Cheers, KenK! If I could get my hands on some brain bleach, this story would be the first thing to go. Next would be certain relationships I've had. Then the Bush presidency. Etc.
I love sci-fi, and I love sex. I love sci-fi sex. But this just seemed over-the-top and ridiculous. Surely, they would have taken a break at some point? Maybe tried other forms of communication? A months-long orgy seems pretty unlikely for any being to sustain (or want to) no matter how many feeding tubes there are.
People have pointed out that the story generated a lot of good discussion and raised some good questions. I agree that it did, but doing so does not necessarily make it a good story. You can draft a bill that says gay people can't marry, and that will generate good discussion and questions, but it doesn't mean that bill has any inherent worth. Most of the discussion seemed to focus on whether or not the story was gratuitously titillating. Given the intelligence and general good taste of Escape Pod listeners, this probably means it was close enough to being gratuitously titillating that the author should have found another way to approach the issues s/he wanted to get at. I appreciated the passion of the writing, but it didn't ring true to what would actually happen in such a situation. The idea of endless sex may work in a dream or a simulation of some kind, but it just isn't practical in real life. It doesn't seem likely that both beings would remain in the same mental space for months where that's all they wanted. They would surely go through phases of trying other things to pass the time. Or one of them would decide enough is enough and find a way to stop it.
A more interesting story would have been one that explored the psychology of how the two stranded characters decided to try sex in the first place. It could even have been a subtle interplay of emotions and actions that really got into the issues of interspecies communication rather than pretending to. Pretty much any other approach I can think of would have been better than this rape fantasy.
If nothing else, the story did inspire me to find out more about how the Hugo/Nebula nomination process works.