You know there’s a difference between pornography and erotica, right? Think about it. We’ll get to that later.

Before I get to the purpose of sex scene fiction, I’ll start with the purpose of fiction. You read Adult Magazine, because you like it. When you read a really good book, you enter another world. the intimate world.

Fiction offers an intimacy rarely found in real life. Where else can you read another person’s mind, revealing their conscious and unconscious impulses?
People are storytellers. Everyone has a story to tell because everyone uses language to share visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile and kinesthetic memories.
Everyone listens to or reads a well-told story.

Suspense makes a good story.

Now here’s the bottom line: believable tension between recognizable characters in authentic situations, however fictional, makes for memorable stories.
Think of a favorite novel you read as a child, a novel that inspired you and taught you new things about human nature. Mine was “The Tree That Grows in Brooklyn.” I was ten or eleven years old. Mom saw me reading it and said, “Oh, you don’t want to read it!” I’m almost done reading this so stay tuned. This book taught me about sex. No one did. It was a good education.

Maybe that’s why I agree with sex scenes in fiction and why I write them.

Everyone has sexual feelings. How each person lives with their sexual feelings is a personal matter. No two people have the same attitude towards sex, and the myths of men contradict this.

Sex scenes in a novel can be very effective in characterization and subject matter. Prominent figures in literature and life often confuse love with lust. He thinks he’s in love with someone who is ultimately wrong for him – or her.
This ambiguity creates the main tension that drives the plot.

Recognizable characters are created with enough specific details like inflection, body language, and dialogue that you’ll say you’re reading, “I knew a guy like that. His dad was a bear.”
Or, “She shouldn’t be so nervous around boys. But I would be if I grew up with that grandma.”

Put these recognizable characters in an authentic, if fictional, situation and you have an unforgettable story.
We get to know ourselves in the privacy of our living rooms as readers see detailed personal thoughts and feelings. We empathize with the main characters and say, “Oh, yeah.”
Shakespeare’s characters survive because he contradicts them. To this day we can watch Mercutio explode and think,

I just felt that way

Or Hamlet is tormented by his conscience because he does not know what to believe. Shakespeare created sexuality as well as delusion in his characters. The sex scenes they created on stage were, of course, not as explicit as they would be in novels read in private.
The characters make the story for me. I love creating my own characters and I’m very interested in it.

What is the difference between porn and erotica in fantasy? Regarding pornography, I quote Lee Siegel’s excellent article in the New York Times Book Magazine, January 21, 2007, on Norman Mailer: Connections and Technological Societies Are Built by Expanding Connectivity in the Way Capitalism Builds on Precious Characters from Capital and Money , and the outlook is more mixed. If you’re looking for an explanation of why pornography dominates the internet, this is it.

Pornography has a happy ending, like lots of money every Friday, even if it’s always the same, but erotica has a sad, long ending. Both characters are indistinguishable.

Which reminds me of a friend who wrote and published several historical Erotica stories. She didn’t like to write stunts, but the genre needed one novel. So he cut and pasted the only scene he had written and changed the titles of all subsequent novels. It doesn’t matter the genre, the characters can’t be distinguished as long as you get nostalgic.

Immersing yourself in that pain is so scary it’s… well, scary! It’s awful to be in bed with a woman (or man) without being able to get or keep an erection. The anxiety seems unbearable and men will do almost anything to avoid it. It takes a lot of courage to start seeing that pain because we believe that because it looks so bad, there must be something so bad underneath. Interestingly, this is not the case at all. I will admit that some men experience serious sexual trauma that should not be taken lightly, but for most men it is a different kind of problem.