Sara_Wilcox Was it a rant? No problem, polite disagreement is the patron of useful discussions. 👍
I mentioned 'Gals don't like it' because it's a statistical thing. Of course, there are exceptions. Like everything else in life. So I think my post wasn't invalidated by your personal experience or style. It's not only me saying it, the behavioral scientists said it before me. We all have our idiosyncrasies, but I was talking about the majority.
The kind of people who will find your thread useful are exactly the ones who are ruining their sex scenes because they don't know how to dose or to describe what they see in their mind. Or they don't even see it in their mind, which is a BIG problem. The ones perfectly okay with how they are writing their sex scenes will just shrug (or laugh), so any advice here is not for people who know exactly what they are doing...
As you said, there are basic problems (as I remember, not exactly your words):
- not conveying the intended mood because The author is using the wrong/weak words.
- repeating words or phrases thus making it boring as hell
- turning the sex act into something mechanical (I call it 'the pistoning effect') and lacking emotion
- doing it all wrong because you don't know how it really is, didn't do your homework, went against physics/anatomy/common sense (like, male-male sex, it's a whole different thing and some inexperienced BL authors do forget it needs lube to be enjoyable...).
There are more, but you gave excellent tips for every of them.
But, at least to me, the most important thing is what you said more than one time in your comments: sometimes they don't know what they wish. They don't feel the scene. They turn one thing into another.
So I reason this way: Hm, so you don't know what you want with this sex scene, but you want to insert one all the same? WHY?! HELL, WHY?! (note that it is a rant 🤣)
If it doesn't occur to you as a consequence of something, sprouting naturally, in a way you can imagine the whys and the hows, why do you need to insert a sex scene?
And that's the problem in many (not all, but many) Webnovel romances. Too many crap sex scenes because authors feel they need to push a sex scene when they don't really need one in the first place. Just to earn traction. MATURE CONTENT - The magic words on the top of the synopsis (by the way, something frowned upon by WN editors).
By the way, I've read the source you mentioned long ago and used to have it pinned in my favorites bar. It's a good source with lots of useful tips and words. 👌 I don't remember any other so good.