At 1:11 AM -0400 6/28/03, Madora Bianco wrote:
I also wasn't gonna post to this thread but liked your post so what the hell.But...is there a bias against male writers in this genre? Should the author not admit to being male or female?There is a bias in this genre both online and in print. Its silly really because I find there is a realism in the sex that is written by some men that many women don't write. This is not to say that there aren't male writers out there who have obviously gotten there ideas of lesbian sex from watching a few to many bad pornos. Just as there are female writers (some who are entirely to prolific) who seem to have no idea what to do with there characters beyond have them kiss each other and say I love you a few million times.
LOL. I was going to say, bad writers exist across gender. Just as much as I hate it when I come across a lesbian sex scene that seems like something from a bad porno movie; I hate it just as frequently the number of authors having their characters say "I love you" within in minutes of their meeting, or "no man had ever made her feel like this", and a slew of other pandering comments.
Love/Sex scenes are hard to write. I've read stories where I've had to skip over the sex scene, because despite how well the author had wrote the rest of the story, the scene was just too distracting (and not in a good way). When you think about, what turns people on is so particular. Bad porno has it easy, even as your criticizing it, you get to see and hear, and pretty much that takes you somewhere. But reading sex, requires the words to become visual and one misstep can totally ruin it for some readers, while making it super hot for others.
I was reading a Scully/Reyes fiction story online, and I swear the first sex scene was so hot, I thought my eyes would melt my LCD screen. But low and behold, about three lines before the scene was to be over, the author used some phrase, that just dropped me out of the scene. I was just me, back in front of my computer, with my rapidly cooled arousal. That's not to say that the author did something wrong, just to prove how tenuous it is to hold someone completely during a written sex scene.
I've read poorly written scenes that still managed to engage me, because of the authors style, as well as badly written scenes that have caused me to skip all future sex scenes in the story. Of course then there are the truly great scenes, that have your lover wanting to write a thank you letter to the author after the fact. But let's not go there :))