Ask ten aroace folks what they think about sex scenes in stories and you’ll probably get seventeen different answers. So consider this more a meditation than an assay at representation.
Writing always starts with reading. In the olden fandom days I used to complain a great deal about how ship fics crowded out nearly everything else in the pipeline. It’s vastly irritating to work hard on a piece that isn’t terribly explicit or shippy (or God forbid, gen) and see it drop in the pond without a ripple, while the one-off explicit story one writes for a challenge gets an avalanche of recs. There are still a few embers of annoyance there, when I care to stir them. Why the hell does a story have to have a sexually-driven throughline to compel widespread interest?
Yet I don’t hate to read it myself. I quite like a good romance from time to time, particularly if it’s got mystery or mayhem to go with the sex. True, I’ll often skip, skim, or gloss the sex scenes, not because I am disgusted by them, but mostly out of a reflex I used to call “smut sunblindness” — one doesn’t want there to not be a sun, but staring at it is A Bit Much.
I’m leaning toward a food metaphor for it these days, though. If I order a hamburger or somesuch, I rarely ask to omit the tomato and onion, even though I inevitably end up fishing them out and leaving them in the wrapper. Why? Because I like the flavor those things bring to the party, to paraphrase Alton Brown. I just don’t necessarily want to eat more than a bite or two of them.
“A sex scene should be about sex and something else,” counseled a writing-advice book I once read; I can’t remember if he was quoting Vonnegut or merely used Vonnegut as an example. (He took care also to excerpt some bad and overwritten sex scenes to ahem, nail down the point.) I think this is quite right; the more a sexual interlude drives character development or plot arcs, the more likely it is I’ll want to read it, and the more likely it is to be erotically interesting, too.
This principle informs my writing, too, naturally. If you’re not going to tastefully fade to black, there ought to be a reason for staying in the room where it happens, so to speak. Say perhaps that the encounter is the locus of a turning point between the characters, or a catalyst for the motives of one or both; say that it’s an occasion for release, or recognition, or ruin. That much should be clear whether or not one chooses to use unequivocal language.
I don’t, for the most part; my goal in writing scenes like that is to evoke emotion and sensation by an indirect approach, which is, as I said above, more erotically interesting to me. Once the scene is written, though, I tend to treat it just like sex scenes I didn’t write; I gloss them on reread and sift for the emotional throughline on the other side.
This is another instance of how hobblingly inadequate writing advice like “Write what you know” can be. It so easily becomes “Write only what you know,” and that is manifest bullshit. If we wrote nothing but what we know, we would write nothing but memoirs. Often I turn that around and say, “Know what you write,” but in this case, I could also say “Use what you know.” As an aroace person I know for a fact that that “something else” turns a piquant sexual interlude to a compelling one; that access to emotion and sensation is the goal of good prose; and that, as Lord Peter Wimsey observed, sex isn’t some separate thing “functioning away all by itself; it’s usually attached to a person of some sort.”
So as a person of this sort, I happily invite all and sundry to make use of my expertise. Happy belated Pride.