Worldbuilding for Masochists Episode 148: Horny on Main: Smutting Up Your Worldbuilding
In honor of Valentine's Day, the season of Carnivale, and our own amusement, we bring to you this extra-long episode, where we heat things up and get a little down and dirty with our worldbuilding. What role does sex play in the world you're building -- and how do you depict that?
This comes up a lot, obviously, in romantasy and other related subgenres, but even if that's not what you're writing, sexuality and gender dynamics are still part of whatever world your characters inhabit! So what's the dominant paradigm of sexual relations in your world? How sex-positive or puritanical are they? How queernorm? How monogamous or expansive in their ideas of relationships? What physical attributes, clothing styles, or acts do they find particularly sexy? And how accepting or judgmental are they of desires that fall outside that paradigm?
We also wrangle with the craft of how to portray these things on the page. How do you decide what amount of "on-screen" spice feels right for this particular story? How explicit do you get, and what words do you choose for that? And even in non-sexy scenes, how much word count do you spend on cluing readers in to the ways in which your world's sexual mores might not match their assumptions?