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alt title(s): IKEA Porn 
Awwwwwwww yeah!
Brian: OK, insert Rod 'A' into Rod Support 'B'."
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 furniture 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 biology textbook (a lot of Fan Fiction written by 14-year-old girls comes into this category), making it less of a case of You Fail Sex Ed Forever and more You Haven't Even Taken The Course Yet. Examples are too numerous to list, and too forgettable to remember in any case.
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 ". A frequently usable antidote: lead up to the act, then pull a discretion shot at the end of the chapter, coming back in during the next chapter when it's all over. It works in cinema, and it can work for you, too!
The extreme of IKEA Erotica is "verbing the noun", in which the scene is given mostly or entirely in subject-verb-object sentences in which the key words could be replaced by anything and you'd have difficulty noticing.
Not to be confused with furniture porn. Or The IKEA Fancy Dress Dinner Party. Also not to be confused with a Cargo Ship.
See also Fetish Retardant and Narm, common consequences of IKEA Erotica. Contrast with Mills And Boon Prose.
Honorable mention goes to:
Fan Fiction
- My Immortal. Who could forget "And then he put his thingy in my you-know-what and we did it"? Lampshaded and parodied in this dramatic reading.
- Karen placed her hands on Sally's ass. Sally licked up the right side of Dorothy's neck repeatedly. Karen finished the kiss. "Let's turn around." Karen took her hands off of Sally's ass. Sally took her hands off of Karen's ass. Karen and Dorothy turned 180 degrees. Described by one fanfic snark community as the only sex scene in the history of erotica ever to be written in LOGO.
- Most Transformers fan fiction falls into this category, only substitute "plug," "port," "cable," "valve," etc. for human genitalia. (Giant robot porn... who'da thunk?)
- Remember Rule Thirty Four.
- Writing with this particular form of... intimacy... actually has a name among Transformers fans - stickyfics.
- I've actually read a well written fanfic about Code Geass mechs. And it actually aroused a lot of people on the forum it was posted on.
- Hilariously subverted in this Smallville fanfiction.
- There is a stunningly prolific PWP-fic writer whose "stories" consist of about three hundred words, with the characters starting, having, and completing (usually with simultaneous, written-out screams) the encounter. If you have read one of this person's stories, you have read all of them. We will not dignify the person with this by giving the name.
- Cori Falls mixes this with Purple Prose to create the most boring, schmoopy and unsexy love scenes ever.
- Although Sonichu is a comic, it still manages this in the form of dialogue: before sex, Rosechu tells Sonichu "Insert Rod A into Slot B." Then there is a lengthy and squicky segue into the physiology of electric-hedgehog-Pokemon sex, which is like reading out a medical book, except that the book is written by an insane pervert.
- legolas by laura: "and then one of the orcs striped her and then he raped her and then laura said 'go away you bastard'."
- This troper found that hilarious. It's too late to say "no" when the deed is already done.
- Battler thrusted his penis one last time and he came. She came too. Then they flew down to the ground.
Literature
- The Clan of the Cave Bear series (with the exception of the first book) has pages and pages of this stuff (the sex scenes average at least six pages each) largely devoted to the fact that Ayla and Jondalar have genitals of a complementary size, and are in fact, the only people with genitals of such a size. Also, they like to watch horses do it. And mammoths.
- Laurell K. Hamilton, whose last few books have devolved into exactly this sort of porn.
- And when Ms. Hamilton isn't utilizing this trope she typically just has some weird mystic happening affect all the characters so they wake up hours (or days) later having had insanely hot orgies that they don't even remember. This really saves her from having to find new words to describe obscenely large werewolf-genitalia (which then get inserted into tab B).
- The (in)famous example from political lightning-rod Bill O'Reilly's book Those Who Trespass: "Ashley was now wearing only brief white panties. She had signaled her desire by removing her shirt and skirt, and by leaning back on the couch. She closed her eyes, concentrating on nothing but Shannon's tongue and lips. He gently teased her by licking the areas around her most sensitive erogenous zone. Then he slipped her panties down her legs and, within seconds, his tongue was inside her, moving rapidly."
- It may be worth mentioning that 'Shannon Michaels' (a man, by the way) is an Author Avatar. Yes.
- Sadly, there is no mention of falafel.
- Played For Laughs in Dave Barry In Cyberspace, with a "cybersex" session including the ridiculous line: "I AM THRUSTING MY MASSIVE KNOCKWURST OF LOVE INTO YOUR PASSION PERSIMMON!"
- And then it turns out that the guy is Al Gore. No, really.
- It gets better. The woman he's doing it with? Tipper Gore. And neither of them knew at first.
- The sex scenes in Greg Egan's novels are so frighteningly banal and usually misjudged from the characters' perspective that he's clearly subverting the whole idea of the things. Yes, people bump naughty bits together from time to time. They also urinate, get cramps, digest food, and flake off skin; there's no tradition of putting scenes specifically depicting those activities into novels.
- Tom Clancy's The Bear and The Dragon is proof that devout Catholics should never, ever, EVER be allowed to write sex scenes.
- Hell, Tom Clancy once induced a Funny Aneurysm Moment when he once said he was surprised his book "The Hunt For Red October" sold so well even when "they didn't have any sex in them". Looking back, it was probably for the best.
- John Varley's novel Mammoth contained an IKEA Erotica scene cringe-inducingly unerotic. "His stiffness into her wetness" or something like that.
- How NOT To Write A Novel points out in a section entitled "Assembly Instructions: Wherein the sex is drained of sex" that this is the likely result of a writer being uncomfortable with the scene; "The result will be something that reads like a medical brochure about erectile dysfunction. What's more, it will read as more perverse than a straightforward 'They fucked all night', and in a disturbing Norman Bates-y way." Weepingcock - a community devoted to the sporking of bad porn of all kinds - looks at this examples provided in the book here.
- An awesome scene early on in the Japanese creation myth Kojiki: "Izanagi asked his spouse Izanami, 'How's your body formed?' She replied, 'My body, formed though it be formed, has one place that is formed insufficiently.' Then Izanagi said, ' My body, formed though it be formed, has one place that is formed in excess. Therefore I would like to take that place in my body which is formed to excess and insert it into that place in your body that is formed insufficiently and give birth to the land. How would this be?' Izanami replied, 'This would be good.'"
- The Tales Of The Otori series should get mention for its two sentence sex scenes. They all go something like: They embraced, they climaxed.
- That's not IKEA erotica. There was no insert staff A in socket B, it was more on the lines of They fucked. Although the first scene is rather disturbing, the 2 protagonists have sex in the same room with a freshly killed corpse, in the castle belonging to the formerly live corpse, with guards running around trying to find one of them.
Film
Live Action TV
- The Shield invokes this, intentionally, in an ongoing subversion of Hollywood Sex.
- Episode 6 of Garth Marenghis Darkplace opens with a piece of hilariously bad IKEA Erotica. Later, Dean Learner gets to go on an epic rant about the standards of modern erotica writing, which ends up veering straight into Purple Prose.
Learner: ''I read modern writers, and it's "screw this", "he licked her", "she sucked that", "he bit the other", you know, "someone put it there", "he held it", I mean, where's the sensuality?
Marenghi: Where's "he glided in liquid smooth"? Where's "her wispy mound"?
- Night Court semi-inverted this once. Mac was discussing assembling a train set, saying "Insert tab A into slot B. Who can't do that?" and the DA (and in-house pervert) just gave him a look and said "You'd be surprised."
Real Life
Video Games
Web Original
- The SCP Foundation fic "Union" actually uses this for effect, since it's based on SCP-217, a virus that converts organisms into clockwork, both literally and figuratively.
- This definitely NSFW book review has sex passages quoted that defy the imagination. They are SO bad, in fact, that they make My Immortal seem like deathless erotic prose by comparison. Read it and you, too, can be torn between wanting to laugh at the ridiculousness and wanting to weep that the author got PAID to publish this.
- This sign◊, as documented on the Fail Blog.
- Text reads "not without a washer!", by the way.
- The PWP of certain fixations and fetishes can turn into matherotica, when the author decides that the best way to spark the reader's libido is by rattling off measurements. A blend of IKEAErotica and a failure to ShowDontTell, it misunderstands the thrill of the impossible which fuels these fantasies as "her breasts had become even bigger and heavier, growing five pounds and a full two inches in diameter in the course of one day, making her a 62FF."
Western Animation
- Parodied in Futurama with Bender "Come on, it's just like making love. Y'know: Left, down, rotate 62 degrees, engage rotor."
- Also shows up in the Family Guy movie. "Get in there! Get in there and... (while reading from The Joy of Sex) insert your pen-is into her vag-in-a!"
- And in the episode where Peter tries his hand at writing erotica, resulting in such timeless classics as The Hot Chick Who Was Italian or Maybe Some Kind of Spanish. As read by Betty White.
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