Sex is Part of the Story 1
I'm ace. I'm not moderately ace; I'm very ace. Sex, to me, is boring. I'm not squicked by it—I can read stories with sex—but in real life? Boring. My sweet spouse knows this, and chuckles when I explain to confused people, "If I could choose between a stale burrito and sex, I'd choose the burrito." (SO is a gem.)
And yet, occasionally, sex shows up in my writing. Even kinky sex.
Does this make me a fetishist? What do I gain from this? Nothing sexual, so how can that count as a fetish?
Writing sex is writing character development. There's a very good place for emotional and mental vulnerability when it's tucked into physical and hormonal vulnerability. It's a time to introduce self-realisation. Mental grounding. Emotional turns. This is even easier in fan fic, where characters are already set up. That's why you can find PWP with vast emotional range, even though it's supposed to be without a plot.
Also, I'm often baffled by how much other people enjoy sex so sometimes writing it gives me insight into that mindset. Same thing with reading sex scenes. They don't turn me on, but they give me an insight into the headspace. I can get the shivers from emotional shifts: from respectful interaction and characterisation showing that these characters feel a deep connection. I don't think that can be called a fetish, unless "emotional connection" counts as a fetish. In which case, I'll claim it proudly. I don't think it's just sex that draws us into these scenes. If that were the case words like "penis" and "schlong" and "cooch" and "vagina" would all be well-used because who cares about the mood of the scene, it's just about sex.
But we don't usually use those—they don't draw you in. You're not able to keep a mental fugue over some of the physical, wet, unglamorous realities of sex with those words. When reading sex, having that distance allows us to fill in the gaps. To connect with the experience, and connect with the characters. It's about being someone else for a little while and, sometimes, living their most private moments allows us to process our own. I believe this is why some people who can't stand any sort of visual porn can read fic. It allows us the distance to process.
Finally, there's a portion of me that wonders why fetish is a bad word. There's a huge difference between fetish and objectification. A fetish makes your body perk up and wonder what's next, but there's no need for a fetish to be objectification. Plenty of healthy people find each other attractive in weird, strange, new ways that might make them blush to write down, but that doesn't mean they've objectified their partners.
And you can't objectify something that's already an object. A fictional character doesn't exist. It's not real. There's a vast difference between objectifying a person and objectifying a character. It's sometimes easy to rationalise objectifying people if you've practised on enough characters, but even then, you are the one crossing that boundary. Fic has nothing to do with it.
So write your story. Explore your characters. Explore yourself. Allow room for your words to grow. And respect real people with kindness and carefulness. That's what matters.
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This essay was originally published in Spark! newsletter, Volume 35, on 2018-07-19.