Valerie Douglas - Writer's Blog: Here there be SEX. I don't get it either, George R. R. Martin

"I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure. Axes entering skulls, well, not so much." G. R. R. Martin Game of Thrones

I've heard it myself, in several reviews of my epic fantasies. Yet readers and viewers eat up the Song of Ice and Fire series, and never complain about the violence, only the sex.

That still mystifies me. Apologies to the person who made this statement, but they said they're a purist when it comes to fantasy, and they didn't like sex in it. In the first book of the series two of the leads are tortured pretty significantly. In the second the bad guy 'virtually' rapes the heroine... But the objection is to the SEX in it? Especially since it's consensual sex between two people who truly love one another.

I'm baffled.

How is it that we writers can portray acts of terrible violence, yet be criticized for showing honest, open emotion, expressed in a physical way?

What are we ashamed of? Our glory of violence, or the tenderness of lovemaking? How is the one good and acceptable, the other not?

Please understand - I leave the moral judgments to my readers. Many of my characters have faced similar prejudices. The Elves in The Coming Storm repress their emotions outside of their Enclaves because the depth of those emotions have been used against them in their past - not because they're cold in nature. The Fairy in Song of the Fairy Queen are seen as promiscuous because of their lightheartedness, and because their nature is to be loving - even when it comes to sex.