Age difference in romantic/sexual relationships in fiction?

Agreed, as long as you don't make a huge issue of their ages, it should be fine. Juliet was only 13 or 14 after all.

What about age differences in contemopries. Is it offputting for a 27 year old woman and a 42 year old man to fall in love if neither is a vampire?

fenroyal said:

I wasn't sure if there was a legal issue with writing it; I read fanfiction a few years back and folks always seemed to include a disclaimer that the characters engaging in sex were over 18, and it sounded like there was a legal reason they had to make it that way.

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I think that bit comes from websites - hosts don't allow child porn or children depicted in sexual situations, etc etc, so sites put a lot of restrictions on the stories they'll post. And because of the varying ages of consent, I suppose they went with 18 just to cover their backsides.

Chris P said:

I nearly sprayed diet Coke on my monitor. "The CHARACTERS are over the age of 18"?!?!?! Are you sure you weren't watching a porn film? Not that you would, of course.

Literature is filled with stories of taboo relationships, molested children, murders, bank robberies, etc. The "All characters and events are fiction" disclaimer should cover anything that goes on in the book. Who're they going to arrest, anyway? As long as your book doesn't come across as glorifying adult/child (and I mean CHILD) love I don't see how anyone would have a problem.

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yeah...Nabokov got away with it...and wow, it's pretty obvious what his ole Humbert was about

Monlette said:

Agreed, as long as you don't make a huge issue of their ages, it should be fine. Juliet was only 13 or 14 after all.

What about age differences in contemopries. Is it offputting for a 27 year old woman and a 42 year old man to fall in love if neither is a vampire?

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I hope its not offputting. My MC is 19 and her love interest is 34...and... neither is a vampire

Chris P said:

Seems to me you would have to TRY to make it child porn. 16 is the age of consent in most US states, if that makes a difference.

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In Ireland the legal age of consent is 17, and there are also laws about age differences, so even if you are 17 and consensual, if you sleep with someone in their mid 20's (I think the age is 24, but I can't think of the rop of my head) then it's still mandatory rape.

However, in Cletic societies you would have been engaged at 14 and married by 16, often to a man much older than yourself, so historically I don't think it's an issue at all.

Some examples, both adult and YA. In George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, Daenerys is married off at age fourteen IIRC and there is a description of her wedding night.

Meg Rosoff's Just in Case won the Carnegie Medal. In it, our fifteen-year-old protagonist loses his virginity to a nineteen-year-old girl. There's a sexually-active fourteen-year-old girl in Melvin Burgess's Doing It (though no description IIRC of her having sex). And the pregnant protagonist of Julie Bertagna's The Opposite of Chocolate is fourteen.

With written material you should not have a problem with underage sexual activity if it's not being written as a reader turn-on - which would be obvious if you were. Visual material is a different matter.

I really don't think it matters as it's fiction. They're both over the legal age of consent and since the...panic, for lack of a better word, about age difference and age in general came about in fairly modern times then it shouldn't raise any eyebrows. Considering that it older years it was considered acceptable for a family to arrange a marriage or sell their young daughter (12 or 13) to a much older man to be married.

As for the thing in fanfics where it said that the characters were over 18, I've read this before too. I think 18 is the oldest legal age in some countries so it's just a way of covering their backs.

What about Fiddler on the roof? They don't mention the daughter's age, but we assume mid to late teens, and her father is about to marry her off to a man older than he is. How's that for age difference?

I have a sexual-ish scene (think foreplay), fully described, between a thirteen-year-old and a thirty-four-year-old in my novel. My agent hasn't commented on it, so I'm assuming she's okay with it. We'll see whether an editor feels the same. But I think it works just fine, because my setting is Egypt in 1500 BCE. Life was just different back then. If I wrote such a scene set in modern times, readers would no doubt feel uncomfortable. Due to my setting and my character, though, readers are apt to be more accepting of the situation.

A lot of it has to do with my main character and how she views the situation: She's thirteen, but she views herself as an adult (if inexperienced) woman, as does everybody around her. That's the reality of her culture. None of my characters have any misgivings about her having sex, other than to be cautious of and sensitive to her potential nervousness over her first time. Nobody thinks she's too young. So it all depends, I think, on how you approach it.

To answer your question more directly, there are no technical restrictions on what you can and cannot do. If you focus on the idea that your main character is "underage" and "a child" and you get all graphic and icky with your descriptions, it is much more likely to be viewed by the reader as "child pornography." If the scene is true to your character and to her setting, and if the character doesn't feel uncomfortable with the situation (due to her age -- she may have good reason for feeling otherwise uncomfortable with it, but reasons other than "I'm a child, wtf" probably won't launch you into the realm of child porn) most readers are likely to be cool with it.

fenroyal said:

Maybe they were saying it for the benefit of readers who might be squeamish. Hm. Because of course now that you mention it you're right--tons of underage/forbidden relationship stuff in fiction. =3

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Yeah, um, I wouldn't take anything that happens in the world of fanfiction and compare it to the world of traditional publishing. "Apples and oranges" doesn't even begin to go there.

It depends on what you're writing. Erotica? Then you'd better be careful about the age of consent. If it's literature -- who cares? It all depends on the story.

The analogy would be porn vs. drama. If you're making porn (even soft core), then all actors must be over the age of consent. It's the law. Now, age of content is different for different countries, from 14 to 21. Still, there's a boundary you don't cross, especially legally.

Now, if you're making dramas, then anything goes. You can depict a sexual relationship in ancient Greek between a man and his 9 year old nephew if you want, or a woman having sex with his 12yo son, and that would be legit because you're telling a story. These are all legitimate stories and plots.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were Ancient Greek stories with plots like that. Seeing as Freud got lots of his complexes from them.

Monlette said:

What about age differences in contemopries. Is it offputting for a 27 year old woman and a 42 year old man to fall in love if neither is a vampire?

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Not at all.

I knew someone in "real life" that was 20 years younger than her husband.

My mother is 13 years OLDER than my stepfather. My father is 13 years YOUNGER than my stepmother.

As for fiction, in my current sci-fi WIP, the MC is a 17 y/o female virgin forced into marriage with a man 6 years older than her. Which means he is also very young, but she is considered a minor at the time they have sex, even though they're married.

My current women's fiction WIP involves a budding relationship between a 30 y/o woman and a 46 y/o man. I'm a 31 y/o woman myself, and I don't find that off-putting.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, none of my characters are vampires.

Libbie said:

I have a sexual-ish scene (think foreplay), fully described, between a thirteen-year-old and a thirty-four-year-old in my novel.

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This made me think of the Jerry Lee Lewis story. Wasn't his wife 14 when they got married? And I don't think she was a virgin either. But I can't remember exactly...

I think another factor is the explicitness of the sex scenes.

Ultimately, in historic type stories, it seems like 15 and up is okay because that is historically accurate.

14 seems like it's pushing into the gray area (though this is historically accurate) and 13 would probably turn a lot of readers off (but I don't think you have any legal issues to worry about).

This is of course assuming male character is 18+ at the time of sex with female character.

Actually, I'm reading a book called Shadowfall by James Clemens, in which a 13 year old girl who just got her period gets raped, and the rape is describe in some detail.

Overall, I think as long as you are accurate with your world building, you should be ok

Mel...

To the original post, the first thing anyone who is writing about a much earlier time should do is a little research. Most important, what was the life expectancy at that time. My guess is it was way lower than today, even in the best of societies. Second, what was the child mortality rate? These things would influence when a woman is considered worthy and ready for marriage and bearing children (hence, ready for sexual activity). An early start meant several things if the people were not well-to-do: more chances of bearing children that survive and help the family eke out a living, and on the other end one less mouth to feed as soon as that mouth was full sized and eating adult portions. My guess is the marrying age was much closer to menarche than today, even though that beginning of the female cycle may have been at a later age than today. Also, when considering different ages of lovers, the life expectancy may have made it more of an "anything goes" situation, particularly since the social mores of many societies gave much more freedom of choice to those of wealth or means regardless of age, and the woman's parents gained by such "upward" marriages.

Whatever is done with the story, the details of the storyline must be firmly set in the time and place of the story, and not influenced by the terms of today's mores, morals, or attitudes.

People were mothers as young as 8 or 9 years old depending on geography and time period. My grandmother was 13 when she became a mother. It was perfectly "normal" back then, considering most people only lived to their 30s and 40s in that part of the world.

As with so many things, it's all in the execution. I was deeply concerned with the way my newest project was developing. When it went out to various readers, I was waiting for the horrified response to come back over a few sexually charged scenes between my MC (aged 12) and her love interest (aged 27) in 1980s Kansas. To my great relief, from readers to agent, nobody freaked out, because in the internal logic of the story, that situation is acceptable. Not that it isn't troubling, but that it works.

Didn't the Supreme Court rule that depiction of fictitious child pornography (sketches, drawings, written works) isn't illegal anyway? Not that 16 would raise any eyebrows, but even if the child were 6, I doubt any laws would be broken (First Amendment and all that). Not that you'd find anyone who'd want to publish or read something like that outside of NAMBLA.

I don't know if this is particularly useful, but I do have two tidbits that might apply to the discussion.

First, what my buddies refer to as the "Rule of creepiness". They say that it is creepy for a male to be with a female that is less than half his age plus seven years old. If I am forty, I could be with a lady that was twenty seven, and that would not be creepy. A nineteen year old could be with a lady that was 16 and a half. The rule works for all ages over fourteen. I don't know how women feel about this, but I am guessing that it works for both sexes.

Second, Historically, we are marrying at a far older age than ever before. Teen marriage was commonplace as late as the 1930's (I believe).

Just don't write child porn. I think it will be fine.

Dave