What's your damage?

Poll at end

I know that the title is going to bring all the smut Karen's in here telling me to quit being a prude, but slow down, hold your horses, and put your fingers back at home base keyboard warriors. Let me speak before you start breathing down my neck and telling me there is nothing wrong with adult fiction having sex. ✋

Have your horses been held? Great.

Something that I've noticed, now that I'm really back into reading as a hobby, is how every single book written for adults, to be consumed by adults, feels the need to include some kind of sex scene. Now, there is absolutely not a thing wrong with writing sex scenes. As someone that writes for fun, I write a lot of smutty one-shots. But when you're someone that reads a lot of books during the year - the past three years I have read 300+ books each year, and I am well on my way to reaching that again this year - it becomes increasingly frustrating for every book I pick up to have a minimum of two sex scene's. They grow stale after a while. No matter how kinky or non-vanilla a sex scene may be, it's still an interruption in the overall progression of the story.

This actually leads me to another vent. As someone who reads almost exclusively M/M books, I can't help but notice how 95% of the books fall under the romance category, which, by extension, means more sex scenes. So many of the books I read within this category will have 3 - 5 scenes in under 300 pages while one, or both, of the main characters spend every waking second thinking about how hot their LI is, or when they're next gonna get off, or when the last time they got off was. One of the few exceptions to this rule I've found is TJ Klune. His books are long and yet, despite them being consistently over 400 pages, we generally get one smut scene and that's it. It's great. It's a good pallet cleanser. Another exception would be Tal Bauer, though his books are often very heavy.

With that being said, why does no one seem to write books with gay male main characters who just... happen to be gay? Like, it has no bearing whatsoever on the plot, but instead of thinking back on all the girls he banged in the past, or his tragically lost wife, why can't we have a male main character that mourns the loss of his husband and spends his travels flirting with the cute guy slinging drinks behind the bar, or the stable boy that is quiet but knows everything there is to know about taking care of the animals? Give me a horror novel where romance is the lowest trope on the list of tropes, but the guy is worried about getting murdered because his boyfriend(s)/husband(s)/polycule will kill him if he gets dead. Give me a hard-boiled murder mystery where the detective/PI is gay, but there's absolutely no romance at all. Publish a sci-fi novel where the guy on the spaceship is constantly being flirted with by male aliens and, while flattered, is constantly going "wtf?"

And it's not just queer stories that do this! Stephen King is notoriously bad at this with straight couples. I loved "The Stand" but omfg the number of times people stop to have sex during the most inopportune times! I'm reading a series by Jim Butcher where the main character clearly has a crush on one of his former coworkers but, thank the heavens above, there's not even a hint of sex - not even a mention of a semi. That is so rare in books; it's like authors think that, in order to make a book aimed at an adult audience, they have to include some kind of smut.

Personally I think that it's the subject matter, and the writing style, more than anything else that makes something adult vs new adult vs young adult. You can still have a book that's absolutely aimed at adults, but it doesn't allude to the bedroom at all. You can have a book aimed at adults that is all fade to black scenes. In fact, I wish more writers would implement this - especially MM writers. (I don't read any straight romance books, but I assume that it's a lot of the same.) Maybe it's just because I read so much that it bothers me as much as it does, or maybe it's because I'm asexual and rarely find myself thinking about sex and don't get dropping everything I'm doing to f*ck, or maybe it's my AuDHD self that has a one track mind and wants to finish a task and nothing can distract me from doing so and people doing it in books literally makes me scratch my head with confusion, or maybe it's because I'm aromantic and just want to read the bits of the story that actually move the plot forward, and maybe it's a combination of all of the above. Who knows?

(Tried posting this on Reddit and got cock blocked because "participation before posting" BS) so it goes here instead.

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