I popped into my blogsite today and noticed some new publishing/marketing material there most likely deposited after a recent update. It was a list of AI-generated ideas for posts. As if a thoughtful and sentient being needed the help. One of the topic suggestions pertained to the difference between intimacy and vulnerability in writing.
I quickly surmised from the wording that one required the negation of the other. In order to write risqué romance, one must be able to relish describing sexual behavior at the expense of holding themselves at a high moral standard, thereby risking criticism from prudes. In other words, to write slutty sexual encounters, an author must be perceived by his or her readers (or non-readers, i.e., detractors, as the case may be) as being loose and slutty as well. And worthy of humiliation for it.
At least, that's the reaction some "friends" of mine arrived at when my husband told them I was writing "porn" (his words). They assumed he and I engaged in pretty erotic bedroom antics, leaving them all fanning themselves affectedly. I was disgusted by the response. The only problems with that supposition were that it was farthest from the truth and none of their damn business, regardless.
The point was that I was considered by them as a sexual deviant, because I write what could be considered lurid carnal knowledge, and an object of self-righteous scorn. Just how in hell do people determine what they like to do and have done to them behind closed doors if they haven't seen it in movies, read about it between the covers of romance novels, or imagined it out of thin air?
Like it or not, we are all hard-wired for sex. We are not hard-wired to be puritanical or abstemious. Intimacy is favored over vulnerability every time when we are given the chance to be intimate. The one leads to the other, not the other way around. How else are we hurt over and over by callous and uncaring partners who just use us to gratify their own needs? Therefore, it is easier to write about sexual exploits between characters who resemble human beings that it is to document the lives of the saints. So, why not just do it and feel no shame in the doing?
As kids, we couldn't conceive of our parents engaging in lusty lovemaking. That baby in Mom's belly was an immaculate conception, as far as we were concerned. Any lesser explanation was cringeworthy TMI. Then as adults we realized they were just normally horny, like us. It was still TMI but at least we were no longer ashamed to have been the product of sweaty copulation between two aroused individuals.
One can have a graphic imagination and still get away with being perceived as sexually sublime, hiding their vulnerability from the embarrassment of expressed carnality. Once they begin putting that imagination down on paper or a computer screen in sexually explicit language, however, they cross a line. Intimate words cause us to shed our purity and innocence, to open ourselves to moralistic criticism.
Or, were we ever really pure and innocent? And is it even possible to write vulnerably? Isn't that just one big intimate oxymoron?
I wonder what would have shown up in this blog post had I let AI write it.
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