This debate kinda makes me think of Karen Marie Moning's (she writes varying levels of smut, with her more recent books focusing more on story over smut, but still.... yeah, people read it for the romance/smut) response to the outcry over her latest series, featuring a 14 year old protagonist. When asked, she said that yes, the character will end up having steamy sex with one of the immortal hunks in the story before she turns 18. The outcry was immediate and vicious, to which she replied (and I am very loosely paraphrasing): teenagers have sex. Get over it.
Yeah, I did see the discussion about literary value in novels over smut written between two individuals earlier, but there is no need for things to necessarily be explicit or venture into the whole legality thing. I, for one, think it is much more tasteful for it to be addressed as growth for the character, rather than always having to be some grotesque caricature of passion for the sole purpose of avoiding, as saefinn put it, an idea about the age of consent.
I do remember discussing, with a rp partner on another site, the prospect of tossing our two male teenage characters (though, mine is 19 and hers .... 17? I think?) into a situation with a prostitute, where the scene planned would be so awkward and horrific in its embarrassing qualities that others would cringe out of reading it (with the prostitute in question being a horror in her own right, aesthetically speaking :3 ).
Which is, to me, the main fun I have writing teenagers: awkward, awful, embarrassing. Complete with, you know, never being able to maintain eye contact with the other person ever again. And in that there isn't any need to be explicit. But it does build character, and it is possible to be tasteful and focus on the characters/plot over . . . using the scene as a way to get your rocks off. Which I am not advocating.
Then again, like I've said before, I really like writing about imperfections. I was never one for perfect romances, anyways, and youth gives you that chance to evoke a sense of gawkiness and shame that is, somehow, permissible and forgivable while being occasionally endearing (assuming you manage to avoid the whole annoying twat thing, of which I have run afoul more than once).
...but who am I kidding. I just want people to remember something particularly embarrassing about their teenage years and cringe away from the writing in acute self-loathing. <3
Yeah, I did see the discussion about literary value in novels over smut written between two individuals earlier, but there is no need for things to necessarily be explicit or venture into the whole legality thing. I, for one, think it is much more tasteful for it to be addressed as growth for the character, rather than always having to be some grotesque caricature of passion for the sole purpose of avoiding, as saefinn put it, an idea about the age of consent.
I do remember discussing, with a rp partner on another site, the prospect of tossing our two male teenage characters (though, mine is 19 and hers .... 17? I think?) into a situation with a prostitute, where the scene planned would be so awkward and horrific in its embarrassing qualities that others would cringe out of reading it (with the prostitute in question being a horror in her own right, aesthetically speaking :3 ).
Which is, to me, the main fun I have writing teenagers: awkward, awful, embarrassing. Complete with, you know, never being able to maintain eye contact with the other person ever again. And in that there isn't any need to be explicit. But it does build character, and it is possible to be tasteful and focus on the characters/plot over . . . using the scene as a way to get your rocks off. Which I am not advocating.
Then again, like I've said before, I really like writing about imperfections. I was never one for perfect romances, anyways, and youth gives you that chance to evoke a sense of gawkiness and shame that is, somehow, permissible and forgivable while being occasionally endearing (assuming you manage to avoid the whole annoying twat thing, of which I have run afoul more than once).
...but who am I kidding. I just want people to remember something particularly embarrassing about their teenage years and cringe away from the writing in acute self-loathing. <3
