Exploring Sex and Challenging Taboos in Literature

SEX!!!

Everyone loves to think about it, and everyone is afraid to talk about it. So, as Salt-N-Pepa famously put it, “let’s talk about sex babeee, let’s talk about you and me, let’s talk about sex.”

Sex has been a part of literature since the first cuneiform tablets were baked by the Sumerians, and yet the tug-of-war battle to define proper sexual mores continues to play out across the literary landscape. As an author who dabbles in matters of morality, philosophy, and culture, I often struggle with the question of sex, not as in (you know) the basic plumbing aspects, but regarding the values I and my characters hold dear.

While Jeff Bezos and his cronies insist on lumping my fantasy adventure series in with erotica, I am quite the prude when it comes to eroticism. Honestly, you’ll find more action in Fourth Wing than in Aenya, which may be why my books don’t attract horny young readers as much as I’d like. Much of this has to do, I think, with my conservative Christian upbringing. For eight straight years, during the most impressionable years of my childhood, my brain was hammered with the unerring word of the Bible and the tenets of the Southern Baptist Church. While I eventually escaped my religious indoctrination to embrace science, reason, and a more open worldview, my repression lingers. To this day, I have not sipped an ounce of beer or any other form of alcohol beyond the occasional Nyquil, because we were warned against it in class, and I admired the commitment of my teacher. Admittedly, abstaining from drugs and alcohol is a wise course, given the number of auto fatalities attributed to drinking, and alcohol’s tendency to turn you into a blathering idiot. But the “sin of lust” has always plagued me and affects my characters’ behaviors.

Thelana runs around naked and shameless throughout the lands of Aenya, yet her sex life is largely nonexistent. Aside from a few brief moments of passion in the desert and later in Emma’s home with her lover, Xandr, she’s as innocent as a Disney princess. And yet, over the years, I couldn’t help asking myself the uncomfortable questions. Is every Ilmarin woman such a prude? And in a shameless utopian society known for its free-spiritedness and nature-worship, why should they hold to the same stringent concerns as the Puritans?

The underage heroine in Stephen King’s IT, Beverly, was gangbanged by her childhood friends in a scene that was, for lack of a better word, far less shocking than it should have been. My biggest issue with this scene, aside from the age issue (they were children at the time), is that it contributed nothing to the story. You also have to wonder about King’s motivation for writing this, given that it seems, at best, gratuitous. Yet the question remains: do Beverly’s actions make her a slut and therefore a bad person? Should we judge her harshly for not pushing back against what the boys did to her? What if Thelana had done the same thing? Would it ruin her character? Or can we afford female heroines the same freedom as James Bond and Conan?

I based the Ilmar on Amazon tribes like the Zöe, who don’t wear clothes, and do not hold to the same cultural values when it comes to sex. For the Zöe to behave like Puritans, to adhere to the same repressive outlook as the Amish, never made sense to me. It also never made sense that in a matriarchal society based on Goddess worship, the Ilmar should maintain the same misogynistic views as the West, because when you really look closely, our taboos and traditions, including the taboo against public nakedness, are rooted in the Bible and the Quran, which have long treated women like property. That being said, I am not advocating for a free-love society — I do not wish to live in A Brave New World, where intercourse carries no more weight than a game of tag — but I recognize that there is no inherent, biological meaning in sex, and that much of our behavior, and what we deem moral, is based on social constructs, one that is fluid and open to reinvention.

In the podcast below, I rethink the Ilmar in terms of sex, morality, and religion. I also get into Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, and the infamous Marquis de Sade, the 18th-century French author whom I in no way condone but who is critical in this discussion.

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