Sex. And violence. But mostly sex.

[from the stabenow.com vaults, 7/16/2010. Reposting, just because.]

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I’m just saying.

I was on a local radio show recently, me and host Aaron talking about good summer reads, when someone called in to say that he’d read a couple of my books and called them soft porn. I admitted that, yes, there was sex in my books, told a funny story about me at age 12 and and my mom and Lady Chatterly’s Lover and finessed my way back to the topic under discussion, good summer reads.

But I’ve been thinking about his comment. My books have been accused of having sex in them before, and I find it fascinating that it is invariably the sex by which people choose to be shocked, shocked.

Not on another topic, but the bodies lay pretty thick on the ground in my books. There’s at least one first degree murder and frequently more in each novel I write. The constraints of the crime fiction genre produce some graphic descriptions. People are strangled, shot, drowned, they have pickups dropped on them, they’re stabbed with boathooks, they’ve been used for bear bait and they suffer death by mosquito. In one book nine people die at once, and in another an entire Thai bar is blown up with a soccer ball stuffed with C4. A boatload of Coastie BTMs were killed in another book, and don’t think I slept well that night.

I haven’t poisoned anyone yet, but give me time.

Nobody ever says anything about the body count. Evidently it is acceptable to slaughter any number of innocents but when two adults dare to have consensual sex and then have the further audacity to enjoy it, not so much.

What does it say about Americans that we are more comfortable with written murder than with written sex?

We really need to get over the whole Puritan thing.

I’m just saying.

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