"OK, insert Tab A into Slot B."
"That's what she-"
"If you say 'That's what she said' one more time, I'm gonna pop you."
Named after the Swedish home furniture retail chain,
IKEA Erotica describes the tendency of badly written sex scenes to be nothing more than "insert tab A into slot B"
ad nauseam, as though the readers
actually didn't know what goes where. The result is that the participants might as well be doing nothing more interesting than assembling a flat-pack wardrobe, the kind of affordable, Swedish, some-assembly-required crap IKEA is known for. The point of erotica is to make the reader feel something of what the characters do, which in most cases will be arousal rather than boredom. It's often a sign that the writer didn't want to have a sex scene here but
got overruled, or that the writer is sexually inexperienced and writing with the aid of a GCSE biology textbook (a lot of
Fan Fiction written by 14-year-old girls comes into this category). Examples are too numerous to list, and too forgettable to remember in any case.
One
trippy but well-written
Fan Fic used
IKEA Erotica in a sex scene to convey the fact that the characters were just (literally) going through the motions and didn't feel anything, making intentional use of the effect that's so often unintentionally triggered. T.S. Eliot's
The Waste Land makes similiar use, ending with the line "Well, thank heavens that's over." Well, not
really. But it
does imply something similar in "The Fire Sermon" portion...
An extremely common feature of
PWP. An example of
IKEA Erotica is the line, "
He pressed his hard sex against her soft sex and they had sex
".
And who could forget "
And then he put his thingy in my you-know-what and we did it".
However, honourable mention goes to:
- Laurell K. Hamilton, whose last few books have devolved into exactly this sort of porn.
See also
Fetish Retardant and
Narm, common consequences of
IKEA Erotica.
