I, as you all know by now, read a variety of romance and non-romance. Accordingly, the level of sex in each book swings wildly from G/PG to XXX (I would put more X's in, but I find that redundant). But what about the average reader? What do they want? What are they willing to tolerate? I was talking out this idea with my roommate and we decided that it was GREAT. Who has a Sex-O-Meter?!?! No one I know of!
But what also came about during this conversation was the question of how I was going to decide on my two endpoints. The whole point of a scale is to have the two extremities at either end. Originally I thought maybe I'd put a young adult or juvenile novel at the 'sex-less' end of the scale but I think that's going to be TOO FAR on the
innocent end. Instead, I think one of those Harlequin Inspirational Romances is going to be over there on that end. Mostly because this is going to be a Sex-O-Meter, not an Adult Content-O-Meter. I will not be judging books on their language or violence - I'll leave that up to someone else. Primarily, 80-85% of the time, I'm reading some sort of romance novel (or a paranormal with lots of sex added in), thus a Sex-O-Meter would be the most useful. Inspiration Romances are defined by their religious/spiritual aspects, with no sex and little kissing happening in the books. With that in mind, I think they're more than acceptable for any person in the general population so they're going to be 1's.Well ok then. We've got one end of the spectrum defined. But what about the other side? It's a lot harder to say whatever I've got in my other hand, that 'THIS' is hardcore. Porn is in and of itself something generally considered to be defined by the individual. Thus, I have to create my own definition of porn- at the very least using 'porn' in such a way that it implies that the sex content is far higher than what would normally be found in most books. Finally, after much discussion, I decided to make the far end of my Sex-O-Meter spectrum this one particular E-book I reviewed in an earlier post, Stalked by Jaid Black. As an Ellora's Cave 'Exotika' title it's pretty much guaranteed to contain a lot of raunch, but I feel this title really exemplifies porn - but not in a derogatory way. 'But how can you call something porn and not be derogatory?' you might ask, but I think it's very possible. Porn doesn't always have to be of the type that pedophiles and perverts use to jack off to in the middle of the night. Porn can be used by many people in a completely healthy, consensually satisfying, way. I'm using the word 'porn' to signify a high sex to plot ratio, because it's a word that's easily associated with sex- graphic sex at that.
And yet, still in this discussion with my roommate, the conversation changes - 'What about the books with those guys who change shape and have sex? I definitely think that's porn'. My reply is that those particular books are a type of KINK, not something that is automatically classified as porn. What a huge 'ah-hah!' moment - I do consider things like that a kink and not porn. Because I've found that what kind of sex and how often that sex happens in a novel has very little to do with what type of creatures the main characters are. The question that comes out of that though, is how far does that extend? Are all types of sex going to be categorized more as someone's kink? Maybe that's why we have the delineation of porn, to refer to a medium that incorporates a particular type of sex, a medium that is meant to include large amounts of graphic reference or images of sex, with no consideration to the type of sex being had. Now that I write this, that definition is probably why anyone is able to use the term porn or pornography in a non-derogatory way. The porn itself is almost innocent of what type of sexual act is being portrayed. Thus, you can have both morally defined 'good' porn and 'bad' porn.
Wow. I just referred to porn as innocent. Go figure. I probably just made some fundamentalist's head explode.
