It's how you tell it

I'm currently reading a science fiction book which, on the face of if, I ought to be falling in love with.  It has an exotic alien, and a very clever alien invasion strategy.  But I'm not falling in love with it, and it's got me thinking about the way we tell our stories.  The words we choose to tell that storyline, and where we choose to focus our camera, make a vital difference to how the story is told.

The writer of this book is male, and he writes about sex a lot, some of it explicitly.  To me that's just an irritating diversion taking me away from the story.   But the thing that can really turn me off a narrative is the way sex is described.  In this story, nobody makes love.  All sexual encounters are described as fucking, even when the characters say they love each other.  I find the author's way of describing the sex act hostile to women, focused on a male's bodily sensations.  There's rarely any emotional involvement in the act.  And even rarer is any recognition of the female's part in th sex act. These partners aren't real people, more like sex bots.  

Another thing which puts me off a story is a focus on corruption and the criminal world, to the extent that they're made to look interesting and attractive, and everyone is corrupt.  I can't care about a character who casually murders people just to obtain their clothes.  Apart from the dubious morality of focusing on the criminal world, I find there's always a sense of hopelessness to these narratives.  The people who live in the slums accept that's just the way things are. They don't make any attempt to change their circumstances, or to change the system which put them there.  Which is always some kind of corrupt government/regime ripe for overthrow.

I'm most tired of reading about abused prostitutes who are stuck in that life.  I want to grab hold of the narrative and introduce a formidable woman who takes them to a safe house, educates them, changes their belief systems so that they know they're capable of better things.  But I've never seen this in any narrative so far.

It depresses me enough when male authors set up this kind of world, but when women writers do it I'm ready to throw the book across the room.  It's likely to ensure I never read their work again.

I guess this is telling me that I should write to kind of book I want to see.  Maybe I need to think about writing a prostitute-saving character when I've finished my current rewrite.