Cath, I really strongly agree with the bit about being unsettled by taking sex scenes out. And I also agree with your reason for it, that the sex scene is often an important part of the plot, the character journey, or the emotional arc of the fic. Or all three. The idea that it is so low in value that it can just be taken out without harming the fic makes me kind of instinctively defensive. There's this whole implication that the sex is just there for titillation and not actually meaningful. And I am not saying that a person who wants to take a sex scene out of a fic would mean any of those things. But my gut reaction is to see it that way. I just... can't they find a gen fic, and leave the NC-17 stories intact for those of us who enjoy reading and hearing them that way? Because the act of taking a sex scene out seems really different than the act of just not choosing to write or record one in the first place.
The language you disapprove of thing is more interesting. I think I agree about taking it out. My friend was telling me the other day about how, in this long fic she's reading, she found this line that was casually misogynistic. So casually thrown in there that she didn't notice. Here, I'll find the lines she quoted me.
"I’d probably get my head bitten off if I asked for champagne in the dressing room. I asked [female character] if she could get me a Coke Zero the other day; she handed me a Pepsi and told me to go fuck myself."
[Male character 1] laughs. “My sweet little [female character],” he says in a saccharine voice.
"No seriously. That time of the month or something, man, I don't know."
"PMS,” [Male character 1] says. “That's what you get for working with women."
What do you do when you are reading along, in a fic you've already committed to doing and have already put hours and hours of work into, and you come across something like that? If it were by an author I felt comfortable talking with, I'd definitely ask them to alter it in some way to either remove the problem or acknowledge it as problematic. In this case, she doesn't know the author well enough to do that, so she just read it but felt very uncomfortable with it.
no subject
The language you disapprove of thing is more interesting. I think I agree about taking it out. My friend was telling me the other day about how, in this long fic she's reading, she found this line that was casually misogynistic. So casually thrown in there that she didn't notice. Here, I'll find the lines she quoted me.
"I’d probably get my head bitten off if I asked for champagne in the dressing room. I asked [female character] if she could get me a Coke Zero the other day; she handed me a Pepsi and told me to go fuck myself."
[Male character 1] laughs. “My sweet little [female character],” he says in a saccharine voice.
"No seriously. That time of the month or something, man, I don't know."
"PMS,” [Male character 1] says. “That's what you get for working with women."
What do you do when you are reading along, in a fic you've already committed to doing and have already put hours and hours of work into, and you come across something like that? If it were by an author I felt comfortable talking with, I'd definitely ask them to alter it in some way to either remove the problem or acknowledge it as problematic. In this case, she doesn't know the author well enough to do that, so she just read it but felt very uncomfortable with it.