‘Horny’ is not sufficient!

This blog post is a slightly refined version of thoughts I've been feeling out in local-only posts on timetheft.social. Part of these thoughts/frustrations obviously come from trying to sell stories/a novella with sexual-but-not-sexy content in the current insanely competitive paid SFF publishing market (though if you are interested in that, hiiii); so yeah, maybe my work does just suck lol. That's a possibility. But I also see this a bit in indie games (a field I am totally outside of paid/publishing opportunities for) and do kind of feel like I'm giving something no one really wants in a different way than putting out work without this content, so I thought I'd try to articulate that. Anyways:

One of my favorite obscure theory beef stories is related in this LRB article about Alain Robbe-Grillet:

At the party for Barthes’s 1977 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault confronted Robbe-Grillet: ‘I have told you this already and I will say it again, Alain: when it comes to sex, you are, and always have been misguided!’ Barthes rose to his defence, reminding Foucault that Robbe-Grillet was, at the very least, a pervert. Foucault replied: ‘Ça ne suffit pas!’

This is funny to me because while I get where Foucault is coming from as like an intensely practicing gay guy, I actually do think it can be sufficient to be particular types of pervert. As others have infamously noted, it's a position that implies a unique and intense form of attention that exists outside norms or acceptability. And that's cool and interesting to me, it often "brings the juice" to a work of art/literature/etc/whatever. But one thing I have started feeling is insufficient in the sense Foucault means here is the concept of "horniness."

Generally, I think the parts of both SFF publishing and indie games that I feel most adjacent to in terms of like, friend groups, media we talk about, places I submit my work etc., consider themselves very socially liberal and chill about sex and sexuality. And I think that's true in a sort of, representational variety of characters sense, but sometimes it's frustrating how it doesn't go deeper than that.

I feel like there's still a lingering anti-porn, sex-negative reactionary "feminist" influence on "socially liberal" spaces that makes more grounded and ambivalent depictions of sex lives feel inappropriate or excessive or "problematic." Or maybe it's also a reaction against seeing the golden age style horniness/sex scene in SF as corny, gross, objectifying, dudebro. (In a way, strictly negative experiences feel more acceptable so long as they're properly morally framed.) It's too risky or too potentially gauche to pay for, at least. But we don't want to be prudes either, so the safer stand-in for this stuff is horniness.

Contemporary SFF and indie videogame scenes are alike in kind of creating fanservicey characters across the spectrum of gender and sexuality that they know people will have a horny response to and present them in a way that encourages that. It feels like this is where a lot of people stop and think that's representing sex or sexuality.

One step further, there can be like, eroticized metaphor in a speculative context (magical fusion, knights stabbing each other etc) that's idealized to the point of being near-jerkoff material too, and that's also mistaken for sexuality. Not to say either of these things are wrong or "bad writing" or whatever, I like some stuff that fits the bill. But when any realistic or grounded depiction of sex seems basically absent, they start to stick out as insufficient and annoy me.

I write characters who have sex for reasons that are maybe a little unusual by these standards and not life changing or total devotion or True Love. And the sex itself can also be like, clumsy, weird, underwhelming etc rather than this beautiful expression of poetic intensity and fire/ocean wave metaphors. Because that's what's interesting and specific about relationships to me, it's not just you find True Love and then everything about it is Perfect... (and the expectation of that can ironically be a form of pressure that ruins relationships!)

Sometimes it feels like you're only allowed to use those really one-note depictions of idealized/abstracted sex or sexuality, and people who are satisfied with it don't really understand how that's eliding or excluding a lot of the narrative/character function of sex and relationships... but then I may be expecting like, Pynchon-style characterization and symbolism and psychology via weird sex from a commercial/entertainment context.

But like, isn't that something to aspire to?

Trying to sell stories/a novella that has some pretty banal sex scenes in them to establish character psychology and relationships to SF markets right now kind of feels like being in this disorienting situation where it's totally ok to be like "This character FUCKS, they are HOT and they're always HORNY and talking/thinking about what they like" but as soon as you describe n non-hotties in an emotionally ambivalent situationship where any number of them may kind of suck you're some kind of pervert forcing your seedy porno on people. And don't get me started on how no erotica/off-page only clauses on submission guidelines make me feel, ha ha. Though again, disclaimer that my work may just suck.

But, ok, my larger point completely removed from the quality of my own work (though if your curiosity is piqued by this blog post: hello). This kind of stuff being represented is what I really like about Domino Club and many free itch VNs that have come out recently but there is, tellingly, basically no market for anything like this, outside of skinny depressed heterosexual women doing it tremblingly in lit fic. And I'm here to say: THAT IS NOT SUFFICIENT!! To me :)