Jon - some of us are new here (well, newish) and the topic is new to us!
Well, that's a good point I guess.
Lursa - yes, sure there has to be some sex in romance genres these days, but its the monumental amount of pages devoted to sex in every position - forwards, backwards, sideways - that makes me wonder about padding out the word count.
I don't think that's
quite what's going on.
It's been a while since I regularly read romances, but what you said reminds me of a particular one that my wife and I both enjoyed. It was a Regency. Heroine was 18 or 19, Hero was mid-twenties, both were gentry.
Heroine is orphaned, probably through actions of Villain. Heroine can't inherit a fee tail due to her gender. Villain wants to possess both Heroine and her fortune.
Heroine's fate is decided, at least in the short term, by Duke. Villain wants Heroine to be his ward, this is all set to happen but somehow Duke makes Hero the guardian, with the stipulation that Hero and Heroine have separate living & sleeping quarters.
Hero and Heroine fall in love. Despite the reasonable precautions of the Duke, explicit sex happens, I frankly don't remember how many separate sex scenes. Maybe it was one or two, or maybe it was six. I read this years ago.
But here's what I
do remember:
Duke has a costume party. Of course, Hero, Heroine and Villain all show up. At about midnight, Hero and Heroine sneak out into the Duke's garden and have noisy sex in the gazebo.
OK, I frankly enjoyed this sex scene --- because
it heralded a future conflict. At this point, I had been losing faith in the novel, because the obstacles between Hero and Heroine seemed to have dwindled into insignificance, particularly Villain who was turning out to be kind of a wuss. However, this sex scene was ripe for causing new, non-sexual problems for the lovers --- I foresaw another party guest (maybe Villain!) blowing the whistle on this, and the Duke finding out. Duke had been predisposed to like the lovers so far, but if they embarrassed him like this he was likely to slam some kind of hammer down. This seemed likely to bring the plot some needed complication from an unexpected quarter.
In the next chapter, the truth
did come out, the Duke had his private talk with the Hero, and it ended with the Duke saying, "I'm so glad you two are in love! Best wishes to you both!"
No obstacle whatsoever. My hopes were dashed.
My problem wasn't the inclusion of the sex scene --- or how explicit it may have been. The problem was that, the inclusion of the sex scene made somebody
lazy (maybe the writer, maybe the editor; in the end it didn't matter). This was well before the "e-book revolution", when e-book sales were insignificant --- word count mattered, but it was often something to be cut down, rather than padded. There's no way to know whether the author had originally included the plot I wanted, but
if they had, when deciding which 5,000 words to cut, between the tension-causing, character-building, climactic plot obstacle and the sex scene,
somebody would have probably decided to keep the sex scene. Because it's a simpler, easier decision.
And "fade-to-black" would have never worked with a scene like that one. When a sex scene's plot significance is that one or both lovers will suffer consequences for this later, "fade-to-black" fails to deliver. Giving the reader the full impact of whatever punishment lovers face for being caught with their hands in the cookie jar, requires description of how delicious the cookies were.
I'm not saying "fade-to-black" never works. Many times it's the best choice.
But sex scenes can be mismanaged --- written badly like any other scene; unnecessary like any other scene, and so forth. But the level of "explicit-ness" is often not the problem. . . in fact, I'd say it's rarely the problem, at least at the writing stage. The level of explicit sex in a book is a problem when readers are misled about what the book contains.
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