Sex in Wartime: Bad Endings in Porn Stories

[dr_mabeuse]

Someone mistook aphorism for wit, perchance?

No, I took it to mean that if a love story has an end, it must include the story of how a love ends, which must needs be sad. And then, there's just something in us that expects great love stories to be tragic because there's something inherently tragic in big love. It's obsessional; it's madness; it's delusional and destructive.

 

[Guest]

edited

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Just my thoughts -

There is no reason an erotic (not porn) story cannot have a happy ending. I read a book some years ago where the heroine has an accomplice who murders her lovers just at a moment of orgasm. The story was highly sexual and, of course, the heroine is killed in the end. Not exactly a bad ending, actually.

Still, bad endings are quite possible. It seems to me there could be a story where the ending is separated from the erotic content - Romeo & Juliette is quite a good example, even though the Elizabethan era wouldn't allow the explicit eroticism we have today.

 

[Stella_Omega]

No, I took it to mean that if a love story has an end, it must include the story of how a love ends, which must needs be sad. And then, there's just something in us that expects great love stories to be tragic because there's something inherently tragic in big love. It's obsessional; it's madness; it's delusional and destructive.

But most love stories don't tell how it ends-- they tell how it begins.

 

[3113]

Someone once said that all love stories are sad stories. Maybe someone wants to comment on that.

They must have been French.

 

[3113]

No, I took it to mean that if a love story has an end, it must include the story of how a love ends, which must needs be sad. And then, there's just something in us that expects great love stories to be tragic because there's something inherently tragic in big love. It's obsessional; it's madness; it's delusional and destructive.

Well, but then we have to distinguish whether it's the Love that causes such tragedy or the circumstances. Consider Romeo and Juliet if their parents had been best friends and they'd been slated to marry. I'm seeing a romantic comedy there (he broods about his arranged marriage, she broods over hers, they meet at a party (neither knowing who the other is), they fall in love, hijinks ensue-turns out all right in the end). Love does lead to tragedy, but ONLY because of the circumstances surrounding it. It isn't like the two fall in love and their crazed, mad passion leads them to destroy each other, or end the relationship, right? Love leads them to try and figure out a way to be together that goes tragically wrong. That may be splitting hairs, but I think it's an important difference.

Do you see my point? There are million sad stories that can be written about inappropriate love that ends sadly or badly because the mores of society, the customs and circumstances of the culture won't allow it to end well. Like Brokeback Mountain or Atonement--which puts us back in wartime love, so sad because, hey, people dies in wartime and lovers are parted. The tragedy isn't in the love, its in the fact that the love isn't, in those circumstances, allowed to be whatever it might or could be. That is tragic. And sad.

But the love itself isn't the thing that destroys. It's the circumstances forbidding that love that destroys. When "Love" destroys a couple, then it's usually seen not quite as "love" but, as you say, madness, obsession, a grand passion. But "love"? I think we moderns have a much better view of psychological problems brought on by chemical imbalances than prior generations. We're not going to romanticize or find tragic a man who loves a woman and kills her so that she can't be with anyone else. We're going to look at him and see a crazed stalker. And while we may be fascinated by two people who express love in the most extreme fashion, to the point where it's destructive to both, I don't know that we can honestly argue that they truly love each other more, or better, than that little old couple quietly holding hands in the park. I think, in short, that you're grossly misrepresenting love if you define it only by that narrow bit of it that's grand, passionate, fiery and destructive.

It's interesting and it makes for great drama, but in regards to love and love stories, it's only the tip of the iceberg.

 

[WRJames]

No, I took it to mean that if a love story has an end, it must include the story of how a love ends, which must needs be sad. And then, there's just something in us that expects great love stories to be tragic because there's something inherently tragic in big love. It's obsessional; it's madness; it's delusional and destructive.

One of the themes I explore in "Strangers in the Night" -- which I tried to make bittersweet (isn't that an appropriate flavor for Valentine's Day?) At the end, Tom is already mourning the loss of a love he has not yet fully won.

We know, that, eventually, all things will end. There is no happy ever after, at least not in this life. So, in that sense, every happy ending has a falsehood to it.

 

[CharleyH]

Porn differs from mainstream literature in many ways, but one of the most striking is in the ending. Porn commonly has a happy ending. There's something about an uhappy ending - a murder or a tragedy - that makes the sex that's come before seem especially tasteless or gratuitous. This avoidance of tragedy or serious themes gives porn a naive and pollyannish, unreal and glossy feel.

Few serious books seem to have happy endings. More and more books deal with such violence and degradation that porn looks positively wholesome compared to them, but porn also comes off looking false, artifical, and contrived. If porn's ever going to be taken seriously as literature, it's going to have to find a way of dealing with the negatives of violence, murder, and loss that mainstream fiction's already concerned with. Is this even possible?

Is it possible to write serious porn? Or is it by its very nature the stuff of fluff and must it always remain so?

Porn - IMO is fluff. I see and read so much of it that I can't even take it seriously. Porn is fluff - easy to write and easy enough to get off on if it fits your bill.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well, but then we have to distinguish whether it's the Love that causes such tragedy or the circumstances. Consider Romeo and Juliet if their parents had been best friends and they'd been slated to marry. I'm seeing a romantic comedy there (he broods about his arranged marriage, she broods over hers, they meet at a party (neither knowing who the other is), they fall in love, hijinks ensue-turns out all right in the end). Love does lead to tragedy, but ONLY because of the circumstances surrounding it. It isn't like the two fall in love and their crazed, mad passion leads them to destroy each other, or end the relationship, right? Love leads them to try and figure out a way to be together that goes tragically wrong. That may be splitting hairs, but I think it's an important difference.

Do you see my point? There are million sad stories that can be written about inappropriate love that ends sadly or badly because the mores of society, the customs and circumstances of the culture won't allow it to end well. Like Brokeback Mountain or Atonement--which puts us back in wartime love, so sad because, hey, people dies in wartime and lovers are parted. The tragedy isn't in the love, its in the fact that the love isn't, in those circumstances, allowed to be whatever it might or could be. That is tragic. And sad.

But the love itself isn't the thing that destroys. It's the circumstances forbidding that love that destroys. When "Love" destroys a couple, then it's usually seen not quite as "love" but, as you say, madness, obsession, a grand passion. But "love"? I think we moderns have a much better view of psychological problems brought on by chemical imbalances than prior generations. We're not going to romanticize or find tragic a man who loves a woman and kills her so that she can't be with anyone else. We're going to look at him and see a crazed stalker. And while we may be fascinated by two people who express love in the most extreme fashion, to the point where it's destructive to both, I don't know that we can honestly argue that they truly love each other more, or better, than that little old couple quietly holding hands in the park. I think, in short, that you're grossly misrepresenting love if you define it only by that narrow bit of it that's grand, passionate, fiery and destructive.

It's interesting and it makes for great drama, but in regards to love and love stories, it's only the tip of the iceberg.

That's interesting and I concede the point, but I actually think that what we're doing by using those circumstances to set off the comic or tragic in a love affair is making a comment on the nature of love, not society. I think Romeo and Juliet is about love as something that consumes and destroys, not about family feuds, and I think Casablanca is about love and loss, not about war and loyalty.

I think there are happy loves, and I think there are unhappy loves, and I think the great, memorable loves are intrinsically tragic. There's something both deeply beautiful and yet inherently tragic in losing control of your own destiny and becoming enslaved to your beloved as happens in a great love affair and I think we recognize that as tragic. I don't know that Romeo and Juliet could ever be done as a comedy. Or Brittney Spears and Kevin Federlane could ever be anything but a comedy.

 

[Frank Noir]

Porn differs from mainstream literature in many ways, but one of the most striking is in the ending. Porn commonly has a happy ending. There's something about an uhappy ending - a murder or a tragedy - that makes the sex that's come before seem especially tasteless or gratuitous. This avoidance of tragedy or serious themes gives porn a naive and pollyannish, unreal and glossy feel.

Few serious books seem to have happy endings. More and more books deal with such violence and degradation that porn looks positively wholesome compared to them, but porn also comes off looking false, artifical, and contrived. If porn's ever going to be taken seriously as literature, it's going to have to find a way of dealing with the negatives of violence, murder, and loss that mainstream fiction's already concerned with. Is this even possible?

Is it possible to write serious porn? Or is it by its very nature the stuff of fluff and must it always remain so?

Endings are a fabrication in the first place. Life - as they say - goes on.

Entertainment stories has an ending, wrapping everything up nicely (the lovers get married, the murder is solved). Serious authors may choose just to stop - leaving the readers pondering what might happen next.

I tend to write happy endings in porn, but I could well imagine darker ones. I have a couple of story ideas involving one of the main characters dying at the end. However, that wouldn't automatically make it great literature.

So, can porn be great literature? The great Marquis de Sade mixed porn with philosophical musings, making his books some of the strangest and most confusing works of literature ever. But whether it works as either porn or literature is debatable.

I think gauchecritic has a point that the sex scenes exist in a different realm from the rest of the story. Graphic sex scenes break the flow of the story and focus on gratuitous details.

Kinda like the songs in a musical, actually...

 

[xssve]

No, I took it to mean that if a love story has an end, it must include the story of how a love ends, which must needs be sad. And then, there's just something in us that expects great love stories to be tragic because there's something inherently tragic in big love. It's obsessional; it's madness; it's delusional and destructive.

Well, it's impossible to maintain that level of intensity indefinitely - one reason people cheat, not so much that they get tired of the same old, but that they crave that initial rush of exitement, it can be addicting like anything else I suppose.

There might be a sense of dissapointment when it turns out that the new relationship is just as unsatisfying as the old one, which might be part of what drives sexual addicts.

In sense, sex is tragic, when you figure in the whole letdown thing afterwords, post coital depression - most porn ends before that particular thing settles in.

The good thing about it is that the whole cycle of lust starts all over in anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour, for me anyway.