I really love Scifi fiction, especially when it’s paired with the popular ‘must breed!’ trope.
I think it ties in with my desire to see this hang-up about sex and sexuality get abolished. I’m tired of monogamy being touted as the only way, despite being in a monogamous relationship. I love the prospect of people just needing to ravage one another without all these precautions and frights, despite my own child free lifestyle.
It’s just that it seems so much simpler. So much more base and human, on some level. I think it allows authors to really explore things in a different way.
Scifi and fantasy has always been this safe space to try on a myriad of kinks. The Gorean lifestyle, for instance, is based on a scifi novel. Where women had to turn to romance as a way to explore their innermost lust, men instead turned to fantasies where they were free to act on their desires. Where they were free to explore various kinks and fetishes in a less judgmental arena.
Romance novels have been filled with dark secrets and soap opera style plotting for decades now, and it’s given women a safe and secluded area to discover things about themselves.
Forced Seduction, Incest, Sex Slaves, Rape, Bodice Rippers, Taboo Relationships, Human Slavery, Breeding, Power Differentials, BDSM… it’s all there in these books that have been mass published since the 70s.
For women, it has been hidden in Romance.
For men, it has been hidden in scifi and fantasy, mystery and horror, adventure and pulp magazines.
I have to wonder, then, if the toning down of sexuality in scifi and fantasy has been because more women have been reading and writing in these genre fictions. It’s interesting to think on, to wonder if men are perhaps shier, in certain manners, about their kinks and fetishes. Maybe they don’t want women to think they’re odd, but truthfully, I’d love more sensuality in all genres.
I think, if more men and women read in a broader spectrum of stories, we’d start to realize just how little difference there is between us.
Finally, someone said it! Why has sexuality been almost entirely scrubbed from sci-fi, and especially, fantasy? I understand why sci-fi/fantasy readers might be squicked by hard-core, graphic sex, but I think there is an audience for sci-fi/fantasy with a lot more explicit sexuality.
Perhaps that’s only wishful thinking on my part though:)
Sometimes I have to wonder if they seemed dirtier only because I was younger and less experience, but I still feel like a lot of books that aren’t specifically marketed as romance have just been removed of all traces of sex and sexuality, as you said.
There unfortunately seems to be this increasingly strict delineation between content with sex and without. Where there’s no more grey area between. It’s something that’s been becoming more predominant on the internet especially as it ceases being a wild west frontier of lawlessness.