Gratuitous
I am sometimes puzzled by the fact that we are well into the twenty-first century and people are still complaining about “gratuitous sex” in films and TV programmes like they did back in the ’70s. (I was most recently struck by comments in an interesting discussion of sexism in A Game of Thrones.) Of the various collocations for “gratuitous” I searched for on Google, “violence” comes top with 403,000 results, but “sex” manages a respectable 167,000. “Gratuitous eating” on the other hand, only gets 2,270 results, though I was interested to find that even “gratuitous chess” comes up occasionally (805 results).
This prompted me to look up “gratuitous” in the Oxford English Dictionary, since it is one of those words, like “egregious”, that gets thrown around a lot by people who aren’t sure exactly what it means, and I didn’t want to be one of those people. It means “Freely bestowed or obtained; granted without claim or merit; provided without payment or return; costing nothing to the recipient; free.” Well, in that case, gratuitous sex should be a wonderful thing. Oh, wait, there’s another definition: “Done, made, adopted, or assumed without any good ground or reason; not required or warranted by the circumstances of the case; uncalled-for; unjustifiable.” That’s the one we want. But why would sex in A Game of Thrones, or indeed in any fantasy, be uncalled-for?
I can see that it is not absolutely necessary for fantasy to have sex: The Lord of the Rings is still the greatest fantasy novel ever written, and nobody gets their end away during the entire epic (though we can assume that just after Sam concludes the book by saying “Well, I’m back” there is some hot hobbit sex). There again, chess is not necessary for a fantasy novel, but I’m sure that if someone put a chess scene in one, there would be no complaints about “gratuitous chess” unless, perhaps, they spent two hours showing the whole game. In practice, when people say “gratuitous” in the context of sex or violence, they don’t just mean “doesn’t need to be there” but “shouldn’t be there.” Sex is seen as something like defecation; we know it happens, but it doesn’t add anything to the story (unless, perhaps, it’s a bio of Martin Luther) and it’s kind of gross, so let’s keep it out. But of course sex is not like defecation. Not everybody does it regularly or even at all, it doesn’t usually smell bad, and most importantly, who you do it with, why you do it with them and sometimes even how you do it are significant variables. It’s kind of important that Jaime Lannister is boffing his sister, after all (and if you think that shows how fantasy has degenerated since the golden days of the Inklings, read Children of Hurin).
This does not of course mean that we should never complain about sex being gratuitous. Just like the two-hour chess scene, a two-hour Dothraki orgy would be uncalled for, unless it was some pornographic George R.R. Martin rip-off, called, say, A Game of Bones. But when your average sex scene is gratuitous in the sense that it is only thrown in to provide some titillation, that usually indicates a problem with the plot, not the sex.
Note: This post first appeared in LiveJournal a long time ago.
