My current book project has a lot of sex scenes. I joke about how some of them will probably be on the chopping block by an editor and my ongoing addition of more scenes into the plot. There were several things I wanted to accomplish in this project when it came to sexuality, but there are also important reasons why I included so many different angles and combinations.
First, my book is about a woman ruler of a secondary world inspired by and heavily referencing our Mesopotamian Empires, particularly the Sasanian Empire. I do not focus on a specific period, more the overarching influence and innovation this Empire brought to the world and civilisation. As a student of religious and cultural history, a specific area of inspiration is the moment in time when the new monotheistic philosophies which would influence all Abrahamic religions, entered a world of polytheist philosophies about wrathful gods. However, my themes also use this original change to explore different combination of spiritual ideas, including how spirituality and sexuality are explored to use physiology to experience encounter with the divine.
Because my protagonist is a woman in this kind of culture, she is adapting her behaviour to being in a position and domain of a man in her position. We know that many kings in the Near East, such as David of Israel, Darius and Xerxes of Persia, all the way to modern Ottoman times, had very large numbers of wives, and as much sex as they wanted, including historic record of the behaviour men have had throughout history of objectifying people for sex, of all ages and genders. Whether it was these cultures or Rome, boys and children did not escape the outlet of use of sex to exert power, and practices did not seem to have any ethical or moral guidelines. We only see David of Israel with any self awareness that having a woman's husband killed in battle to justify his adultery with her, brought to his consciousness.
Due to this opportunity, I looked at the context of how sex is written about on the shelves of consumer fiction, and it being extremely problematic. Women have to endure depictions of horrible acts of sexual aggression toward women in fiction. Some of the most popular books of the past 10 years have offered us a lot of male sexual fantasy. My character presented the opportunity to counter slut shaming culture by showing a woman as the one holding the sexual power, not afraid of her desires. Apparently just writing about female sexuality, without saying anything political, is a political statement.
In the fall, I was at a business school networking event, and a woman there had a startup to educate the world about the female orgasm. Talking about different religious and cultural underpinnings behind how sex is viewed, she said if we look at (heterosexual) sex as only one of the genders experiencing pleasure when the goal being the male orgasm (which a view of sex for procreation supports), it is the foundation of rape culture, if the emphasis is never placed on the pleasure of both partners.
I know in the porn industry there is a lot of discrepancy as well over how intimacy is viewed, and whether we approach it with the view that men are the ones in charge and being pleased, or whether there is representation from women's perspectives.
It was outside of my comfort zone to write about many of the themes in this book, including the sexuality. I have long conversation threads with my therapist about what was acceptable, and whether I would be able to represent sexual viewpoints which I have no experience. That said, and perhaps I spent so much time overanalysing how to write about this topic, my readers have been inspired by the result. For that, if I can write about themes which I am able to develop well and make complex and engaging, and create popular book people want to buy and read with all of those elements - which is my goal, hoping I can find partners in publishing to share that vision - I hope to add a significant contribution to the literary conversation in these areas.
This is an elaboration of my twitter thread post which can be found here:
https://twitter.com/SylviaWoodham/status/1244727990082252800?s=20
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