sex between the covers

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Sex Between the Covers: How Much and How Often?

Didn’t finish writing a book I set in a library once that only stays in my mind for one scene. The older, male head librarian catches a kid viewing porn on the Internet on a library computer terminal and balls him out for it. Finishes the lecture with “For God’s sake, go check out a book and read about it like we always had to!”

A question I’ve been facing since I took up writing full time is how much sex to put in a book anyway? I decided to do some research, to measure how frequently the subject should come up. How much time do people really spend addressing the subject any given day? How often do people have sex anyway?

Typing in “average number of times Canadians have sex per week”, I found a forum that provided answers that were, well … conflicting:

     I'm not sure what average is but me and my husband do it twice a day...usually. We 

     have the same schedule and no kids so lunch time is awesome.

     Per week? How about per month????

     twice a week with my husband and 4 a week with my boy friend.

I dug deeper, deciding not to limit my research to Canadians. Again, I found conflicting results.

One site says the global average is 109 times per year.

Which works out to 2.1 times per week (the 2 I get, but how do you have sex 0.1 times a week?) Or once every 3.3 days. (Set up your day planners now!)

Another site said 1 in 5 couples live in sexless marriages. That’s gotta skew the average …

Another one said 16% of couples do it 2-3 times per week, while another said 34% of couples do it in the same range, 2-3 times per week. More than twice as many. Maybe the second source includes the extra 0.1 in the 2.1 global weekly average, while the first doesn’t? You have to think it would be difficult to measure accurately.

The greater consensus of sites I checked settled on 1 or 2 times per week on average.

But they only looked at married couples. Which seems to be rather an oversight, to my mind.

Then ultimately I realized that to truly determine the weight I should allow the subject in my writing, maybe I should be asking how much time do people spend thinking about sex as well as actually doing it? Trying to extrapolate on a metareasonal basis from my research, it seems to me certain people obviously think and act upon the subject a lot, while others, enh … not so much. Defined by natural biology, or relational circumstances? Obviously a situational conclusion. Determined mostly no doubt by who you’re with in any given situation.

So what did I decide?

I better not leave it out.

The best question obviously should be “How much do people want to read about sex?” A quick look at any bestseller list containing the words “Fifty Shades” clearly answers that. I’ve never thought it was accidental that the one fiction book I managed to sell to a publisher I hooked with a query segment that had the most sex in the entire book.

So there are obviously good reasons to include sex in any given novel in some capacity. Either people looking for it, responding to stimuli in that direction regardless of whatever other crises they have going on in their lives right then, talking about it, making contact, and occasionally, by gosh even having it.

In relation to this issue, I have to say that The Twitchy Gal, which I am posting as we speak on the http://realficone.blogspot.ca/ site has got more sex in it than any other book I’ve ever written and how many people reading this didn’t bother to finish this sentence before they went to check that claim out?

Sexual possession is one of the main themes of the book, and to illustrate it properly I had to contrast it with normal sexual behaviour, the 2.1 times a week kind. Which meant I had to figure out a way to write those 2 encounters a week, plus define that 0.1 adequately somehow, in a manner that quite frankly I was comfortable being quite frank about.

The most important thing I decided was never losing the emotional connection between the participants as well as the physical. You need both — the emotional and the physical. And depending on the circumstances, intimacy, doubt, uncertainty, passion, anger, fear, excitement, reticence, a complete lack of inhibition, humour, sentiment, objectivity, delight, satisfaction, conflict, resolution, tragedy, drama, sweetness, experimentation, content, innocence, raging hormones, licentiousness, interruption, abandon, resolution, focus, forgetfulness, apprehension … and I could go on.

Ah. Maybe that’s why you need to have sex in novels.

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Chapter Seven of The Twitchy Gal posted on Tuesday, with Chapter Eight coming on Friday, August 29th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

In which Mr. Snuff wanders off naked into the woods, and we meet Clare. An even twitchier gal …