The Necessary Sex Scene: Intimacy as Craft in N.K. Jemisin&#8217;s <i>The Fifth Season</i>

This is how discourse is born: somewhere in the United States, a family watches Dune: Prophecy on the living room TV, and an unanticipated sex scene plays. Out come cellphones to shield against stirring feelings of awkwardness, shame, and discomfort. In the grip of cringe, one watcher vents to social media, asking: ‘Why are writers still including graphic sex scenes? They’re never necessary.’ 

For sex scene skeptics in the age of CinemaSins, ‘necessary’ is largely used interchangeably with ‘plot relevant.’ Any sex scene is ‘gratuitous’ if it doesn’t involve a character placing Chekhov’s gun on the bed (or the counter, or the starship helm, or the sept altar). 

Conversations about plot relevancy have an especially fraught history in science fiction and fantasy, where the perception that plot is king has provided the basis for longstanding criticisms that diminish the artistic value of the genre in comparison to literary realism. The label ‘speculative fiction’ emerged as a legitimizing strategy to distinguish works that prioritized theme, character, and style from the common conceptions of plot-focused mainstream SF/F. 

But audiences innately recognize that even in mainstream SF/F, a story is more than its plot. If it weren’t, we would lose nothing (except our planet) in letting ChatGPT summarize the latest Locked Tomb installment for us rather than reading it ourselves. But it’s reductive to imagine that any narrative element is only made necessary through plot relevance. Compositional choices can develop and sustain a story’s tone or style, reveal character, explore themes, provide contrast, or simply stir feelings. 

Sex scenes face an exceptionally high bar for justifying their presence in the narrative in part because of Americans’ uniquely weird relationship to sex. A Nielsen study affirmed that American parents worry more about their kids being exposed to sex than violence, and legal scholars have found “psychological excitement from sexual imagery” and “the advocacy of improper sexual values” to be two of obscenity’s main perceived harms. When the 1973 Miller v California decision replaced the Hays Code, the “average person, applying contemporary community standards” became the judge of obscenity, empowering a rising wave of conservatism—such as a fresh swath of sex- and sexuality-focused book bans—to turn the debate of ‘unnecessary’ sex scenes into an existential question of whether sex scenes belong in public art at all. 

Despite social media discourse, critically-acclaimed SF/F authors continue to write sex scenes into their work. In a conversation with graduate students following her April 2024 presentation at the University of Kansas, N.K. Jemisin recalled receiving considerable resistance from her publishers regarding the sex scenes in the Broken Earth trilogy. In response to the pushback, she resolved to make it “as queer and poly as possible,” with a focus on the realism of sex as a human experience. Indeed, precisely because the sordid details of the sex scenes in The Fifth Season do not directly impact its plot, Jemisin’s celebrated novel provides a master-class in how explicit sex scenes can benefit SF/F stories.

The first of two notably explicit scenes in the novel comes when the Guardians of the Fulcrum assign Syenite “to produce a child within a year” with Alabaster (Jemisin 69). The non-consensual nature of this scene is emphasized by its context, including Alabaster’s accounting of wrongly believing that “the first few women” assigned to produce offspring with him “were interested” rather than forced. The act of sex itself and how it takes place between two Fulcrum orogenes becomes a way for the reader to better understand the societal dynamics of the setting. 

Like many elements of The Fifth Season, the Fulcrum’s eugenicist breeding program recreates the dehumanizing conditions of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery in a speculative context. Ironically, Alabaster’s early, naive misconceptions about the dehumanizing context in which he encountered these women serves to humanize his character: a great and powerful orogene who is not only a victim deprived of his humanity by violations of his autonomy, but fallible and boyish. 

This pattern extends throughout the encounter: the depiction of the dehumanizing oppressive conditions by the Fulcrum in turn humanizes Alabaster and Syenite. If our concern as readers were solely on the plot impact, even the characterization of Alabaster’s “all business” attitude towards the rape would be excessive or gratuitous (73)—all we need to know is that the events transpired, and neither party was willing. A ‘clean’ version of this scene might stop there, cutting away from the particulars of this scene and allowing readers to imagine their own version of events. 

However, euphemisms are often deployed to propagandize heterosexual intercourse for procreation, presenting it as miraculous and unknowable. It’s widely considered the most ‘vanilla’ type of sexual encounter, and skipping past it in prose would reinforce the idea that what they experience here is unremarkable. That runs the risk of underrepresenting the very personal, very private humiliation involved in Alabaster and Syenite’s oppression. 

Rendering the details instead implicitly argues that this interaction matters, and renders their humanity in the face of it through specific, individual eccentricities. Only in the heat of the act does Alabaster’s “all business” approach melt. He looks “embarrassed” and “self conscious” as he “tries for a while to work himself up to” having an erection, which “doesn’t go well” (73-74). Instead of becoming easier through desensitization, Alabaster’s long history of being dehumanized in this way seems to have made the act harder. 

As resigned as he is to it, and as determined as he is to protect Syenite in the only way he can, Alabaster cannot bring himself to actively participate in his own dehumanization anymore. Syenite has to help him achieve an erection, and afterward, he “shut[s] his eyes”—Syenite sees this as a way for him to “imagin[e] that her hands belong to whoever he wants,” but given the “strained whimper” that signals his orgasm, it doesn’t seem like he’s escaping anywhere pleasant. Rather, Alabaster retreats from the trauma into dissociation, passivity, and inaction, freezing in the face of the reality of the horrors thrust upon him. 

Syenite’s contrasting approach to their mutual rape represents the difference in their rhetorical positions in the Fulcrum. By the time he meets Syenite, Alabaster “earned the right to refuse with his tenth ring”—the further dehumanization Alabaster subjects himself to is only to spare Syenite, who is unable to refuse (71). If he turned her away, or if she proved “difficult,” Syenite would be assigned “permanently to the Fulcrum, leaving her nothing to do but lie on her back and turn men’s grunting and farting into babies.” By participating in his own (and her) dehumanization, Alabaster actually affirms his humanity through the compassion it demonstrates to a near-stranger. 

Syenite, meanwhile, takes an active role in her own violation because she feels compelled to prove herself “reliable” in the face of stereotypes about her status as a “feral” orogene (73). While Alabaster dissociates and lies passively beneath her in a subversion of conventional sexual roles, Syenite positions herself on top, but not out of any eagerness. She “grits her teeth” to take an active role and get the job done, and the descriptions evoke manual labor, not intimacy. Her “thighs ache and her breasts grow sore”; “lube only helps a little” and Alabaster “doesn’t feel as good as a dildo or her fingers.” The descriptions focus not on her pleasure, but on her pain. These details demonstrate how despite her active role, she takes no pleasure from her trauma.

The ways she thinks about sex while engaging in it reflects the self-gaslighting that grows out of accepting her unchangeable social position within an oppressive system. Syenite constantly tries to imagine them as autonomous actors in this moment—first by comforting herself, normalizing Alabaster’s impotence as a “hazard” of “having to do this with an older man.” But while she avoids the word ‘rape,’ the phrase “having to” reveals her awareness of the non-consensual context, forcing her to admit that it’s “probably more the fact that sex doesn’t usually go well when you don’t feel like having it.” This desire to delude herself into a sense of control over her circumstances leads her to feel “ashamed of what she’s done to him” when it’s over, a guilt that suggests her heartfelt belief that she was more willing. Syenite cannot consciously acknowledge or process her own trauma, which pollutes her own suffering with guilt and confusion.

Describing their mutually traumatic experience at length suspends the reader in the ways dehumanization intrudes on these people’s most intimate and vulnerable moments, turning them embarrassing, painful, unsatisfying, and inadequate. They are severed—and proactively sever themselves—from their own sexuality, their own bodies, their own feelings. In a book that brutally and realistically deals with the human consequences of intergenerational trauma caused by institutions that employ chattel slavery, it is essential that readers not only be able to see and connect with the lived experience of that oppression, but be unable to flinch away from it. 

However, it is not the unconventionality or traumatic result of this scene that justifies its level of explicit detail, nor its overall inclusion in the narrative. Pain, discomfort, and shame are potent human emotions, and dehumanization and autonomy key thematic concerns, but they are not uniquely sophisticated. In fact, it is the second sex scene of The Fifth Season that seems most at risk to be deemed gratuitous and excessive precisely because it deals not with misery and dissociation, but in joy and connection. 

On the island of Meov, Alabaster and Syenite begin a polyamorous relationship with the charming and feral Innon. It is one thing to be told of how their experiences with Innon contrast with their experiences in the Fulcrum by Syenite, another to viscerally understand the gap between these experiences through vividly rendered detail.

Again, the context is important: Jemisin explicitly invokes Alabaster and Syenite’s past encounters while they are navigating the early stages of the relationship. When Innon approaches her, Syenite notes that he “seems to want Alabaster, too. And Alabaster doesn’t seem disinterested, either” because he “looks at Innon […] like a virgin” (351-352). The term “virgin” feels especially ironic applied to a man with approximately twelve children, which serves to emphasize the novelty in his relationship with Innon. When Syenite approaches Alabaster  to discuss her intentions to cede any claim to Innon, he makes the connection more explicit: “it’s just been so long,” he says, which Syenite translates for the reader to mean “Not since he’s had a lover, of course. Just since he’s had a lover he wanted” (354). This harkens directly back to how he’d believed the first few women assigned to procreate with him were interested, revealing how much of his trauma stems from losing the intimacy and agency over his own attraction. 

The scene evolves into an argument between the two characters’ philosophical perspectives on their own humanity, and how it has been influenced by their traumas. Alabaster asks if she ever just wants “to be human,” explicitly linking agency over his sexual attraction and intimacy to his sense of humanity. This connection alone would be enough to frame the relationship, but Jemisin pushes it further. Jilted and cynical and not so removed from her complicity with the Fulcrum, Syenite cites the common understanding that orogenes are not human. In response, Alabaster’s “voice turns fierce” and he argues: “Yes. We. Are. […] I don’t give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we’re not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don’t have to feel bad about how they treat us” (354). Alabaster’s attraction to Innon becomes not only an explicit act of resistance against his oppressors, but the very thing that affirms his humanity. 

This declaration is especially powerful in consideration of the greater literary context of depictions of queer relationships. The association of Alabaster’s humanity to his homosexual attraction to Innon rejects a long history of characters made subliminally queer by their inhuman traits and features, conflating queerness with monstrosity. Even his resistance in this moment is an act of queer defiance. Syenite regards Alabaster’s willingness to give voice to what “all roggas know” as “vulgar” (354). This evaluation echoes theorist Harry Benshoff’s The Monster Theory Reader, which characterizes queer activism as “unruly, defiant, and angry,” reveling in “the discourse of the loathsome, the outcast,” the “kind of activism that attacks the dominant notion of the natural” (Benshoff 227). By the time we reach the sex scene between the three of them twenty pages later, Alabaster and Syenite’s sexual relationship with Innon has been inextricably linked to their humanity, a declaration of queer resistance against the systemic oppression that traumatized them. 

Left to a reader’s imagination, their dynamic might reproduce something conventional and expected, or even bewilder readers without any personal connection to polyamorous communities. But SF/F has always been about imagining other ways of being, so being able to actually see the specifics of their dynamic serves that function. Through Syenite’s perspective, Jemisin explicitly challenges any normative presumptions about their dynamic: she concludes that their sexual practice is “not a threesome, or a love triangle,” two common ways of conceptualizing polyamorous encounters. Instead, Syenite calls it “a two-and-a-half-some, an affection dihedron. (And, well, maybe it’s love).” This use of “love” stands in stark contrast to her and Alabaster’s “all business” approach to their previous couplings. The result—this humanizing reclamation of a feeling as vulnerable as love—is revealing yet honest to Alabaster and Syenite’s mutual trauma, while also offering hope for healing. 

As for what an affection dihedron looks like, each detail in the scene challenges Syenite and Alabaster’s trauma, demonstrating the reparative potential of their dynamic with Innon. Even two years into the dynamic, Alabaster “doesn’t want [Syenite…] that way, nor she him”; they “can’t stand sex with one another directly” (372). Trauma neutered their ability to be physically intimate with one another, tainted it with memories of compulsory procreation. However, Innon’s inclusion lubricates their interactions with one another, allowing Syenite to find them “beautiful together,” calling it “unbelievably arousing…to watch Innon drive [Alabaster] to moaning and begging” (371-372). She acknowledges that she “likes” sex with Innon “more when ‘Baster’s watching” and notes that Alabaster “also clearly gets off on her going to pieces with someone else.” The exhibitionist and voyeuristic indulgence of cuckolding kink directly challenges the way they were hawkishly supervised and monitored in their sexual activities previously by enforcers who clinicized it, not by aroused friends and lovers. 

The details also continue to deliberately mirror the original scene between Syenite and Alabaster, including how both of them draw a pleasure from their interactions with Innon that they never found with one another alone. The scene opens with Alabaster’s dialogue, which was wholly absent from his interaction with Syenite alone, as Syenite hears him “blurting, “Oh fuck, oh please, oh Earth, I can’t, Innon” (371). Instead of shutting his eyes to imagine someone else, he calls Innon by name. Contrasting his dissociation during the rape scene with Syenite, Alabaster is fully present and connected with her and Innon here. Syenite, too, takes pleasure from the encounter that she never got in the Fulcrum. Innon is “a considerate lover” who “does marvelous things with his fingers”—so “of course she’s wet” when Innon “slides a hand between Syen’s legs” (371). With Alabaster, additional lube could not make up the difference of Syenite’s disinterest in penetration, and she compared him unfavorably to toys and masturbation. 

As the encounter continues, the details further enforce how the queerness of Alabaster and Syenite’s sexual experiences with Innon separate them from the reproductive trauma of heterosexual intercourse at the Fulcrum. Again Alabaster takes a submissive role, but while the way he speaks “against Innon’s shoulder” suggests face-to-face positioning that might seem conventional, penetration is absent. Instead, “Innon pants and ruts against him, cock on oily cock.” While coarse and obscene language like “cock” drenches the passage in heat and arousal, it does so while challenging preconceptions about what intercourse can and does look like, reinforcing that for Alabaster, the sexiest part of this encounter is not the cock, but the subversiveness of it all. 

While Alabaster’s strained orgasm signaled the end of his heterosexual encounter with Syenite, in accordance with the ways that heteropatriarchy centers the penetrating partner’s orgasm, the encounter with Innon is not constrained to this limitation. When “Alabaster is spent but Innon isn’t,” the scene does not end: Innon “does not stop thrusting against Alabaster until [Syenite] curses and demands all of his attention.” Decentering Alabaster’s orgasm allows him to discover his humanity outside of his ability to procreate, which is especially radical for a Black queer man who has been reduced to breeding stock. Syenite, too, reclaims her reproductive agency. She knows that she “should worry about another pregnancy, maybe from Alabaster again given how messy things get between the three of them,” but she also knows that “someone will love her children no matter what,” removing the element of fear (372). That “utter lack of fear,” Syenite tells the reader, is “another turn-on, probably.” Genetic lineage was everything for the fascist eugenics policies of the Fulcrum, so Jemisin highlights how kinks often involve indulging or subverting cultural taboos and reclaiming agency over societal traumas.

When examining why writers might include detailed sex scenes in SF/F, I look to the question posed by SF writer Samuel R. Delany in his 1988 memoir The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village: “Why speak of what’s uncomfortable to speak of? What damages might it do to women, children, the temperamentally more refined, the socially ignorant, the less well-educated, those with a barely controlled tendency toward the perverse?” In context, this question, which enumerates the many ostensibly vulnerable groups that stand to be harmed by so-called obscenity, pertains as much to his coming out as it does to writing about the obscene. 

Its construction reveals the common thread at the core of questions like ‘Why include a sex scene?’ and ‘Why come out of the closet?’ and even ‘Why does the story need dragons?’ Each of these questions belies an argument, delivered with a bullying sort of leverage, that the speaker should not have to acknowledge the disdainful subject exists. In the face of questions of censorship and social convention, SF/F has often stood at the vanguard to challenge these derisive questions with its own: ‘Why not?’ In Ida Yoshinaga’s Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction, P. Djeli Clark considers the power of counternarratives in imaginative fiction, exploring what if instead of what is. 

For me as a queer person growing up in the repressive culture of the United States, depictions of queer sex often felt speculative in nature, as wild to imagine and as challenging to my perspective as dragons and spaceships precisely because authentic, human depictions were—and still are—so rare. The sex scenes in The Fifth Season provide a quintessential example of science fiction and fantasy’s potential for imagining a way of living unfettered by the conditioned limitations of not just literary realism, but the modern world’s normative perspective. What if a poly queer triad could find a happy reprieve from fascism and chattel slavery and eugenics in non-normative sexual relations with one another? Despite our cultural reluctance to talk about sex in the United States, it is as much a part of the human social experience as food and government and religious holidays, and has just as much place on the page to render its role in our pains and our joys, in our connections with each other.