Stefan Baciu on Nether Street Blues

Thank you very much for replying and sharing your article. As I mentioned in the above, this wasn’t something that I followed, just a rabbit hole I went down on my lunch break. Didn’t intend to ignore you. I will read your article and edit mine to include a reference. To be clear, both ladies wrote interesting articles, but the debate itself failed. Without reading your articles, I cannot make a general prescription of how graphic a sex scene would be. I only believe that each sentence should advance plot and/or deepen the theme. Anything else is self-indulgent on the part of the writer. From reading George Sanders’ “A swim in the pond…”, I understand that there is a current taboo in the MFA circuit against writing death scenes or taking the POV of someone dying. Clearly, this shouldn’t be the case because Leo Tolstoy did it quite masterfully. With sex scenes, I agree with you when it comes to my own work, but if somebody needs to deepen theme or advance plot through something more graphic, whom am I to police their work? We’ve reached a point (thankfully) where both sex and violence (even blasphemy) fail to make an impression on the reader anymore. So if an author wants to grab our attention, they won’t be able to rely on needless edge. The TLDR is simply asking “what does sex in your writing signify? What are the metaphysics behind your kinks?” :)))