners by virtue of having these forums. In that way I think "overrun" may not strictly apply seeing as all listeners have been encouraged to give feedback here.
I'm'a tell you all something about my introduction to horror.
My first intro to REAL horror was an early Year's Best Fantasy & Horror anthology I got from the Science Fiction Book Club when I was... um... 12-ish? Maybe 11? Anyway. To me, early on, horror and eroticism were quite well-mixed -- or, at least, horror and sex. And, as a kid about to go into puberty, I was looking for any way to learn about sex that didn't involve talking to my parents (or my friends, because I was pretty damn shy). So whenever the SFBC put a little disclaimer in the teaser text in their catalog that said "warning: explicit sex", I gave that book a pretty good once-over before deciding if I wanted to buy it. That led to a lot of genre experiences that I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise -- such as William Brinkley's post-apocalyptic "The Last Ship", an immensely long but quite good book that, out of 700+ pages,
two had explicit sex. Or "Beauty", by Sheri S. Tepper. Or the many other Year's Best F&H that I obtained and enjoyed the hell out of ("More Tomorrow" by Michael Marshall Smith was in one of them, and it's still one of my favorite horror stories).
To me, horror has been known as the genre where anything can happen, where there are no ratings except for "adult" (I know there's YA horror but it's its own genre). The horror shelf can have Laurell Hamilton next to Stephen King next to Piers Anthony, and they can all have violence and gore, psychological terror, explicit sex, or any combination of the three.
Where am I going with this? I don't really know. I'm just saying, there are probably other people besides me who were introduced to genre fiction the same way, and to us, we don't have a problem with explicit sexual content in our horror, provided that it doesn't overwhelm the story.
In "Sight Unseen", I don't think the sex overwhelmed the story, because we're supposed to wonder if Nathan is really there, was ever really there, or if he really hypnotized her into thinking he's not there while he really is (the sex part). Because, if your brain thinks your body is having hot bent-over-the-bathroom-counter sex with your lover, then does it really matter if he's actually there? Your brain is the part of your body that controls how you process what your senses feel. If your brain says you're sore because you just got laid, then your body will respond that way.*
Of course, I don't want to open the "is it really horror?" box. So let's just kick that back under the desk, and I'll put my feet up on it. And I walk through Atlanta every day, so you don't want to get near my shoes.
* I'm pulling most of this out of my ass, to be honest. I don't know if that's ACTUALLY what happens, scientifically speaking, but it makes sense to me based on what I've read.