alt title(s): IKEA Porn
So Hawt!
"OK, insert Rod 'A' into Rod Support 'B'."
"That's what she-"
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.
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
". 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!
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.
Honourable mention goes to:
- My Immortal. Who could forget "And then he put his thingy in my you-know-what and we did it"?
- Laurell K. Hamilton, whose last few books have devolved into exactly this sort of porn.
- Indeed, one wonders if Ms. Hamilton has been replaced by a pod-person who has never had sex before, her descriptions are so trite.
- 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."
- Brokeback Mountain's (in)famous tent scene deserves more than mere honourable mention. Not only is there no foreplay or buildup to the sex, but anyone who has ever had anal can tell you that you can not just spit on yourself and jump in.
- That scene is hilarious if you happen to be watching the movie with subtitles. *grunt* *grunt* *spit*
- The short story upon which the movie is based is even worse. Pretty much the whole thing reads like this.
- The Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction award showcases bad sex in fiction that quite often falls into this trope.
- German-Polish critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki should also be mentioned, after he famously pointed out in one of his critiques that the sentence "he put his penis into her vagina" is about as interesting as "he put his pencil in the pocket". Well, that's what he said.
- Hilariously subverted in this Smallville fanfiction.
- Parodied in Futurama with Bender "Come on, it's just like making love. Y'know: Left, down, rotate 62 degrees, engage rotor."
- 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.
- 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 Troper recalls 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. This Troper will not dignify the person with this by giving the name.
- Most actual Porn resembles this, sacrificing any form of eroticism or foreplay for unnatural and mechanical movements repeated ad infinitum.
- 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.
- The Shield invokes this, intentionally, in an ongoing subversion of Hollywood Sex.
- 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.
- John Varley's novel Mammoth contained an IKEA Erotica scene so cringe-inducingly unerotica that this troper considers it a marvel that the novel got published.
- Episode 6 of 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"?
- 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.
- This sign◊, as documented on the Fail Blog.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
