Really Bad or Inappropriate Sex That Pulled You Out of A Mainstream Novel

[Wifetheif]

How many times has this happened to you? You are reading a novel (genre doesn't matter) when you come across a sex scene that is either so badly written or introduces a WTF factor that it ruins what was an enjoyable experience. I just reread and finished D.F.Jones's "The Fall of Colossus" a 1974 novel that is the sequel to "Colossus" which was filmed as "Colossus: the Forbin Project." On the one hand, this novel predicts Viagra, a randy scientist ingests a drug to get it up to continue his bachelor playboy lifestyle. On the other hand, essentially the only female character in the novel is Cleo Forbin, wife of the creator of the world-controlling supercomputer. Cleo is revealed as a member of the resistance, dedicated to restoring human dominion of the planet. As punishment, and to test her love for Forbin, she is exiled to a tropical atoll where she is handed over to a complete creep who proceeds to rape and beat her! It gets worse, she comes to have affection for her abuser to the point that she weeps when he is killed and causes a severing of her relationship with her husband!
I KNOW the book was written a long time ago, but when I first read the book as a much younger man, the treatment of Cleo so repulsed me that I stopped reading the novel. Decades later, I finally finished it but it still makes me feel icky. Only a real sexist and misogynist male author could come up with such a repellant punishment and give his female protagonist such a hideous trajectory.
Surely, my experience cannot be unique. Has anything similar happened to you during an ordinary day reading in your easy chair?

 

[KeithD]

It's never made me want to slit my wrists. I usually just laugh and move on.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Mostly when bad sex happens in a novel, it's possible to to skip a few pages ahead and get back into the plot.

The only time I think it's really been an issue for me is in The Chronicles of Thomas Coventant which tries to subvert all the typical fantasy tropes by having the 'chosen one hero' be a total asshole. The scene, relatively early on where he rapes the healer characters was when I put the book down, but I'd got the sense well before that it wasn't going to be for me.

 

[Demiurging]

The Warded Man.

It's an interesting world with a neat magic system where people have to use wards to stop demons from breaking in and killing them every single night, and the title character eventually finds actually offensive magics so humanity can start fighting back.

But every single book has at least one rape, and a large number of them in the second book wouldn't be publishable here because of the under 18 rule. Way to waste your worldbuilding because you couldn't keep it in your pants.

 

[HeyAll]

Every so often, there are mainstream articles written about this:

https://www.lelo.com/blog/10-worst-erotic-passages-fiction/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/21/why-no-good-sex-in-fiction-prize

My theory for bad sex writing in mainstream novels is that the author is still fixated on using heavy prose. For sex, heavy prose can make it look ridicious. Sexual words and descriptions are hot by default. No need to go heavy on the prose.

 

[DouglasFinney]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/21/why-no-good-sex-in-fiction-prize

Martin Amis has a pretty arrogant take on why sex is hard to write: “it may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do – like dreams.”

 

[Bramblethorn]

The Warded Man.

It's an interesting world with a neat magic system where people have to use wards to stop demons from breaking in and killing them every single night, and the title character eventually finds actually offensive magics so humanity can start fighting back.

But every single book has at least one rape, and a large number of them in the second book wouldn't be publishable here because of the under 18 rule. Way to waste your worldbuilding because you couldn't keep it in your pants.

Ugh, yes. I never made it past book 1 (and only finished that because I was stuck on a boat trip with nothing else to read) but I remember that being really skeevy in how it handled rape. It felt like the writing process was "Male Lead needs a reason to get angry and lose control, what can I do to him?" *reaches into the Cliché Sack* "Yeah, let's rape his girlfriend".

The aftermath of that scene was more about him being overcome with guilt at killing the rapists than about how she felt about it.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Martin Amis has a pretty arrogant take on why sex is hard to write: “it may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do – like dreams.”

Which kinda implies Amis has never had good sex which he could just narrate factually...
I think he's won the Bad Sex award multiple times.
The only bad sex memorable enough for me was some Virginia Andrews book where yet another girl was raped by her older brother/father/stepfather/cousin/guy who was all of the above. Usually I just skim over scenes of the magic penis producing a wild orgasm in a woman it's never met before.

Some later Jack Reacher novels have pretty implausible sex if you keep a mental tally of how long the guy has worn the same underpants and socks...

 

[ElectricBlue]

Some later Jack Reacher novels have pretty implausible sex if you keep a mental tally of how long the guy has worn the same underpants and socks...

EB looked at KQQ with her note pad and pencil, making notes on these things. He began to feel uneasy, realising he'd never touched on the rate one changes one's socks, not in any story, not once. Might this lack of information be a dampener, might he be, quite inadvertently, writing truly filthy erotica?

He shuddered to think of the consequences. Fuck Jack Reacher, what about his own world? Best set a story in a laundrette, pretty damn quick!

 

[Kumquatqueen]

EB looked at KQQ with her note pad and pencil, making notes on these things. He began to feel uneasy, realising he'd never touched on the rate one changes one's socks, not in any story, not once. Might this lack of information be a dampener, might he be, quite inadvertently, writing truly filthy erotica?

He shuddered to think of the consequences. Fuck Jack Reacher, what about his own world? Best set a story in a laundrette, pretty damn quick!

Heh. It's only an issue because the author makes such a big deal out of Reacher owning no possessions other than a toothbrush, and every so often (about once a book) he buys new clothes and puts the old ones in the trash. The first half-dozen books he only got together with the obligatory female character after acquiring clean clothes and a shower. Later ones (allegedly ghostwritten) are much less careful.

Most books you just assume the people meet the regular standards of cleanliness of people around them.

 

[lovecraft68]

Mostly when bad sex happens in a novel, it's possible to to skip a few pages ahead and get back into the plot.

The only time I think it's really been an issue for me is in The Chronicles of Thomas Coventant which tries to subvert all the typical fantasy tropes by having the 'chosen one hero' be a total asshole. The scene, relatively early on where he rapes the healer characters was when I put the book down, but I'd got the sense well before that it wasn't going to be for me.

That scene was extremely short and the reason he did it is he was a leper for years, thrust into a new world through magic, then healed and whole, and he lost his mind. The guilt from that incident-which led to the birth of his daughter he meets in the next novel because time is different there, drives him through the entire first series.

I'm no fan of rape scenes, but if that were too much for you, what the hell are you doing here? Now Girl with a Dragon Tattoo on the other hand....

Or Game of Thrones...and if you tell me you watched that rape fest, then I really don't know what's wrong with you.

 

[lovecraft68]

I'll bring this up because I like to remind people of it. The underage gang bang in IT. Because you know, King couldn't come up with any other way for the Loser's club to escape other than four boys running a train on the girl. You do that here, you're a pedophile, but when you're a pedophile drunken pile of shit that has some bestsellers you write what you want.

 

[TheRedChamber]

That scene was extremely short and the reason he did it is he was a leper for years, thrust into a new world through magic, then healed and whole, and he lost his mind. The guilt from that incident-which led to the birth of his daughter he meets in the next novel because time is different there, drives him through the entire first series.

I'm no fan of rape scenes, but if that were too much for you, what the hell are you doing here? Now Girl with a Dragon Tattoo on the other hand....

Or Game of Thrones...and if you tell me you watched that rape fest, then I really don't know what's wrong with you.

Perhaps the book changes tone and gets better after this incident. Having given up on it at that point, I don't know. At the time I was on page 70 and didn't feel like spending another 1,000 pages with the character (I have the combined trilogy book).

It was about a decade ago that I tried reading it, so I can't remember all the build-up but I pulled it off the shelf just now and found the scene. I think the issue with it almost is that it's too short, there isn't a lot of context or foreshadowing of what is about to happen and I didn't really get a proper sense of the character losing his mind. It felt more like 'and then this happens'. Emotionally the passage is very detatched from horror of what is happening, but also has some weirdly flowery language "His climax flooded him as if he had fallen into a Mithil of molten fury."

With Game of Thrones, while the show tended to be more gratuitious (and I stopped watching after the third season or so), I didn't have a problem with how rape was presented in the books. The country was at war and lawless and rape was a fact of life and constant danger and also, given the nature of arranged marriages, the sex between couples doesn't follow our standards of consent and, in some places, is clearly shown to be rape. Martin's view seems to include rape because of he aims for realism in his books, but I always thought there was authorial condemnation of it.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I've seen the movie and I'm pretty sure I read the book, but I can't remember any of the particular details about it, except that I quite enjoyed it. I guess I didn't have any problems with the content.

 

[Wifetheif]

Yeah, as far a King goes, mainstream lets you get away with more because it's "art" whereas erotica is supposedly NOT. I'm also reminded of "The Warrior Within" novel series by Sharon Green. Even though they are written by a woman, they are just as regressive and problematic as John Norman's "Gor" Set in the future, a modern woman who is a skilled negotiator is sent to a world of barbarians to draw up a peace treaty and stop the planet's incessant conflict. She is promptly stripped by her barbarian 'guardian" and roughly used. She takes ALL of this in stride. At the end of the first novel the barbarian takes a wooden rod and BEATS OUR HEROINE! She then promptly forgives him because he is a barbarian and didn't know any better! Imagine a male author writing the SAME thing! He'd be a pariah everywhere.

 

[Demiurging]

Ugh, yes. I never made it past book 1 (and only finished that because I was stuck on a boat trip with nothing else to read) but I remember that being really skeevy in how it handled rape. It felt like the writing process was "Male Lead needs a reason to get angry and lose control, what can I do to him?" *reaches into the Cliché Sack* "Yeah, let's rape his girlfriend".

The aftermath of that scene was more about him being overcome with guilt at killing the rapists than about how she felt about it.

I bought the second book because I have a rule "You get one rape before I think it's your fetish" and let me tell you that you dodged a bullet. The second book begins with the training of child soldiers and I think I can leave it at that. I swear, it was an undertone to every scene where a woman was alone with any number of men.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Martin Amis has a pretty arrogant take on why sex is hard to write: “it may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do – like dreams.”

That would be very bad news for the writers on this site.

The worst sex scenes I know of are not in a novel, but perhaps in Norman Mailer's short story The Time of Her Time. Let's see - the male character is an Irish Catholic bullfighting instructor? I guess there is one somewhere. It's obvious that Mailer wants the reader to loathe the female character, Denise Gondelman and well, he succeeds at that.

 

[gunhilltrain]

That would be very bad news for the writers on this site.

The worst sex scenes I know of are not in a novel, but perhaps in Norman Mailer's short story The Time of Her Time. Let's see - the male character is an Irish Catholic bullfighting instructor? I guess there is one somewhere. It's obvious that Mailer wants the reader to loathe the female character, Denise Gondelman and well, he succeeds at that.

Hey, the whole thing is online.

The Time of Her Time

One quote: " 'Oh, you don't want me. I'm very inadequate as a lover.' Her dark hard New York eyes, bright with appetite, considered my head as if I were a delicious and particularly sour pickle." Mailer could really write his ass off when he wanted to. I could quote the longer passage in which the narrator enables her first ever orgasm, but you can read that for yourself.

 

[Lovecraft_Lore]

Clan of the cave bear rape scenes. I read those books in middle school. I remember thinking 'what the hell'.

 

[SimonDoom]

Some later Jack Reacher novels have pretty implausible sex if you keep a mental tally of how long the guy has worn the same underpants and socks...

And he carries a toothbrush, but no toothpaste.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I bought the second book because I have a rule "You get one rape before I think it's your fetish" and let me tell you that you dodged a bullet. The second book begins with the training of child soldiers and I think I can leave it at that. I swear, it was an undertone to every scene where a woman was alone with any number of men.

That's a reasonable rule in general, but from what I recall #1 was getting creepily rapey even before the actual major character rape happened. The author seemed really, really eager to make sure we didn't forget that the wilderness was full of rapists and women might get raped at any moment ps. rape.

Also didn't make sense from a world-building POV: if life outside the settlements is so incredibly dangerous, and there's so little trade between them, how can there be enough to support "banditry" as a way of making a living? But then my suspension of disbelief on the world-building broke when I noticed that the main trade commodities were wheat, sheep, wood, clay, and metal, exactly the same as in Settlers of Catan.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Clan of the cave bear rape scenes. I read those books in middle school. I remember thinking 'what the hell'.

I don't recall the rapes, but given we all read them in first/second year (ie age 11-13) they were some of the first books we read with any sex scenes in. We had low standards of consent in the 80s and Ayla was clearly badass - she invented *everything*!

And the main alternative was Flowers in the Attic. Rapes and incest!

Danielle Steel (some of the worst books I've ever read) and Jilly Cooper were a breath of fresh air...

 

[lovecraft68]

Every sex scene in 50 Shades of Gray

 

[gunhilltrain]

Every sex scene in 50 Shades of Gray

We recently had a discussion here about Fifty Shades of Grey on another thread. My idea was that it would have been more fun if they had switched roles around at times. Christian would come home one day and find Alexandria sitting there with a short, tight black skirt, spike heels, and a nice thick paddle or tawse in her hands. "Christian, I have a bone to pick with you. Come over here and drop your pants." I think the guy would have loved it. Maybe I should write it, but I'd have to wing some of it because I haven't read any of the originals.

 

[lovecraft68]

We recently had a discussion here about Fifty Shades of Grey on another thread. My idea was that it would have been more fun if they had switched roles around at times. Christian would come home one day and find Alexandria sitting there with a short, tight black skirt, spike heels, and a nice thick paddle or tawse in her hands. "Christian, I have a bone to pick with you. Come over here and drop your pants." I think the guy would have loved it. Maybe I should write it, but I'd have to wing some of it because I haven't read any of the originals.

It would have been lost upon the books target audience which was a bunch of older women who think bad boys are hot, money is sexy, and young girls being indoctrinated to believe abuse is BDSM and they have to take that shit.

My comment was just sarcasm, I could not have read every sex scene in those books and remained sane. Contrary to hype, my wife claimed the sex in the movies wasn't all that either. Then again, she's married to me, has her own porn hub account and shops at Petco for "bedroom accessories" as she calls them. So in other words, she's not the vanilla mini van crowd who think that crap is hot.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I know a bunch of mums who quite liked 50 Shades. But the interesting thing is, they all thought the sex was a bit crap, whether or not they knew anything about BDSM, and bearing in mind that I really wasn't going to ask mums at the school gate about that.

What they enjoyed was the fantasy of a rich man who understands your every need. Like a vampire in a TV show, said more than one of them who didn't realise it was indeed Twilight fanfic in disguise.

Given a fair few of the same women admitted to watching Secretary more than once, I'm guessing they're telling the truth about what they thought of the sex scenes.

If nothing else, the books hugely boosted charity shops' income for a few months...