Sax and violins
A long time back, a friend of mine (tongue firmly in cheek) told me that when it came to fiction, all the trashy stuff was full of sex and violence, while all the great literature was about love and death.
The truth underneath that bit of word play is that which you have - sex and violence, or love and death - depends a lot on both the way the writer handles them and on the eye of the beholder. There's not much the writer can do about the eye of the beholder, unfortunately, but the content and tone are all ours. And the first and most important choice in both cases is whether a particular scene is going to be merely explicit, or whether it's going all the way to graphic.
Explicit covers a lot more ground and is a lot more flexible than graphic, because explicit just means that it's clear that it happened. You can be very explicit without being at all graphic, but I don't think it's possible to be graphic without being explicit. "The battle lasted three days in the rain" is explicit without getting into the details of mud and sweat and blood and who wounded whom how badly. It's explicit without being graphic. "The knife cut through the muscles of his back and into his kidney" is both graphic and explicit, and it's hard to see how it could be the one without also being the other.
The real problem is that American society is an awkward combination of prudish and obsessed when it comes to sex, while when it comes to violence, it's pretty much just obsessed. What this means is that there is a bias in most published fiction toward explicit-but-not-graphic sex on the one hand, and graphic violence on the other. It also means that most readers are sensitized enough to sex that the traditional "stopping at the bedroom door" is considered explicit - think of the old movies where the couple kiss, fade to black, and then there's a picture of two pairs of shoes next to a bed, and that was plenty enough to let the viewers know what happened. Using a similar technique to avoid a fight scene is problematic, unsatisfying, and rarely done.
The interesting thing is that an awful lot of the time, the writer has no real story-related need to be graphic. All the reader needs to know is that the sex or violence happened, not every tingly or gory detail. And a lot of time, the writer doesn't get graphic…but the techniques are different. It's far more common to imply that sex happened and entirely skip any description that goes past a kiss, going straight to both parties looking/feeling happy and smug next morning, than it is to imply a fight scene and make do with a description of the loser's bruises later on.
"Graphic" for sex scenes starts fairly early in the process of simply describing the actions the characters are taking. When writers go for explicit-not-graphic, they often do so by describing the emotional impact of the characters' actions, rather than the actions themselves.
On the other hand, fight scenes don't start being considered "graphic" in most cases until the writer gets into painful or bloody description of the effects of the violence. The actions themselves are fair game. Shooting, stabbing, or punching someone isn't considered graphic until the writer starts talking about blood spatters, torn flesh, and broken teeth.
There isn't an exact line between explicit and graphic, of course, but it helps to be aware of the difference…and of the difference between where explicit sex starts and where explicit violence starts. You'll notice that all the graphic details in this post are from the "violence" side of things. It is supposed to be a family-friendly blog, after all.
