User blog comment:Drgyen/Is H.T. a old pervert?/@comment-21519-20101127025626

There's nothing perverse about simply having sex scenes in a work of fiction. He needs believable, human-like characters to tell an interesting story, and being believable and human-like will involve, at some point, some sort of sexuality playing some sort of role in a person's activity. Most people engage in sexual behavior, and more still feel an instinctive attraction to it. And everyone, including asexuals, has their sexuality make up a sufficiently major part of their identity that it can't simply be ignored altogether without compromising a major character's character arc, as an author can decline to show characters defecating without making them unbelievable: True, everyone does it, but it's not an important part of anyone's identity.

Also, sex is one of the major motivations that defines how human beings relate to one another, so it's an obvious, logical way to advance the relationship between two characters, or to provide a watershed moment in the history of how one character relates to the story.

The question becomes, does HT include too much gratuitous sex, ie, sex scenes which do nothing significant to advance any plot or character arcs? Most critics would agree that he used to. The first few TL-191 books were especially notorious to this, and it got to the point that it interfered in many readers' ability to enjoy the story. He's dialed it down quite a lot in the new millennium, though there are recent episodes that I could point to as a backslide: Diana McGraw's affair with Marvin Lewis, for one, and the attendant fretting that her husband no longer satisfied her. I guess it could be argued to show that her newfound celebrity left her unable to go back to the life she'd previously led, but that didn't become a major character point till the final chapters, and when it did, the implications of her affair were not really a point there. Peggy Druce's affair with Constantine Jenkins was another example of gratuitous sex. I'm hard-pressed to think of any way one could argue it went anywhere at all. True, shortly afterward Jenkins's offices obtained for Peggy the opportunity to write to Hitler, which finally got her out of Germany, but we're given no indication the one had anything to do with the other. Then again, not all sex serves some higher purpose in real life, either; sometimes people just fall into bed with one another.

I thought Victor Radcliff's sex scene in USA was gratuitous at the time, but in retrospect it turned out to be pretty significant. Blaise Black's sex scene was gratuitous, and much worse, very out of character.

The Gap books had a lot of sex, some of which amounted to something greater and some of which did not. But that was such a shoddily-done series altogether that I hate to bring it up at all.

Anyway, the dropoff in gratuitous sex comparing HT's recent works to those of 1990s vintage suggests he's not an OLD pervert; if interest in writing gratuitous sex makes him a pervert, that interest does appear to be diminishing as he ages. I guess one could also suggest that his interest is as strong as ever, but he's been resisting the temptation for fear that a reputation for smutty writing will hurt his sales. One could then say he's gradually sneaking it back in now that his reputation has largely dissipated, but Occam's razor would seem to apply.

Another angle from which to approach your question would be to ask whether HT's sex scenes are unusually kinky. Well, that's awfully subjective in most cases. However, we might ask whether they specifically show some sort of deviant behavior, and especially whether he shows characters condone this behavior, or whether he tries to lead us to sympathize with the deviant when other characters condemn him. I can think of examples that meet all three of those conditions, but they're neither frequent enough nor significant enough to the stories they're in to suggest much of an ulterior motive on HT's part.

One exception is Earthgrip, where transgender issues became a major plot point. But that was among members of an alien species with an extraterrestrial biology. Normal rules are off with alien biology and the author is free to write in whatever he wants. Now one might say that HT choose to make the Foitani transsexual because he's aroused by transsexuals, but that would be a pretty dumb thing of one to say. We saw no characters getting off on the gender issues (in fact, many took it to the opposite extreme) and nothing to indicate the author was getting off on it, either. He may have had an ulterior motive in that one, such as to encourage us to show greater tolerance for those with sexualities different from our own, but it wasn't a motive founded in eroticism.

There are short stories which could trigger some of the definitions of perversion I've described, but the point of a short story is often to take one or two themes and exaggerate it/them ad absurdum. HT gives that treatment to many, many facets of the human condition in his shorts, and sex comes up no more often than other, similarly important parts of our behavior. Also, he's written some characters who have an unhealthy obsession with their own sexual prowess, but the real world is full of people like that, too. Very few of these characters are truly significant characters, and offhand I can't think of any who were POVs.

So while I can see a small amount of evidence in his writings that HT's a pervert, I think you've got a very steep uphill climb here. Turtle Fan 02:56, November 27, 2010 (UTC)