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I recently finished reading Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros, and this post will likely contain spoilers for both it and its predecessor, Fourth Wing.

After reading Iron Flame, I’m more curious than ever about where the line is between erotica and sex scenes in fantasy. Is it the overuse of the word “core” to refer to female sexual organs? Is it using euphemisms for the word “penis” (like “tip” and “length”)? It’s clearly not when penetration occurs — I’ve read that in lots of fantasy novels.

No. I think the difference is when sex is a part of the book, as opposed to when sex is the point of the book. Which is why my novel Dreaming of How it Was Going to Be qualifies more as fantasy than erotica, in my opinion. Sure, there are sex scenes, and yes, to be fair, spanking is a big part of them, but it’s more about the magic than it is the sex. Compare that to Iron Flame, where Violet and Xaden have “regular” sex — both giving and receiving oral, and PIV sex in various positions. I will say that Iron Flame is the most graphic in its descriptions of sex when compared to other fantasy novels I’ve read.

Don’t get me wrong — I enjoyed the book, and even if I do think it should’ve been two separate novels I didn’t begrudge the author any part of it (except the rather silly dick joke she included about 2/3 of the way through). But I’m also thinking about the normalization of sex in fantasy (and sci-fi), and where and when it is appropriate. I’m reminded of a sci-fi story I wrote under a different name that was published by a major sci-fi magazine; it contained an oral sex scene in its first incarnation, and the editor, when accepting the story, told me I needed to remove that scene because her readers would be offended. Fine by me; I made it a PIV sex scene instead (it wasn’t graphic at all, either way) and she published it. That story was published in 2010… but back in 2003, I had read a sci-fi novel where there was a pretty non-explicit oral sex scene. I certainly wasn’t offended, and I don’t remember reading anything about other readers being offended either.

I wonder if Rebecca Yarros has ever read this quote from George RR Martin:

I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness.

Now, Yarros’s scenes of violence are just as graphic as her scenes of sex — there’s some pretty brutal torture that occurs in Iron Flame — so clearly things have at least changed a little since Martin said what he said. But he has an excellent point — one that I’ve expounded upon in the past. Hell, it was even lampooned to an extent in the South Park movie:

Remember what the MPAA says: horrific, deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don’t say any naughty words!

Seriously! PG-13 movies can have hundreds of people dying, but if you use the word “fuck” more than once, it’s an instant R rating.

To get back to my original point: I don’t think Iron Flame qualifies as erotica, even though the sex scenes are fairly explicit. There seems to be a list of “approved” euphemisms writers can use when writing sex in fantasy and sci-fi to get around the “erotica” label — core, tip, length, etc. But woe betide the author who uses the word “pussy” (except as an insult) — or even “vagina” or “labia” or “penis”. I’ve seen a lot of sex scenes in genre fiction, but certain words just aren’t used. Why is this the case? Is it because certain audiences (mostly American ones) are still so fucking puritanical that they can’t bear to see people enjoying explicit sex in their fiction? Even people who are in love and are sexually monogamous with each other? Even people who don’t do anything kinky?

I haven’t read a lot of romantasy. Maybe Yarros’s book is the norm for sex scenes in that subgenre. But in the fiction I read, sex is still treated with a light touch most of the time, even when it makes perfect sense for the plot and story to show a sex scene. Hell, when I write genre fiction, I’m very careful about it, not because I’m embarrassed, but because I know editors won’t want to see it, or if they do see it they’ll ask for it to be removed (in most cases). If I write anything too sexually-explicit, I’ll probably still publish it as erotica, because that’s what I focus on these days, even though you probably could take some of the storylines from the SCU and turn them into straight-up romance novels. I mean, you’d have to get rid of the spanking, because heaven forbid people in non-erotic fiction are shown enjoying kinky sex — which plenty of “normal” people do — but if I got rid of that, and probably the squirting too, I could write Charlie and Jeannette or even Tom and Charlotte as straight-up romance novels. Or I could throw them in space, or in medieval-like worlds, and get away with sci-fi and fantasy with semi-explicit sex.

But I can guarantee you that, if I submitted Dreaming of How it Was Going to Be to a traditional publisher, it would be laughed out of the room before the slush reader even got past the prologue because I use spanking as a form of magic. That, I fear, would be a bridge too far.

Oh, one more thing — I accidentally published this post a little early and then unpublished it, so if you got this in your email last week… my bad.