# Taboo Sex Scenes and Internal Struggles



## BRN (Apr 9, 2011)

I'm currently eight-point-three-thousand into a lemon that I'm plugging through. My main character's in a position where he wants whats coming to him but he's struggling to reconcile his desires with the extremely taboo nature of those desires. What sort of language can I use to show internal struggle?


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## Daisy La Liebre (Apr 9, 2011)

Monologuing is good for that, I suppose. Body language too. Pacing is a sign of discomfort, and excessive escapism like drug use...


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## M. LeRenard (Apr 10, 2011)

Depends a lot on the tone of the whole story.  I dealt with internal struggles in my novel mainly by having the main character talk to himself.  If you want to make it a little more psychological, you can make it seem like two characters are talking, when really it's just one by splitting the dialogue into paragraphs, with one speaker representing one side of the debate and the the other speaker representing the other.
Or you don't have to say anything at all, and just portray the internal struggle through actions or character progression.  Maybe if it's a really tough struggle, this fellow will start having a mental breakdown and eventually show signs of physical decay due to a serious depression or some such thing.  Like Jared was saying, maybe the fellow starts using drugs or drinking heavily, starts showing less interest in personal appearance, things like that.
So I guess think about degree and tone.


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## Shouden (Apr 15, 2011)

For anthro characters, the way a tail wags can also help with showing internal struggles. I use that a lot. Sometimes it's also a good idea to find out how the feral animal of you character tends to deal with conflict (unless they're not mammalian.) Like, with wolves, if they're being dominate, they bear their teeth, ruffle their fur an and lay back their ears, whereas, when they're submissive, they fold their ears back, cower low, they're fur is flat, and their tails are tucked between the legs. Sometimes you can tell when an animal is nervous by their expressions and body movements and posture as well. Look at deer when they since a predator is near: they get all stiff and silent, ready to dart at a moment's notice.

But really, how YOU express YOUR character being nervous and uneasy and conflicted is completely up to you. Not everyone reacts the same way in the same situations and the same is true with characters in a story.


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## Lutrian (Jul 2, 2011)

I have a story in which this does come up.  It's a science fiction story with some anthro-type aliens.  The main character is a human.  Humans have been a spacefaring species for about 90 or so years, before the story is set.  However, humans are still a very sexually conservative species.  In the story, I did lay out some history about the sexual mores of some of the species, which are generally quite liberal, and contrasted it with humanity (i.e. after contact with its first non-terrestrial species, several countries, and US states expanded their bestiality laws to cover fully sentient non-humans).  Later in the story, when the human character finally faced the idea and possibility of having sex with a member of an anthro-wolf species, he had a lot on his plate.  Basically, I used a combination of dialogue with the wolf-alien, and the character's inner dialogue, and just played with it.  The alien wasn't forcing anything, but the human had to figure out whether his disdain for interspecies sex was his own, or merely his conforming to his own society's sexual mores.  Yes, in the end, it was a mental struggle.  My stories do not depict some Star Trek type future where everyone and everything is perfect.


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