The Boner Line.

There's a lot of bemoaning the inability of media to include sex without being all weird about it. Books, movies, and TV shows tend to fade to black or to tasteful montage even if it completely clashes with the style. Video games have to be even more circumspect, and even mentioning that sex exists in a game is pretty much a guarantee of scandal or disreputability. For the most part, a creative work is either erotica or totally non-erotic, and there's little integration.

Some of this is societal hangups, there's no question. And some of it is justifiable; a lot of the time, we don't really want to know exactly what fictional characters do in bed, not down to specific body fluids and muscular contractions. But I think some of it is also due to the Boner Line.

Because, I don't know about everyone, but I don't really watch or read porn. I use it. I don't just sit there thinking "yep, that's some sex there all right," I get physically aroused by it and I masturbate. Consequently, about five to ten minutes in I'm not going to want to find out about how the characters' relationship has changed or where their adventures take them next; I'm going to lose all interest and probably want a nap. Or if I'm looking at porn somewhere I can't masturbate, I'm going to feel very awkward about my arousal or have to devote a lot of attention to suppressing it.

There are few questions more awkward than "Should I be masturbating to this?", when I'm watching or reading a work of fiction. It's a significant gearshift. An action scene may feel different than a comic banter scene, but at least neither one physically takes me out of the story.

So I don't think it's sex-negative or buckling under to Moral Guardians to leave sex out of art--while it may be wrong to tap-dance around the very existence of sexuality, if you try to present sex as matter-of-factly as you'd present an intense conversation, you run into the Boner Line. If you don't want to badly distract your audience, you have to do a little tap-dancing. Sex and non-sex can never completely be integrated in art, not while audiences are susceptible to boners.