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Misconceptions of how sex works

Sex itself is not magical. It is an activity, a pastime, a way to kill time, etc. Like all activities, from sewing to eating, to bungee jumping, sex can be a wonderful, epiphany, magical experience based on why one does it and who they do it with.

Sex cannot cure psychological problems. Eating can’t cure it. Sewing cant’ cure it. Bungee jumping can’t cure it. Unlike causing psychological problems, curing takes time. Granted all of these can be catalysts and effectively HELP the cure, but they are not the cure themselves.

Power play and relationships

If you disagree about sex being about powerplay, please check out Dan Savage's Savage Garden, but only if you are of age.

Sex is about power and whose in charge. But just because you’re ‘on top’ doesn’t mean you’re on top. Sex is about trust. Either you trust someone to do something to you or they trust you to let them.

Consensual sex is about exploring whatever you’re both comfortable with exploring and not having to worry. Consensual sex is about freedom. Both (or more) people are free to let whatever happens happen and free to ask for it all to stop for whatever reason they want and trust that no harm will come to them if they ask such.

There are six types of power play roles:

Consensual bottom:

A conceptual bottom likes to trust the consensual top to know exactly what they like. They put their happiness in someone else’s hands for two reasons, they like this person enough to see what they can do (or know what they can do) and they trust that person to be responsible enough to hold their happiness in their hands. It’s like being a sexual canvas to sexual paint. You trust them to do the best painting ever to you and you like it.

Consensual top:

Going with the artist/canvas analogy, you have a canvas that goes wild when you use blue. You’re going to give them so much blue they’re brain and/or heart will explode from having so much good blue. You want to give them blue because giving them blue makes you feel great and seeing their reaction to blue makes you feel great about being so good at it. You really live giving this particular canvas blue and you want to feel like the best blue painter ever.

Nonconsensual bottom:

Doing this isn’t a choice. This is weird due to all the forms of rape, but for the most part, it is felt that there is little or no choice in the mater that someone will be having sex with you and has used some sort of cruel means to do it. Having actually been a victim of a very mild form of this, I can vouch for saying you begin not to trust sex, despite still having hormones, you don’t trust those like your attacker (from the single person to similar characteristics to the whole gender, to everyone), and you feel like less of a person. You feel like you’re treated badly because the attacker things you’re not good enough to be human and maybe you aren’t.

Nonconsensual top:

There tend to be two types of this. Type A is one that wants sex and will degrade, punish, and otherwise manipulate their victim if they resist. Type A feels they should get the sexual stimulation they want and either this is how you do it or other methods don’t work enough to bother. Type B tends not to want sex so much as to commit an act of violence that will have the most impact on a victim. Often the rapist wants to get back at someone, and not necessarily the victim. In fact, he may not have a certain person in mind that he feels he wants to get back at, a society in general is enough motivation.

‘Zombie’ bottom:

For some instances of this role (dead, brain-dead, perma-coma) there really isn’t any reaction to this. Heck, in a coma or a heavily drugged state, the reaction to sex would be mild twitches to vaguely trying to bat at the rapist. But this is fiction and I’m not going to handle the non-reactive part of this role. When you wake up and find out that someone had sex with you, your reaction relies on how you were told. However, the general (not universal) reaction for men is often ‘Well, I’m glad I came in handy’ while for women it is feeling violated, possibly more so than outright rape. For women, you have a open/closed sign on you and you’re the one who changes it. Someone violating that, however, is far worse than someone broke into a store.

Zombie Top:

Because someone in a ‘zombie’ state cannot really give consent, this is a kind of nonconsensual top. Like the nonconsensual top, you have two choices, but unlike the nonconsensual top, these can be combined. A) you want rape, but you don’t want a victim that can scream or remember because you’re afraid of getting caught, b) the same thing, but you don’t want a victim that’ll struggle because you don’t want to go to a lot of trouble, c) your really, really like people that are asleep or seem dead; you find their vulnerable state very arousing.

Big Change: Desire, action, and conflict

Sometimes a sex scene is in literature to show a radical change in a character. Do they decide to abandon men and go for women? Do they decide to fight back all their life? Have they matured in some way and officially become an adult? Do they discover some unified field theory?

This can’t happen automatically if this is what the scene is for. Your characters start the sex scene with certain desires. Something happens. Change or no change, depending.

What happens when one character goes in expecting love and another expects just sex? Now. What happens when the sex is good? What happens when sex is bad or lame? Completely different outcomes. What if someone falls over, looks ridiculous, or says the wrong name? What if one person mistakes a gesture or the whole act, laughs, or the protection breaks?

Not all sex comes out perfect, and sex can be very different from what you wanted to experience. This can change a person, and because its often behind closed doors and lasts a short time compared to the rest of the character’s life, the change can be sudden and dramatic.

One final note: How do you choose whether or not to write a sex scene? By thinking about the story and deciding for yourself. Others can give hints, but the story is yours alone, as are all scene within.

Edit:

Nice.

But... but... you mean to tell me that bunjee jumping CAN'T cure psychological problems?!

...I've been going about self-help exactly the wrong way, then.

Okay, then, thanks. I was wondering if I had just wasted my money on all this equipment... >_>

There's one thing I'd like to add:

If you want to write a sex scene but are uncomfortable with typing out certain words, don't try. Fade to black. There's nothing worse than bad euphemisms for genitalia.