Sex Is Violence/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Examples of Sex Is Violence in Literature include:

  • The Acts of Caine looks at this a lot, perhaps best personified by Count Berne.
  • In Hyperion Kassad and Moneta slaughter a group of soldiers while the readers are treated to a description of just how much they're both turned one. Then they have sex on top of the bodies. In fact their entire relationship is like this.
  • In The Hyperion Cantos, Kassad gets superpowers for a while and, as he slaughters a bunch of enemies, the reader is treated to a description of how much he's getting off on it. Actually he's implied to connect sex and violence for most of his life.
  • The Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures novel EarthWorld:

Your body is so beautiful. I am going to run my hands over your smooth pale skin, softly, so softly, so you shiver at my every touch. Your body will be mine and I will hurt it, beautifully, you will feel every caress of pain. I will hurt you and hurt you, and when you think there is no pain left I will hurt you again. I will take you far away, to pain you could never dream of. And then you will bleed for me, a trickle, a torrent, a stream, until the last drop of your life falls to the floor and I can taste it. And I will, finally, feel whole and fulfilled, through you[...]

    • This lovely little paragraph is coming, basically, from a thirteen-year-old girl, and is apparently directed at the Doctor, who's a thousand-year-old Chaste Hero who looks like a handsome forty-year-old man. And his companion, who has no intention whatsoever of ever either hurting him or boinking him, is being made to say it. Basically, it's just gross.
  • Light in August by William Faulkner
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • In the Outlander series, the Depraved Bisexual Captain John Randall is very much into this. He's shown to be incapable of getting hard unless he's beating or torturing the person he's raping.
  • The dark fey court in Wicked Lovely. Particular mention goes to how Niall's rape/torture was laregly treated as 'entertainment' by all except Irial (and Niall himself) and the whole 'shadow girl' thing. Melissa Marr has described it as both 'the court of temptation' and 'a place of cruelty'. Leslie describes Irial, their former king, as "Every horrible thing she shouldn't miss, every nightmare she shouldn't crave." Yeah, they're made of this trope.
  • In the Parrish Plessis series, the Eskaalim parasites feed on both sex and violence. Parrish, in an attempt to prevent her Eskaalim from driving her Ax Crazy, learns to substitute sex when it tries to drive her to violence. This ends up backfiring, as the Eskaalim gets fed either way; her efforts merely end up teaching it that she is less averse to sex than to violence, allowing it to get better at manipulating her.
  • In IT Patrick suffocates his baby brother and is described as being turned on while doing it.
  • In the short story "The Screwfly Solution" by James Tiptree Jr., aliens exploit the connection between sexual arousal and violence. A chemical agent is spread over the earth that causes men to become insanely, homicidally violent when aroused. It doesn't end well.
  • In Orson Scott Card's short story Closing The Timelid, teenagers project temporary bodies into the past to get hit by cars. One girl, returning, says dying is sex.
  • In J. G. Ballard's Crash the characters are car accident fetishists, and seek orgasm by deliberately crashing their cars. They often end up seriously injured as a result, and cause the death of other people.
    • There was a movie made of the book in 1996, named "Crash." It's... definitely not to be confused with the 2004 movie of the same title!
  • In the one of the Dresden Files short stories, Jenny Greenteeth tries to drown Harry in a punchbowl while getting herself off on him at the same time.
    • Madeline Raith. Both examples fall afoul of the werewolf pack.
  • In A Song of Ice and Fire, Jaime Lannister states that the only times he feels alive are when he is either having sex with his sister or fighting. He also drily notes that the aftermath of his fight with Brienne looks like they've been screwing rather than knocking the shit out of each other. The connection between sex and combat is also noted several times by various other characters, unsurprisingly given the Rape, Pillage and Burn that frequently happens after a fight.

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