The suspension of disbelief paradox in erotic fiction

[Auden James]

"Sex" and "sexual intercourse" are not interchangeable terms. HTH.

Sure they are, see, for example, Merriam-Webster's online definition of "sex:"

2 b : SEXUAL INTERCOURSE

Or see, for another example, the Free Dictionary's entry of "sex:"

1. a. Sexual activity, especially sexual intercourse: hasn't had sex in months.

Or see, for a third and final example, the Oxford English Dictionary's entry of "sex:"

4. b. Physical contact between individuals involving sexual stimulation; sexual activity or behaviour, spec. sexual intercourse, copulation. to have sex (with): to engage in sexual intercourse (with).

And I—and apparently the OP too—used "sex" in this sense as a kind of short form for the longer term "sexual intercourse."

 

[Smuttyandfun]

Since my stories are often at least somewhat romantic, I like to let the reader know what the couple are thinking. Letting the reader know that there's an attraction that's often mutual helps to lay the groundwork. I warn my readers that most of my longer stories will be a slow burn to let them know that they'll be reading the buildup before the two finally succumb. By the time the couple do give in, the reader is right there with them, happy to see them finally making love. I think you have to lay it out bit by bit, which also helps to make their love story and whatever way they choose to make love, more believable.

 

[EarlyMorningLight]

Since my stories are often at least somewhat romantic, I like to let the reader know what the couple are thinking. Letting the reader know that there's an attraction that's often mutual helps to lay the groundwork. I warn my readers that most of my longer stories will be a slow burn to let them know that they'll be reading the buildup before the two finally succumb. By the time the couple do give in, the reader is right there with them, happy to see them finally making love. I think you have to lay it out bit by bit, which also helps to make their love story and whatever way they choose to make love, more believable.

Absolutely. I think length and a slow build can help dramatically. Up until recently I hadn’t done any non-professional writing for a few years, so I’m cleaning out the cobwebs with some shorter vignettes before I start on some longer narrative pieces I’ve got planned. The piece I just finished was 8.5k words with two sex scenes, so space was at a premium to set up the story then get people into bed.

 

[gunhilltrain]

If that qualifies as sex, what then—to your mind—doesn't qualify as sex? I think it's unnecessary and impractical to broaden the meaning of "sex" to such an extent that fucking someone in the ass and walking around in a skirt without panties on become interchangeable.

You're losing me here. I never said that. With all due respect, you must have studied philosophy at some point, right? I say this because one of my best friends taught philosophy at a university. He never got tenure, and unfortunately, he passed on several years ago. He was very interesting to talk to - certainly, that was one of the reasons for our friendship - but man, he could tie my mind into knots during a discussion.

 

[MelissaBaby]

The movie that inspired Hinckley, Taxi Driver - well, I don't know what Bickle was doing in the years before the movie starts, but his spurned interest in Betsy seems to be what set off his rampage, although there were other factors.

He was in VietNam

 

[gunhilltrain]

He was in VietNam

I know, but there seemed to be no information about his romantic or sexual experiences. There were many other aspects of him that were not revealed. He briefly talks about - in a voiceover I think - that he has been lonely for much of his life.

 

[SimonDoom]

Sure they are, see, for example, Merriam-Webster's online definition of "sex:"

Or see, for another example, the Free Dictionary's entry of "sex:"

Or see, for a third and final example, the Oxford English Dictionary's entry of "sex:"

And I—and apparently the OP too—used "sex" in this sense as a kind of short form for the longer term "sexual intercourse."

This is becoming a debate over definitions. One of my top 5 principles of good debating is that debates over definitions are not meaningful or illuminating. Debates should be about values, or interpretations of facts, not definitions. There's nothing gained by quibbling with someone about what they call something.

I use "sex" in my own mind, for erotic story purposes, in a very broad way to mean whatever the erotic thing is in the story. It could be intercourse, or walking naked down the street, or a great foot rub. In my stories, an orgasm is usually involved. But I don't care what anyone calls it. Others have their own terms. Lovecraft can explain his usage but I think this is more or less what he means, and if so, that's how I think too.

 

[Winter_Fare]

Historically, "sex" was something a man did to his wife for the purpose of procreation. Anything else was "buggery", "rape", "adultery" etc. Masturbation and getting off on watching other person all went under the umbrella of self abuse. We've come a long way! Definitions are important, but not worth getting bogged down in. If you use an ambiguous word like sex, best to qualify it further if you want to convey a particular meaning. Penetrative sex. Phone sex. Both sex, one has no touching at all.

 

[MsNatalie99]

Sure they are, see, for example, Merriam-Webster's online definition of "sex:"

Or see, for another example, the Free Dictionary's entry of "sex:"

Or see, for a third and final example, the Oxford English Dictionary's entry of "sex:"

And I—and apparently the OP too—used "sex" in this sense as a kind of short form for the longer term "sexual intercourse."

That would be a fine argument if you wanted to be redundantly literal. It's also the kind of argument a sex offender would make trying to get their name off of a registry. "I only jerked off in front of her, therefore it wasn't a sex act." The more and more I see you pop up on these threads, the less I think you actually believe the endless round about arguments you make. If you don't want to believe that any act aside from penetration constitutes a sexual act, that's your business. Nonetheless, everyone else seems to disagree. So perhaps we can move on to the original question.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I think it comes down to context. You get taught in school from age 11-15 (at least in England) that sex is illegal under 16. The teachers aren't expecting anyone not to think about sex nor avoid masturbation - the latter is encouraged! Then teenagers ask each other if they've ever had sex - and they mean a penis in an orifice or some sort of penetration at the least. Any medical practitioner asking about sex only wants to know who or what your genitals and possibly mouth have been in contact with.

The use of 'sex' to mean 'any activity where at least one party is having sexual thoughts or responses' is possibly only really used by publishers (and thus writers) and queer communities who've had to think more widely on the subject.

Literotica is the first mainly-straight place I've encountered which uses the wider definition, and I think the Guidance for Authors page could really do with changing the relevant headline to 'No under-18 sexual acts or thoughts', because how many people read the small print?

Back to the original topic, I've read that people will believe one wildly improbable thing per story, but everything else has to be consistent and logically follow. It's probably a good rule of thumb.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I imagine some people could sit through the old porno where a sexy mechanic comes to "fix the fridge" until the credits start rolling, and then ask, "when's he going to fix her fridge?"!!!

In fairness, I'd be pretty pissed if I blew the mechanic and he still left without fixing the fridge. There's a nearly complete 12-pack of yoghurt in it.

I think it comes down to context. You get taught in school from age 11-15 (at least in England) that sex is illegal under 16. The teachers aren't expecting anyone not to think about sex nor avoid masturbation - the latter is encouraged! Then teenagers ask each other if they've ever had sex - and they mean a penis in an orifice or some sort of penetration at the least. Any medical practitioner asking about sex only wants to know who or what your genitals and possibly mouth have been in contact with.

I'm reminded of Bill Clinton. He didn't have sex with that woman, Ms Lewinski, but he didn't exactly not have sex with her either. In erotica, of course, the sex scene can be a variety of different activities

How do you make a certain outcome feel natural? How do you judge veracity at key moments where people could make a whole range of decisions other than the one that leads them to the outcome that both the writer and the reader desire? What’s the margin of error for suspension of disbelief?

Well it varies by how the story is set up. You can write stories in which both of the protagonists are horny, attractive and unattached and it's not really any surprise that they hook up together. Of course, that's not a particularly interesting story by itself, so the secret sauce of that story has to come from somewhere else. On the other hand, for some of my stories I've had image of the ordinary guy, the increadibly hot woman and the setting and spent months racking my brain for the exact sequence of events that would cause her to ever look at him twice. Generally you want to try and land just the right side of unlikely but plausible - ideally you want the reader to be thinking that, while it seemed unlikely at the start of the story, you can see the reasons why she finally did.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Back to the original topic, I've read that people will believe one wildly improbable thing per story, but everything else has to be consistent and logically follow. It's probably a good rule of thumb.

I have a writer's theory that, if you embed in your story one element of absolute truth, however small (be it an emotion, an image, a moment) readers will recognise it, either consciously or subconsciously, and be prepared to suspend a million miles of disbelief.

I adhere to this theory in every one of my stories, however fanciful.

 

[XerXesXu]

Historically, "sex" was something a man did to his wife for the purpose of procreation.

I remember. I'm the child of a mixed marriage in a Catholic church. My parents gave the usual undertaking that I'd be brought up in the Catholic faith. I didn't attend a Catholic school so I was sent to 'Sunday' School, miscellaneous days. tutors and retreats. I was given the classical instruction that sex within marriage was permissible only for the purpose of recreation. I had no faith, but I allowed myself to be confirmed because my parents had given their word I would be.

 

[Auden James]

You're losing me here. I never said that.

I'm not sure why you're saying that now, but—to quote you again—above you wrote:

I have a story coming up where a woman walks along public streets (as an experiment) wearing a skirt and no underpants. . . . And yeah, I'd say that certainly qualifies as sex.

So you said above that walking along public streets wearing a skirt without panties on "qualifies as sex," and since I think it stands to reason that fucking someone in the ass would also qualify as sex to you, it's only logical to conclude that to you it's "sex" in both cases, hence both would become interchangeable (in name, "sex" in either case), which is exactly what I stated above.

With all due respect, you must have studied philosophy at some point, right?

I'm interested in philosophy, yes.

This is becoming a debate over definitions.

I didn't start it though! It was Brambelthorn who denied that "sex" and "sexual intercourse" are interchangeable, which is an easily testable statement by checking common parlance as recorded in dictionaries like the OED. Viewed in this way, it's not even really a debate over definitions (or if so, it's more of an indirect one), but rather a debate over acceptable word usage, which I think isn't necessarily as useless as you take debates over definitions to be (a sentiment with which a tend to agree by the way), for if someone started to call "apples" "oranges" (or vice versa) there might follow some real problems from that, e.g., when trying to bake an apple pie.

 

[LdyHoneybee]

So, I’ve got my first story pending (although I’ve written a lot of smut in the past, just not here). Thankfully, two of my beta readers called me out on a section where I glossed over the moment where my characters went from potential lovers to actually starting to go through with it.

This has always been the hardest moment for me in writing smut. The writer and the reader both know that sex is a forgone conclusion. But I want to get there in a way that’s believable, that doesn’t pull the reader out of the moment and make them question the characters coming together.

How do you make a certain outcome feel natural? How do you judge veracity at key moments where people could make a whole range of decisions other than the one that leads them to the outcome that both the writer and the reader desire? What’s the margin of error for suspension of disbelief?

These questions fascinate and frustrate me. More than the buildup, more than the sex itself, I think that moment between the two is the defining factor for a good erotic story.

I also like questions about craft. Not that I am an expert here. Almost everyone is more experienced than I. But i certainly agree that it is in the mind. We think, as humans, that we are the only species that is capable of delayed gratification and imagining sex. If you put a mare in estrus and a stallion together, you have an expected outcome, but there is, we believe, nothing there but driving instinct. They are not even, we think, capable of associating the eventual outcome with the act. But humans are capable of it, of anticipating, imagining, or resurrecting what it will feel like, of delaying gratification for social norms or to make gratification more worthwhile. What are the characters thinking? They don’t always have to say it. In fact much of the time, people show it rather than tell it. Verisimilitude is about imitating a reality that human readers will recognize. You are human. You know how to do it even if you write characters who are very different from you in detail. All you have to do is take the time to try and share it.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I'm not sure why you're saying that now, but—to quote you again—above you wrote:

So you said above that walking along public streets wearing a skirt without panties on "qualifies as sex," and since I think it stands to reason that fucking someone in the ass would also qualify as sex to you, it's only logical to conclude that to you it's "sex" in both cases, hence both would become interchangeable (in name, "sex" in either case), which is exactly what I stated above.


I'm interested in philosophy, yes.


I didn't start it though! It was Brambelthorn who denied that "sex" and "sexual intercourse" are interchangeable, which is an easily testable statement by checking common parlance as recorded in dictionaries like the OED. Viewed in this way, it's not even really a debate over definitions (or if so, it's more of an indirect one), but rather a debate over acceptable word usage, which I think isn't necessarily as useless as you take debates over definitions to be (a sentiment with which a tend to agree by the way), for if someone started to call "apples" "oranges" (or vice versa) there might follow some real problems from that, e.g., when trying to bake an apple pie.

Well, I only had one course in philosophy - yes, I liked it - but my friend Mark had a doctorate in it and thus really knew his stuff. And he definitely was interested in defining categories and then debating what should go into such categories. He also - I think he admitted this - liked getting into debates and agreements for their own sake, for the sheer joy of, well, nitpicking. There has plenty of that in this thread. I guess I've been doing it too.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Oh, about that woman without her underwear. I wrote it, but even I don't care that much about what it means. That's another thing Mark would do - he'd remember some throwaway line I said and later quote it exactly to prove some point that I had already moved beyond.

 

[SimonDoom]

Your comment about traffic reminds me of the show 24 with Keifer Sutherland. Great show, he was awesome in it, and as the title goes, each season was 24 episodes with the whole thing happening in real time. The biggest stretch of reality is he could get anywhere in a major city seemingly in minutes.

Keifer Sutherland is great in 24. I've watched a couple of seasons and it's very entertaining and it's a great example of how a show can make the viewer suspend disbelief. The idea of the show is basically ridiculous, because Sutherland's character Jack Bauer must transport himself all over the place from episode to episode while keeping within the "one hour for every episode" framework. But I think they pull it off pretty well.

The thing that most bugs me about that show is his daughter Kim, whose sole purpose in the show is to do the stupidest thing at every possible opportunity to distract Jack from saving the world so he has to save his daughter from her stupidity. When she encountered a mountain lion in the hills outside LA in season 2 I just laughed out loud. The show's makers went too far with that one.

 

[Auden James]

I wonder if we will get a Sumerian historical fiction here

If you can read German, you'll find what you're seeking in the writings of ArtaxerxersI who has written at least one story that takes place in ancient Babylonia with a servant of Ishtar as female protagonist: Die neue Dienerin der Ishtar.

 

[gunhilltrain]

If you can read German, you'll find what you're seeking in the writings of ArtaxerxersI who has written at least one story that takes place in ancient Babylonia with a servant of Ishtar as female protagonist: Die neue Dienerin der Ishtar.

So if you can summarize, what were the attitudes of ancient Babylonia? Unlike GoldenCompulsion below, I haven't even started learning German.

 

[gunhilltrain]

[Emphasis mine.]

Only from a very particular European perspective. A shame that it became so dominant. I wonder if we will get a Sumerian historical fiction here

Oh sorry, you did bring up Sumerian history here. So what can you tell us about their attitudes towards shame or the lack of it?

 

[gunhilltrain]

Thanks, that was very informative. The idea of using anal sex as "contraception" seems to be still around. I suppose that oral sex, mutual masturbation, and frottage (rubbing one's body against someone) have also been used too.

But, yes, they were very different from "European" (Western) standards. The notable thing about many modern urbanized countries is that both the marriage rates and birth rates have been dropping dramatically.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I remember. I'm the child of a mixed marriage in a Catholic church. My parents gave the usual undertaking that I'd be brought up in the Catholic faith. I didn't attend a Catholic school so I was sent to 'Sunday' School, miscellaneous days. tutors and retreats. I was given the classical instruction that sex within marriage was permissible only for the purpose of recreation. I had no faith, but I allowed myself to be confirmed because my parents had given their word I would be.

I went to a Catholic "Tuesday afternoon" school in the mid-1960s. I only went until about the age of ten or eleven, so issues of marriage, contraception, and so forth were not discussed. They definitely had old-school nuns in old-school habits.

The thing that I noticed the most as I got older was the vow of chastity that was imposed on the clergy, including the nuns, of course. Protestant pastors, rabbis, and so forth could get married, which seemed more normal to me. My experiences with Protestant churches was that they were far less hierarchical. The Roman Catholic Church was like the world's first multi-national corporation, starting with the Pope/CEO/Board Chairman in Rome having the ultimate authority over everything. Thus, the Reformation, which really shook things up.

 

[Maxiine]

It's an interesting conundrum, especially in categories like Incest/Taboo. Even in fantasy categories, such as erotic horror and science fiction or if writing absurdist comedy you have to have a realistic reaction of characters to situations otherwise you lose your audience.

For example, a story about a love affair between a hot 24-year-old female science teacher and an 18-year-old male high school senior is a good premise. If they sneak around, keeping their forbidden relationship a secret, this is believable. But if they screw on a table in the cafeteria in front of many other teachers, students and school support staff and nothing happens and nobody reacts to it as unusual or different, it is there where you lose your audience.

The way that I have written something like this is...

Sister home from college on holiday break and her high school senior brother inadvertently watch their divorced father and their former (sister) / current (brother) English teacher having sex. Brother and sister talk about it as they sit on the sofa that evening and make JiffyPop. Then the next day the brother goes to school and their father is making out with their teacher in his English class at school. He calls his sister who comes to the school and by this time the class is basically involved in a full blown orgy...

Poof, segue, brother and sister wake up on the sofa, it's still holiday break-- the last few paragraphs was a dream-- and the story continues.

 

[Maxiine]

....Juliet plunging herself into Romeo's sword at the end of Romeo and Juliet did somehow imply everything that happened earlier in the play?

I was somewhere and I heard these two women-- probably mothers-- talking.

"Is she still seeing Dean?"
"Oh yes, they are just like Romeo and Juliet."
"How romantic."

So...I'm just guessing that neither one actually saw the play.