Surprising Erotic Content In Old Mainstream Fiction

[Wifetheif]

How often has this happened to you? You are reading a piece of old mainstream fiction and you suddenly realize that the sly old-timer slipped in an erotic scene that the censors of the day didn't catch? I read A TON of very old stuff. One that struck me I found in "Sideways in Time" by Murray Leinster in 1934. The story was one of the first "parallel timeline" stories. Earth's timeline gets messed up by cosmic forces. Vikings raid a modern New England seaside town and carry off some of the local women. A Roman legion turns up near Saint Louis. A northern traveling salesman with Uncle Sam emblazoned on his truck, finds himself in the Confederate States of America that won the civil war. The Russian flag flies over San Fransisco. Anyway, the narrative focuses on a college professor and a group of students (equal number of men and women) at one point they are captured by a Roman villa owner and tossed into the slave pens. A careful reading reveals that the students were stripped to their skins before being tossed in with the rest of the slaves. This being 1934 and Amazing Stories being a conservative publication at that time, Leinster could not come out and state this he had to refer to it obliquely. Now I want to write about a bunch of let's say 1950s era co-eds and their dates ending up in Ancient Rome and having that happen to them!
I'm not talking about someone like Abraham Merrit who had lots of nude women and implied sex in his stories. I thinking bout folks you don't expect in stories that are completely normal -- until they aren't!
Do any of you have similar examples?

 

[PennameWombat]

And... from that... Sidewise Award for Alternate History:

The awards take their name from the 1934 short story "Sidewise in Time" by Murray Leinster, in which a strange storm causes portions of Earth to go all topsy-turvy and swap places with their analogs from other timelines.

The awards were created by Steven H Silver, Evelyn C. Leeper, and Robert B. Schmunk. Over the years, the number of judges has fluctuated between three and eight and have included judges in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and South Africa.

Two awards are normally presented each year, usually at WorldCon or at NASFiC. The Short-Form award is presented to a work under 60,000 words in length. The Long-Form award is presented to a work or works longer than 60,000 words, which may include a single novel or a multi-volume series. The judges have four times also recognized an individual with a Special Achievement Award in recognition for works published prior to the award's inception or for other contributions to the genre.

Yeah, there's confusion about the title of the story . On the scribd page, the preview version with the first page of text uses "Sidewise in Time," but the intro material on that same page has it both ways (Sidewise, Sideways).

 

[WritingwhatIlike]

I found that some of Heinlein's books had some pretty out there stuff, at least for a teenage me. Polyamory, lecherous old men, etc. I would guess it didn't exactly slip by any censors but in terms of what we see now it's way more out there.

 

[Demiurging]

In agreement with WritingwhatIlike, I just finished a re-read of Time Enough For Love and forgot until I got to that part that Lazarus actually does fuck his mother. Then there was Stranger in a Strange Land with the poly cult in the end which was quite shocking to me since I first read it while on a trip with my church's youth group. And then there was that odd ending to The Door Into Summer with all the time travel and cryostasis, not sexual (debatable) but if you've read it you know what I'm referring to.

Yeah, Heinlein was a strange bird alright.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I recall a fair bit of sex in Brave New World.

The amount of it in Heinlein was a shock - I started with Number of the Beast - and the idea that a woman could go round having lots of sex, enjoy it, and not be judged for it was a novel one to 18yo me. I then read the rest of Heinlein and every redhead leaping at the men got a tad tedious, but it was still nice to see books with lots of happy sex (as opposed to say Disney Sheldon or especially Virginia Andrews where it generally led to disaster).

 

[NightPorter]

Every generation thinks that they were the first to discover sex. All the studies show that they were having more of it back then than current times. The old timers just had more rules about expressing it.

 

[SamScribble]

Perhaps my first erotic literature surprise came, many years ago, two-thirds of the way through a not-very-good political thriller. (I can no longer recall either the name of the book or the name of the author.) A couple of the main characters, who had been arguing since Page 1, kissed and made up. And more. Much, much more. And in great detail.

I think I was about ten at the time. The young couple who lived across the road from us were deeply, deeply religious. They went off on some pilgrimage and, while they were away, I mowed their lawns for them. When they returned, they gave me the book as a ‘thank you’ present. I don’t think that they read a lot of secular books.

 

[SimonDoom]

As a kid, full of urges I barely understood and too young to buy explicit magazines, I'd get my kicks from reading the sexy parts of mainstream novels. The 1970s were a good era for this, because explicit sexuality had finally entered mainstream fiction. I can recall a few fun and somewhat trashy novels that had sex scenes I read and re-read: Shibumi, The French Atlantic Affair, Raise the Titanic, The Godfather. Even Stephen King's book Salem's Lot had a couple of scenes to spark the interest of a young horny teen.

Heavy Metal magazine was great, too. Some of its content was almost soft-core porn, but the parents never knew. They just thought it was a comic book.

It's funny. I've read that teens actually are having less sex now than they were when I was a teen. Yet porn and erotica were so much harder to come by then. It makes me wonder if there's a correlation.

 

[Lifestyle66]

Every generation thinks that they were the first to discover sex. All the studies show that they were having more of it back then than current times. The old timers just had more rules about expressing it.

I point that out at the very beginning of my 'Lifestyle Ch 08: Clubs' by starting with the following:
****
“…She sucked my delighted prick, handled and kissed my balls, till I spent in her mouth, as her teeth were lovingly biting the head of my penis. She sucked it all down, whilst I repaid her loving attentions to the best of my ability with my own active tongue….”, ’The Pearl’, Volume 7, January 1880.
Per Wikipedia: “The Pearl is a collection of erotic tales, rhymes, songs, and parodies in magazine form which were published in London between 1879 to 1881, …”
The above quote is a scene from one story in which a family invites two young neighbor girls to spend the day. So, for those people who want to believe their parents, grandparents, etc. were ‘pure and innocent’, guess again. Sex has been around forever.
****

So, it is only the naive who believe their ancestors were pure of heart. And it doesn't take an extensive study to find these. They are long past copyright protection and available for download. The 'Lady Pokingham' stories are of interest, as those are about a BDSM club.

 

[NotWise]

I never did come across Nancy Drew Does the Hardy Boys in the original series, but I think someone else filled in the obvious gap.

 

[Blind_Justice]

I borrowed a lot of books from my dad's bookshelf and didn't expect the amount of sex Eric Von Lustbader threw into his Ninja thrillers. Or the Sunset Warrior books.

 

[LexxRuthless]

The one that really sticks out in my mind is Judy Blume's Then Again Maybe I Won't. I had read Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and had enjoyed it, so my deeply religious mother bought me this other novel. I was eight years old. When the narrator referred to having "wet dreams" I almost asked my mother what those were. Fortunately, I did not. Later, he starts watching his older, female neighbor at night when she got undressed for bed. He asks his parents for binoculars for Christmas and they get those for him -- along with a birdwatching guide because they misunderstood his request. Judy Blume never went into too much detail, but that left plenty for my fertile young imagination to work out.

Between that book and Harriet the Spy, I was all set for a career as a peeping tom.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Clan of the Cave Bear.

 

[SimonDoom]

Clan of the Cave Bear.

Great example. And its sequel, Valley of the Horses. Sex, with caves.

The predecessor to the novels in a way was the great cheesy 60s movie One Million Years, B.C., with Raquel Welch in a cave woman bikini, and putting humans and dinosaurs together.

 

[Dingo_Triplesix]

I vividly remember the books by Harold Robbins, available at the local public library.

 

[oggbashan]

Try Maurice Pons' Rosa - all about unbirth.


Or any of Tom Sharpe's novels about Wilt.

Or any buy Jilly Cooper...

 

[KeithD]

Frank Yerby's books had erotic undertones.

It's no surprise to me to find erotic content in old mainstream fiction. The mainstream never had the restrictions that erotica does.

And movies too. My brush with working in movies showed me that screen writers injected a whole undercurrent of "in understanding" reference erotica--homoeroticism, especially--in their movie scripts, and twittered behind their hands at seeing it pass unnoticed by most on the big screen.

 

[SimonDoom]

One of the best examples I can think of is the "oysters and snails" conversation between the characters played by Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis in Spartacus, written by Dalton Trumbo, who'd been blacklisted in the 1950s.

The excerpt:

Crassus: Do you eat oysters?

Antoninus: When I have them, master.

Crassus: Do you eat snails?

Antoninus: No, master.

Crassus: Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?

Antoninus: No, master.

Crassus: Of course not. It is all a matter of taste, isn’t it?

Antoninus: Yes, master.

Crassus: And taste is not the same as appetite, and therefore not a question of morals.

Antoninus: It could be argued so, master.

Crassus: My robe, Antoninus. My taste includes both snails and oysters.

 

[ElectricBlue]

One of the best examples I can think of is the "oysters and snails" conversation between the characters played by Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis in Spartacus, written by Dalton Trumbo, who'd been blacklisted in the 1950s.

The excerpt:

Crassus: Do you eat oysters?

Antoninus: When I have them, master.

Crassus: Do you eat snails?

Antoninus: No, master.

Crassus: Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?

Antoninus: No, master.

Crassus: Of course not. It is all a matter of taste, isn’t it?

Antoninus: Yes, master.

Crassus: And taste is not the same as appetite, and therefore not a question of morals.

Antoninus: It could be argued so, master.

Crassus: My robe, Antoninus. My taste includes both snails and oysters.

Good man. A Stanley Kubrick reference (although he later, to all intents and purposes, disowned the movie).

 

[Bramblethorn]

Great example. And its sequel, Valley of the Horses. Sex, with caves.

The predecessor to the novels in a way was the great cheesy 60s movie One Million Years, B.C., with Raquel Welch in a cave woman bikini, and putting humans and dinosaurs together.

Yeah, I should have said "Earth's Children" since I was thinking of the sequels more than the first book. IIRC the only sex in #1 is rape.

 

[rescatooor]

Around the turn of the 20th century there was quite a bit of literature that discussed sex and women's empowerment regarding their ability to decide when and how much intercourse they would be having with their husbands. There was also a fair bit on extramarital affairs too. I'm sure you could quite a bit of frank talk about sex from that era, mostly written by female authors. One could call them erotic, but perhaps not smutty.

As for your question, last time I was surprised by a full-fleshed out erotic scene was in a YA book. Not something I regularly read. Apparently when they're of the fantasy genre, things can even get quite kinky.

Fav shock read still remains Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman.

 

[TadOverdon]

When Rosemary Rogers finished with historical fiction, she wrote some Jacqueline Suzannesque contemporary romances with a then-surprising amount of slightly kinky sex, one being The Crowd Pleasers.

 

[ishtat]

Even Jane Austen could be made sexy. The 1999 film and the 2007 BBC Series both recognised the suppressed sex in Austen's dullest (but possibly most interesting) heroine, Fanny Price. In these versions of Mansfield Park, the traditionalists hated the observation that Fanny,rather than being the tedious goody two shoes, could be portrayed as manipulative and sexually interested.

There were obvious parallels between Fanny Price and Jane Austen herself with a broken off liaison.