Condom Usage In Erotic Fiction, My Opinion
So, earlier this week, there were a couple discussions on condom usage in fiction. I, of course, need to add my two cents, that way my readers can decide for themselves if I’m an author they’ll want to continue buying from.
Safe sex in fiction, for me, is only as important as the story makes it. I don’t care if it’s a contemporary, PNR, or historical. If the characters and story itself wouldn’t call for safe sex, then I’m fine not seeing it among the printed words. Let’s be honest, anything pre-1985 isn’t going to offer much in the way of safe sex. Most of us didn’t worry about safe sex until STDs became prevalent. In fact, my mother has often told me that in her life prior to marriage (1960s-1980s), the only STD they worried about was pregnancy, and many girls still risked that. Hell, even post-1985, it took a while before safe sex was really preached.
Depending on the characters, the setting, their background, safe sex might not realistically enter their minds. It doesn’t make them less, it makes them products of their time. My generation (in their late 20s-early 30s), I think, would have more of a focus on safe sex because that was drilled into me in middle and high school. It wouldn’t occur to me to have a sex partner and not use a condom.
However, the newer generations? The generations where religion and abstinence only reign? You bet your ass I wouldn’t think a 20-year-old who had been taught everyone else was a virgin wouldn’t think of using a condom. Not everyone has progressive parents who feel comfortable saying, ‘The government is full of morons, and not everyone saves themselves, so use a condom, Junior.’
The misconception here is that authors have responsibility beyond entertainment. Now, we can argue author responsibility until we’re blue in the face, but I have the opinion that authors have no more social responsibility than they care to have, and that whatever responsibility they do have fluctuates. It is not my job to teach through my books. It’s just not. I don’t have to show condom usage in case an eighteen-year-old decides to pick up my fictional book and use it as a sex manual. The responsibility for teaching that person about reality, safe sex, unplanned pregnancy, and STDs is with that person’s parents, not a faceless stranger who wrote a fictional book.
Do I take some responsibility onto my shoulders? Yes, when I choose to. When I wrote Catalyst, I accepted the responsibility to show the degeneration of an addict and how hard it was for him to climb back out of the hole he’d dug. When I wrote Mae, I took on the responsibility to show what unprotected sex could lead to, the hard life of a single, poverty-stricken teen father, and how there were no easy fixes in life.
But every book I write should not necessarily come with a moral checklist. In our upcoming 52 Weeks, we are exploring issues of non-consent, TPE, and cross-dressing, and not always in the most positive or healthy light. That’s our choice, because it serves the framework of the story we want to tell. The idea that a budding, young cross-dresser might look to our story for guidance is ludicrous. We don’t write self-help books. We write fiction, and fiction thrives on conflict and disaster. It’s not some boring utopia where everything is happy and light and nothing ever goes wrong.
As authors, we have to decide what parts of our characters’ lives to show: the parts that readers want to see and that serve to advance the story that we want to tell. We don’t often see characters in romances going to the bathroom, or tossing and turning in their bed, or standing in the grocery store debating whether or not it’s worth paying an additional 30 cents to get 6 more ounces of laundry detergent. And the reason we don’t see it is because, in most cases, it doesn’t advance the story. You can bet that if you do see a scene like one of those in a story, you’re seeing it for a reason. And it’s the same with showing (or not showing) condom usage. If it’s not shown either way, then you as the reader are free to make whatever assumption you like because it doesn’t affect the story any more than what color underwear the character is wearing or what the thread count of his sheets are. Just because attention is not gratuitously called to something doesn’t mean it isn’t there — it simply means that it doesn’t matter in the context of the story.
I will not apologize for not having my characters explicitly use condoms when the story doesn’t call for it simply because some readers feel condoms should ALWAYS be included in romance and erotica. Sometimes, fiction is just fiction. Entertainment. A means to get away from real life and immerse ourselves in the romance and fantasy of characters not us. Sometimes, those characters use condoms, sometimes they don’t, and it shouldn’t make them unlikeable characters when they don’t.
