My story

Thinking about the novels of Anne Rice, while drafting that last post, led me to realize just how pervasive gratuitous sex is in the world of genre fiction. Ms. Rice may be an egregious offender, sure, but she’s hardly alone in the dock.

To give some background, I was a somewhat precocious child, reading early and often. I read voraciously, if indiscriminately. In culinary terms, I was a gourmand. Spy novels, detective stories, horror, middlebrow historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, etc. All were grist for my mill. As long as it was genre fiction, I read it. The upshot of this upbringing was that, first, it took me awhile to know from good writing, and second, I was exposed to more gratuitous and bad sex writing at a young age than I care to remember.

I can only guess at how many novels I read between the ages of 9 and 15 that could have been serious contenders for Auberon Waugh’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. I can further only guess at what kind of psychological effect this must have had on me during my formative years.

You see, I didn’t learn about variations on the sexual act from the Playboy Channel™; I learned about them through bad spy novels, because the evil Nazi spy performed them on the naïve and unsuspecting British lass. I, being just as naïve, had my mind blown, as

1) I had no idea people could do that sort of thing, and

2) I never would have suspected evil Nazi spies would be so generous in bed, generosity not being a noted feature of evil Nazi spies.

Moreover, I, having no frame of reference for this type of thing, didn’t find obtrusive the sex scenes awkwardly shoehorned into the narratives I was reading. It didn’t, for example, set off any alarms when in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (exhibit A in the case against the claim that the book is always superior to the film), the author brings the story to a dead halt, so he can discourse for literally 50 pages on the venereal trials and tribulations of Sonny Corleone’s ex-girlfriend.

In retrospect, I’m forced to imagine bizarre scenes between Puzo and the publishing company, with the representative telling him: “Listen, we love the plotline about Michael Corleone’s rise to power. But do you think you could include more details about a random, minor character’s sex life?”

At the time, I assumed he was just adding color.

Of course, since I was reading, my parents didn’t bat an eye when I brought home from the library books that, if adapted faithfully for the screen, would almost certainly be shelved in a separate room in the back of the video store.

Let this be a lesson then, for parents and would-be parents: if you see your children reading, hand them the remote control.