Sexuality in SciFi

March 7, 2006 7:55 PM

What percentage of SciFi depicts directly or makes references to dark sexual themes?

In this thread people expressed vastly varying ideas of how much sexual violence is either depicted (straight out rapes/forced prostitution, etc.) or referenced (characters with rape or child abuse in their past, characters who are pedophiles offscreen, etc.) in Science Fiction.

I'm looking for REAL DATA on this topic, in the form of a fairly unscientific survey. Specifically, I'd like you to go over to your bookshelf, and go through the science fiction titles. What percentage have this sort of content?

Please actually do the exercise instead of just thinking about it. I got a much higher percentage when I really considered the books on the shelf.

Thanks in advance to people who are willing to do this and share their results.

posted by tkolar to media & arts (39 comments total)

To get the ball rolling, I came up with 30% on my bookshelf.

Admittedly I'm short on the classics, so I think my collection is a bit biased.
posted by tkolar at 7:57 PM on March 7, 2006

About 10% to 15%, depending on arguable cases. But I'm only counting the stuff here, at college, which is self-selecting -- I want old comfortable favorites in my dorm room, because I do so much other heavy reading here, and in this case, SF lets me relax. That was a roundabout way of saying I have mostly Heinlein juveniles here, and that skews the numbers.

When I go home this weekend, I'll look at my much-bigger real collection and come up with a better percentage.
posted by booksandlibretti at 8:20 PM on March 7, 2006

I'm having the deja vu, of a sort.

Flies, by Robert Silverberg, in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, has a rather cruel moment of sexual/domestic violence.
posted by Astro Zombie at 8:22 PM on March 7, 2006

Most of the sci-fi on my shelf has not been read in more than a decade. Looking at what I have (which is small), I come up with 0%. But someone in the other thread says one of my N. Stephenson books has a rape, which I apparently don't remember, so take my number with a grain of salt.
posted by teece at 8:34 PM on March 7, 2006

Interesting question. I just took a glance at my bookcases, and found that very few of the books in my collection have this sort of content. Looking it over, I'd guess perhaps 5%, 10 at the outside, and I'm including consensual but violent sexual scenes in that total. Of that total, perhaps half the books I included are by female authors.

I must admit, though, that my book collection is skewed more towards fantasy than SF, so that may throw off the count. Also, I'd consider some of the violence depicted to be part of the plot (e.g., Bujold's Mirror Dance ) rather than simple titillation (Laurel Hamilton, I'm looking in your direction).
posted by Janta at 8:42 PM on March 7, 2006

I have, geeze, hundreds and hundreds of SF books here, at the very least. I couldn't possibly recall all the details just by looking at the spines and/or covers. I think very few people could.

Your request is a little better than just pure memory, but only just a tiny bit.

If you want a real answer, I fear you're going to have to do real research.
posted by Malor at 8:44 PM on March 7, 2006

This may not be much help, as I can't remember the name of the author and don't know any of his titles, but there was (is?) a quasi-SF series with heavy SM themes. He wrote dozens of books about people living on a moonbase (and perhaps other places), where women were complete and total sex slaves for men. I mean heavy SM. Apparently it mirrored the author's unapologetically sexist belief system, and the books have quite a clut following amongst brutality-level SM folks.

Sorry, don't remember his name, though.
posted by zardoz at 8:47 PM on March 7, 2006

Mine's pretty much 0%.. Most of my collection, though, consists of classics, authors such as: Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury, Niven, Jack Vance, Stanislaw Lem, Herbert (?), Zelazny. More recent: Richard Russo, Alastair Reynolds etc.

I may be misremembering something in there though...I also have Dan Simmons' Hyperion/Endymion series - was there any sexual violence there?
posted by vacapinta at 8:51 PM on March 7, 2006

booksandlibretti wrote...
About 10% to 15%, depending on arguable cases.

Thanks. I'm counting arguable cases in for the most part. For example, Gray Roger's treatment of Clio in the Lensmen series is not overtly sexual -- Gray Roger has no use for sex afterall -- but Clio doesn't know that, and feels suitably threatened when trapped by him. I'm counting that as a reference.
posted by tkolar at 8:52 PM on March 7, 2006

This may not be much help, as I can't remember the name of the author and don't know any of his titles, but there was (is?) a quasi-SF series with heavy SM themes. He wrote dozens of books about people living on a moonbase (and perhaps other places), where women were complete and total sex slaves for men. I mean heavy SM. Apparently it mirrored the author's unapologetically sexist belief system, and the books have quite a clut following amongst brutality-level SM folks.

Wasn't that Gor or something? I don't count the fantasy/space-opera stuff as science fiction. Science fiction should be compelling and make you think. Ray guns and space rape aren't sci-fi; they're just shit.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 8:57 PM on March 7, 2006

I also have Dan Simmons' Hyperion/Endymion series - was there any sexual violence there?

I have those too, and I couldn't remember any. But it's like, 1200 pages, half of which I read 15 years ago. There is a point where a main character is naked and bad things happen (I'll be vague to avoid spoilers), but calling that sexual violence would be an extreme stretch, as nothing sexual happens. It's just violence in which the character is naked (it's also 100% crucial to the plot).
posted by teece at 8:57 PM on March 7, 2006

vacapinta wrote...
Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury, Niven, Jack Vance, Stanislaw Lem

Yeah, I agree all of these guys score about zero in this regard.

Herbert (?)

Baron Harkonnen? Are you kidding me?

Zelazny

I would say that Merlin's treatment of Coral while 'healing' the broken pattern would cross the line.
posted by tkolar at 8:58 PM on March 7, 2006

This may not be much help, as I can't remember the name of the author and don't know any of his titles, but there was (is?) a quasi-SF series with heavy SM themes.
You are probably referring to the Gor series. (But who knows, maybe there are a bunch of other such series that I've escaped.)
posted by Aknaton at 8:59 PM on March 7, 2006

5 of 30 here...16.7%
posted by juv3nal at 9:02 PM on March 7, 2006

Oh, and to answer the question, 0% of about twenty sci-fi books, both novels and short story collections.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 9:06 PM on March 7, 2006

teece wrote...
It's just violence in which the character is naked

Yes, I don't think nakedness in itself is enough to make it a sexual reference.

(it's also 100% crucial to the plot).

Just for the record, I'm not differentiating on whether things are crucial to the plot or not, or in fact casting judgement on the topic in any way.

Many classics of literature reference dark sexual themes -- "Candide", for one, has an average of one rape per page -- some use them to good effect, others not so much.

Right now I'm just curious about Science Fiction because the discrepancies were so large in the other thread. Or maybe I'm afraid I'm a perv for keeping "Dune" and "The Book Of The New Sun" on my shelf :-)
posted by tkolar at 9:06 PM on March 7, 2006

Malor wrote...
I have, geeze, hundreds and hundreds of SF books here, at the very least. I couldn't possibly recall all the details just by looking at the spines and/or covers. I think very few people could.

Sadly, I personally know at least three people (including myself) who can. Geeks are as geeks do, I guess :-)

If you want a real answer, I fear you're going to have to do real research.

No question, I'm not going to get a scientifically valid answer out of this. However, the answers so far have been enlightening to at least me, so I hope people don't feel that time is being wasted.
posted by tkolar at 9:10 PM on March 7, 2006

Arguable cases are so tough, though. I think there's one book on my shelf that has literally one line that's a spanking reference. I'm trying to count out anything that could be triggering, but to discount the entire book because of one throwaway line?

I did not count the fantasy I have, only the SF. I think if you count in fantasy, even after correcting for stuff like the Kushiel's Dart trilogy, the sexual violence count would actually go up. So many of them are pseudo-medieval, with all the power imbalances that go along with it.
posted by booksandlibretti at 9:10 PM on March 7, 2006

Looking at my collection, maybe 1%.

I'm also not entirely clear on what fits your criteria. The Lovers in China Mieville's The Scar combine sex with ritual cutting, but it's entirely (and enthusiastically) voluntary. Norman Spinrad's The Big Flash effectively (and disturbingly) combines Sexual Imagery and the Bomb, but there's no actual sex in the story.
posted by SPrintF at 9:26 PM on March 7, 2006

booksandlibretti wrote...
I think if you count in fantasy [...] the sexual violence count would actually go up.

I'm not a big fantasy reader, but my limited exposure would tend to support that. For starters, the entire rape-and-revenge subgenre would tilt things significantly, not to mention a big chunk of Vampire fiction.
posted by tkolar at 9:28 PM on March 7, 2006

SPrintF writes...
I'm also not entirely clear on what fits your criteria.

To approach it from a different direction, I am thinking of passages which would directly and predictibly trigger a bad memory for a sexually traumatized person.

I would say that cutting combined with sex -- despite the enthusiastic participation of the people involved -- would count as a dark sexual practice for the purpose of this question. However, it is a tough call...
posted by tkolar at 9:44 PM on March 7, 2006

Catherine Asaro has an entire series of books in which the villains are essentially empathic sadists whose brains were rewired so they receive pleasure when they torture others. It's an easy bunch of folks to root against...
posted by kindall at 10:04 PM on March 7, 2006

I'm not at home, but I could safely say that in my collection the percentage would be near 75%. "Dark Fantasy" is kinda what I buy ^_^;;
posted by krisjohn at 10:04 PM on March 7, 2006

15 (say +/-10) out of 186 in the living room. The bedroom shelves with the MMPBs are all out of order and would be hard to count.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:13 PM on March 7, 2006

Tkolar, it's a mildly interesting question, but it feels like you have an agenda here... you seem to _want_ to find these things. The Clio reference does not involve sex, or even anyone's _desire_ for sex. An incorrect fear of rape is not a dark sexual theme.... unless that fear were the centerpiece of the story. As a detail, it's just realistic... what woman, imprisoned by a man she didn't know, WOULDN'T think about rape?

And I disagree that everyone is going to remember all the details of all the books they read. I bought The Scar quite recently, and had pretty much forgotten The Lovers, as an example, just because they didn't particularly speak to me. I remember with vivid intensity, however, the pig-butchering scene in Perdido Street Station, as I was completely horrified by it. (which I'm sure was the intent... and geeze, did it ever work.)

If you're young, and haven't read that many books yet, they will stand out more... but any middle-aged SF reader will have most likely read thousands of volumes by now. Most of us are voracious readers.

Your question REALLY is, "what do you remember being in the books that are on your shelf?" Since we remember what speaks to us, it's only very slightly related to reality.

It is, still, an interesting question. It might be more meaningful if you also asked the question of other genres as well. That wouldn't prove anything, but it'd be interesting as a vague correlation.
posted by Malor at 11:12 PM on March 7, 2006

Well, it can be 100% if you read the right newsgroups.
posted by Paris Hilton at 11:35 PM on March 7, 2006

Out of the 112 SF books at hand, 30 had either dark or graphic sexual content, a further 12 included some kind of unwanted contact or attempt, 17 more had references but no action, and 53 were pretty much without sexual content at all.

I must say that out of those 53 "withouts," many were Heinlein juveniles or Asimov. And the percentage of Dark books would have been considerably higher, but I excluded any books that would be considered Mystery, Suspense, or Romance despite heavy Sci Fi content.
posted by monopas at 12:02 AM on March 8, 2006

Malor writes...
The Clio reference does not involve sex, or even anyone's _desire_ for sex. An incorrect fear of rape is not a dark sexual theme...

I disagree. Think about how out of place such a scene would feel in an Asimov or Clarke story. If Susan Calvin were held captive by a man, rape would not occur to her in the story, or frankly to the person reading it if they were at all familiar with Asimov. Or Stormgren, drugged and kidnapped by four burly men with foreign accents -- is he worried about being brutalized? No, he treats the whole thing as a civil social outing, as most of Clarke's books are.

Or in Niven's good natured worlds, where death may be an option for the maiden, but sexual assault is rarely if ever mentioned.

Similarly for Heinlein's youth novels.

The worlds these authors create are devoid of references to anything that would be called sordid, and often they are devoid of any sexuality whatsoever. The topic is just skipped.

... any middle-aged SF reader will have most likely read thousands of volumes by now.

Yeah, this is why I'm focusing on what people actually have on their bookshelves. I've purged my collection four times in my life so far, and what remains are books that I know backward and forwards. They're the staples I come back to when the new stuff gets too craptastic.

If you've never purged your bookshelf of the forgettable books, then I can see why you wouldn't have a solid memory of most of your collection.

Also, not everbody's memory works the same way. I know people who can't remember the book they read last week, and others who can remember every line of something they read once for a college class fifteen years ago.

The question is self-selecting however. If people don't remember what's in their books, presumably they won't answer.

I remember with vivid intensity, however, the pig-butchering scene in Perdido Street Station, as I was completely horrified by it.

Damnit, I had been doing a pretty good job of forgetting that. :-)

It is, still, an interesting question. It might be more meaningful if you also asked the question of other genres as well. That wouldn't prove anything, but it'd be interesting as a vague correlation.

I agree, but I thought that was a bit ambitious for a single question in Metafilter.
posted by tkolar at 12:40 AM on March 8, 2006

"someone in the other thread says one of my N. Stephenson books has a rape, which I apparently don't remember"

The Diamond Age had something where everyone within its influence had most of their higher brain functions shut down leaving them depraving themselves and others without their knowledge or consent, iirc.

I vote 10±5 for a collection of 100.
posted by Freaky at 1:05 AM on March 8, 2006

I also have Dan Simmons' Hyperion/Endymion series - was there any sexual violence there?

Been a while since I read the whole thing, but there's a rape and a creepy vagina dentata thing between the same two characters, which might actually be me remembering the same scene twice, or maybe the first one is described as a flashback during or preceding the second one.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 1:49 AM on March 8, 2006

Freaky: "someone in the other thread says one of my N. Stephenson books has a rape, which I apparently don't remember"

The Diamond Age had something where everyone within its influence had most of their higher brain functions shut down leaving them depraving themselves and others without their knowledge or consent, iirc.


Actually, there is a violent rape in The Diamond Age. Nell is assaulted when the bordello she works for (in a non-sexual capacity) is overtaken by the Fists.
posted by monopas at 2:07 AM on March 8, 2006

And while not rape, at least one of Tequila's boyfriends beats the shit out of her and Nell, and another does some form or another of child molestation upon Nell.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:46 AM on March 8, 2006

There's some explicit sexual violence scattered throughout the nine books of David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series.

Some of it is relevant and some of it seems to be there just to make the villain more evil.
posted by Talvalin at 7:00 AM on March 8, 2006

Very little of my collection has what I would consider disturbing sexual themes, or even incidents.

Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolf, of course, has many taboo sexual liaisons. Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson had a very strange sexual...epiphany. Probably the most disturbing sexual encounter I can think of is in Dan Simmons' Hollow Man. I'm not coming up with anything else (but then again, my head is clouded by the flu). I'd guess <10%.
posted by adamrice at 7:14 AM on March 8, 2006

Actually, there is a violent rape in The Diamond Age. Nell is assaulted when the bordello she works for (in a non-sexual capacity) is overtaken by the Fists.

As I recall, it's important to the plot -- they're transmitting information in their semen.
posted by Aknaton at 9:15 AM on March 8, 2006

Okay, I'd guess at this point the thread is pretty much done.

My sincere thanks to everyone who went and polled their SciFi collections.

-T
posted by tkolar at 10:54 AM on March 8, 2006

Been a while since I read the whole thing, but there's a rape and a creepy vagina dentata

I think that's The Hollow Man, which I have but had forgotten about, as I never finished it because it sucked. But I don't think that's in Hyperion.

The part of me that has studied and applied statistics also wants to point out that the proportions in this thread, while fun and interesting, mean nothing when it comes to sci-fi as a whole.

We would need to test a sufficiently large random sample for dark sexual themes. Nobody's bookshelf counts as a random sample, so you can't use that measurement to apply to sci-fi as a whole.
posted by teece at 11:07 AM on March 8, 2006

Freaky: "someone in the other thread says one of my N. Stephenson books has a rape, which I apparently don't remember"

In Snow Crash, there's a consentual but statutory rape when Y.T. is brainwashed, kidnapped, and boards the refugee floatilla.
posted by SpecialK at 12:30 PM on March 8, 2006

teece wrote...
The part of me that has studied and applied statistics also wants to point out that the proportions in this thread, while fun and interesting, mean nothing when it comes to sci-fi as a whole.

Yeah, I know. On the other hand, perhaps it will inspire me to get a grant from someone to study the question in rigorous depth. It would greatly aid my lifelong ambition to win an IgNobel.

(Okay, technically not lifelong. IgNobel's-life long)
posted by tkolar at 1:08 PM on March 8, 2006