Authenticity and the Wank Break

I spend a certain amount of my time pointing out to people that sex is just another recreational activity, and that it's stupid to insist that everything to do with sex has to remain in the ghetto called SEX and be treated as  different, special, dangerous, etc. While it's not at all unreasonable for people to get outraged about the exploitation and shitty working conditions some sex workers experience, it's stupid to insist that the sex industry should be totally banned on the grounds that people within it are mistreated while ignoring the abuse and suffering that goes on in the catering and clothing industries. And no, I'm not whining about being forced to work late and poop-scoop for the creative director's chihuahua if you're a junior fashion PR, I do mean the child labourers locked in their factories sewing pictures of cartoon characters onto jackets for pennies a day, and the cockle pickers who drowned at Morecambe. We should all try to make sure that our pleasures come from a reasonably ethical source, at least as much as we can afford.

When it comes to fiction-writing, though, there's one bit of received wisdom that does seem to make sex a bit of a special category, and that's the wank break. I doubt I invented the concept, but I have certainly peddled it a fair bit over the years. It's this: if you are writing erotic fiction, and you finish a piece of erotic fiction without having stopped for a wank or at least really, really wanted to do so, then what you have written probably isn't very good.

(pic nicked at random off the interweb)

I still think it's true, of course: if you've written an entire erotic story and not had the faintest urge to put your hand in your pants or go and grab a nearby playmate then your story is not likely to be all that erotic. Erotic fiction is still the baby of fiction genres, which means that every unpublishable cash-hungry buckethead thinks that/s/he could 'churn some out' to make some money, and they are all completely wrong. Writing good erotic fiction is like writing good fiction of any kind: you have to care about it and enjoy it or it's going to be unreadable crap. It might, of course, be unreadable crap even if you care a lot, but it won't be as unpleasantly unreadable as the stuff produced by people who really don't care about a word they have written.

Fiction should engage you, make you think, make you care, make you want to do... something. And it's only right that good erotic fiction should make you want an orgasm - but it probably isn't the case that good crime fiction should make you want to go and kill somebody. I used to make faces at the people who asked me if I'd personally done all the sex acts I wrote about, and ask them how many people they thought Agatha Christie or Ruth Rendell or Sara Paretsky had killed while they were writing their (good, honest, satisfying) books. That's probably the only argument in favour of treating erotic entertainment as a special category that I haven't yet found a counter to.