schemingreader

I was instant-messaging with rexluscus at 5AM on Friday. (Because my sleep rhythms are soooooo messed up, that's why. I get about seven hours sleep a night, but it's often broken up with a chunk of an hour or two of wakefulness. Nice to have a buddy on the opposite coast!) Anyway I had an insight into why a certain erotic trope, which I tend to find difficult to write, is so compelling to read.

We were talking about erotic writing in which one partner is either nominally unwilling, or much less sexually experienced than the other. I find this especially hard to write if one partner is much older or has institutional power behind him. We both knew that the usually explanation of why such scenes are erotic is the desire of the reader to be absolved of responsibility for his or her sexuality. Presumably the reader projects into the character who is being forced to enjoy himself in one respect or another. Perhaps he is entirely consenting, but is merely less powerful because of the newness of the experience.

It's difficult to feel okay about eroticizing unequal relationships, even when they are supposedly consensual. I'm just a bit knee-jerk that way.

I flashed on the ending of one of my favorite novels, A.S. Byatt's Possession and a line that for some reason seemed very erotic to me in retrospect—"I'll take care of you." The protagonists have been getting to know each other for 549 pages, and finally, they confess their love and discuss all the reasons they have been afraid to be together, and then finally fall into bed. I couldn't find the passage while we were online yesterday, but this is it—much less erotic than I had recalled:



Cold hand met cold hand.

"Let's get into bed," said Roland. "We can work it out."

"I'm afraid of that too."

"What a coward you are after all. I'll take care of you, Maud."

So they took off their unaccustomed clothes, Cropper's mutli-colored lendings, and climbed naked inside the curtains and into the depths of the feather bed and blew out the candle. And very slowly and with infinite gentle delays and delicate diversions and variations of indirect assault Roland finally, to use an outdated phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him, so that there seemed to be no boundaries, and he heard, towards dawn, from a long way off, her clear voice crying out, uninhibited, unashamed, in pleasure and triumph.



(The funny thing is, if I were her beta-reader, I would never have let her start this sentence with "And," I would have made her break it up into more than one sentence, and I would have made her really write the sex scene, and....Man the chutzpah of me! This is A.S. Byatt! This is Possession, a uniquely satisfying novel! One you have to read to know just how satisfying!

But still...)

I suppose the erotic power that I remembered in "I'll take care of you" was built over the course of the whole book.

Still, when you read an erotic fan fic—especially Snarry, but it's also true of many of the pairings—one of the key features is that one partner often has more power in lovemaking than the other. Some examples from Harry Potter fan fiction (because that's what I've been writing!):

• Harry is a virgin because his fame has made it impossible to trust anyone to get close. He needs Severus, who is older, to teach him about sex.
• Remus has scars and is sure he is ugly, or that his curse is too terrible—he needs Sirius to take the lead in their sex life in order to make him feel desirable. Maybe even tie him up.
• Severus has terrible trouble with intimacy—he needs Remus to help him heal through some kink or other (could be anything, really!)


You could think of other examples with other pairings, of course, or even stories in which Severus is a virgin and Harry is the initiator, or whatever. (Or fan fiction from other fandoms you know.)

I guess what I'm saying is, there is a sense in which a lot of the stories about kink in fan fiction are actually elaborate hurt/comfort stories. This is almost always true where there is a power imbalance between the characters. You can even read some of the dubious consent fics that way.

In real life, I'm afraid that sex doesn't make everything all better in the way that it does in fiction. Well, in real life, chocolate doesn't make everything all better, either! Still, scenes of kinky or unequal sex are more fun to read than scenes of one character serving another a bowl of soup. To many readers, I believe, these sex scenes fulfill the same function--demonstrating care while revealing character.

Feel free to disagree, add your two cents, or whatever.