From: "Alice K. Turner" 
Subject: (urth) Re: RAH sex
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2003 22:50:51 -0400


From: "Jeff Wilson" 
quoting me:

> > Wrong. No one ever, ever, including hack porn writers, EVER, EVER wrote
> > worse sex than Heinlein. With possibly the momentary exception of a
> > long-forgotten 9-day wonder of the 60s or 70s called -The Harrad
> > Experiment-. And I am something of an expert here. I should probably
say,
> > for members of this group, that IMO Sturgeon wrote bad sex too, though
not,
> > by leagues, in the same abysmal class.
>
> I don't find sprunging nipples to be an inappropriate idiom, and neither
> did my ex-wife. The spiggots remark I will give you, but I find Clarke's
> depiction of sex to be poorer storytelling than Heinlein's overall.

Have you considered why she's your ex-wife, hmmm?  No, seriously, none of
the Golden Agers could address sex; you could say that they were trained out
of it by convention, and by the time things loosened up it was too late for
them. Clarke had the further problem of the het stuff being a bit alien,
hence indeed "poor storytelling." But only RAH was actively offensive in a
horrible lame, leering, really repulsive sort of way--for me it's that chalk
screaming across a blackboard syndrome to a degree I've never felt with
another writer in any  genre. Ask your ex if she likes any of RAH's later
books (anything after -Stranger-) and if so why.

Perhaps I should add, being rather outnumbered by gender here, that I do not
find Wolfe viscerally offensive sexually. There are rape scenes, yes, but
they are not gloated over and they seem to me in context. The worst rape is
that of Seawrack, and that is certainly agonized over, and also has a
certain supernatural aspect.

-alga



--