In Defense of the Sex Scene

In Defense of the Sex Scene

Do you have a favorite sex scene? I do. It’s the library scene in the movie Atonement. There’s no nudity. There’s no visible touching of intimate parts. My personal favorite moment involves a foot, but the sex act itself is filmed almost entirely from the neck up. I saw it twenty years ago, and I’ve had it bad for James McAvoy ever since.

I’m a romance writer. I like men. I like sex. But I’m no fan of the way sex has come to be depicted in books and movies. It’s not the degree of nudity or the level of explicit content that bothers me. It’s that the sex scenes have nothing to do with love. Was I aroused during the sex scene in Atonement? Let’s just say I think I broke the rewind button.

But I didn’t watch the library scene upwards of seven times because I couldn’t get enough cheap sex. Rather, it was because the love between Robbie and Cecilia was elicited so powerfully through the sex scene that it evoked a visceral response in me. It didn’t put me in the mood for meaningless sex. It made me very specifically fall in love with, and consequently develop a sexual attraction to, Robbie Turner.

As a rule, sex scenes in books and movies are gratuitous extras. They depict sex as fun and games at best and violence and degradation at worst, and contribute to neither the plotline nor character development. It seems to me that this is increasingly becoming the generally accepted view of real-life sex as well.

Just as fictional sex steps outside of the narrative arc for the sake of some indulgent fun, we increasingly seem to think of sex in real life as an entertaining sideline that falls outside the boundaries of true love. In both reality and fiction, we have come to believe that we can have a love story or a sex story, but we can’t have them both at the same time. 

If you asked a hundred people how important trust, respect and shared values are to their personal love story, probably a hundred percent would answer ‘very important’. But if you asked those same people how important sex is, the answers would be all over the map, ranging from ‘not at all important’ to ‘the most important’.

I’m personally one of those who would answer that sex is very important, and I’d probably take a lot of heat for that. But for those of us in the ‘very important’ camp, our positioning (pardon the pun) of sex on the far right of the spectrum has nothing to do with confusing sex with love.

For myself, I can say that I trust and respect a lot of people. I share goals and values with a lot of people. But I have an intimate relationship with just one of them. Intimacy is a bond between my partner and me that no other shared experience can replicate. It’s our someplace only we know, the leitmotif to which our love song always returns. The reason we don’t confuse sex with love is simple: sex is an expression of our love for one another, so there’s no question of confusing sex with love in the first place. They go hand in hand.

So what’s a romance writer to do? How does she incorporate a sex scene into a love story in a culture which widely accepts that love is love and sex is sex and never the twain shall meet? What most editors will tell you is that sex scenes should only be included if they advance the narrative.

But whether or not the sex scene advances the narrative is very much in the eye of the beholder. So who is your reader? If sex does not advance her personal love story, then she probably won’t want to read about it in her fictional love story. But if, in real life, sex is the part of her love story where the narrative peaks, she’ll most certainly need a sex scene. So I say, bring back the good-old fashioned sex scene, the kind where, for example, two young lovers develop an unbreakable bond on the third shelf of the family library. To many readers, just like the writers they rely upon to bring them reprieve, sex is not external to love. It is intrinsic to the love story, and the narrative can’t advance without it. 

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Augusta Reilly has been writing for women’s magazines and literary publications for two decades. In her earlier years, she was a prolifically (if not proudly) published pulp fiction author whose anonymous literary masterpieces included ‘I Had The New Year’s Baby With Santa!’, ‘Prom Night in the County Morgue!’, ‘My Husband’s Sperm Were Kidnapped and Held For Ransom!’, ‘My Son the Pimp!’, and countless other titles, all of which ended in an exclamation point. She is a graduate of McGill University and lives in beautiful Douglas County, Colorado with her husband, three cats, and way too many kids.

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WHY I HELD YOUR HAND, Augusta Reilly

The heat is high and the laughs are plentiful in this steamy romantic comedy by Augusta Reilly. Laura Delaney loves her small mountain hometown of North Powell with its quaint charm, stately Victorian homes and surrounding hiking trails. Unfortunately, when it comes to attracting travel dollars, it can no longer compete with the flashy hot springs and ski slopes of nearby competitors.

That’s why she hires a hotshot marketing team to figure out how to inject the old magic back into North Powell’s sagging tourist trade. What she doesn’t expect is for the team to include David Harper. Smart, funny, handsome, and amazing in bed, he’s the perfect man.

All she needs to do now is keep their relationship under wraps until the project is over. But that’s easier said than done when she’s assigned to work with Spence Markham, the company’s offbeat “idea man” and David’s professional nemesis. When Spence suggests hosting a Dickens Festival to revitalize the town’s winter economy, Laura is thrilled. She’s even more thrilled when Spence falls in love with Powell House, the dilapidated Victorian she hopes to turn into a town museum. But is Spence falling in love with Laura as well? Soon, what started as a simple assignment becomes a tale of two possible futures. But which one will Laura choose?

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Category: On Writing