James Frey says:

fictional characters – homo fictus – are not identical to flesh-and-blood human beings – homo sapiens. One reason for this is that readers wish to read about the exceptional rather than the mundane. Readers demand that homo fictus be more handsome or ugly, ruthless or noble, vengeful or giving, brave or cowardly, and so on, than real people, are. Homo fictus has hotter passions and colder anger; he travels more, fights more, loves more, changes more, has more sex. Lots more sex. (Frey, J 1988)

While protagonists in The Slap don’t love more or change very much at all, it’s fair to say they are having much more sex than us ordinary mortals – if they’re not getting it off, they’re fantasising about getting it off. Yet, rather than learn or understand more about the protagonists by seeing them in their most intimate and sometimes most vulnerable moments, the men in particular, seem devoid of feeling other than that which occurs in their nether regions.

If men in The Slap are defined by sexual desire, women are defined by submissiveness. Though Tsiolkas may have been using sex to comment on masculinist norms or contemporary sexual relationships, his focus on the mechanics of sex contributed to characters who seem little more than stereotypes.

Sex scenes in The Slap, though confronting, were equally generic, when they could have been romantic, fun, erotic, funny, tender, raunchy, loving or a combination of all the above. Sex is difficult to write without riddling it with cliché, overblowing it with sentiment, or resorting to orgasmic metaphors last seen and best forgotten in the film Australia. However, these literary faux pas may have been an improvement on sex so analogous, it sometimes felt that the only thing changing between scenes were the names.

The people of The Slap were often indistinguishable from each other but no more so than when it came to their sexual antics – giggling or sheepish women subjugated by male desire, whose fulfillment came when their men did, and male protagonists, most often thrusting and sperm-producing. Sex was usually cold and mechanical and about one thing – male gratification. This scene fairly typical:

With her free hand she started tickling his balls, then slowly her fingers tapped along the shaft of his fattening cock … He closed his hand around Kelly’s fingers to tighten her grip around his cock and he thrust up and down on his seat,
jerking himself into her hand

An absence of interiority, with sex more about the physical, most notably male genitalia, and its myriad functions, missed the most important erogenous zone of all – the brain. Instead, we got sex scenes that turned us on (or off) with hairy chests, bulging pecs, a labia-majora-of-cunts and tits enough to do a Benny Hill skit proud.

Without interiority, it was difficult to identify with the protagonists or to better understand their inner lives, their motivations or the relationships between couples. So it was revealed that Hector was worried about ageing and felt guilty about his affair with Connie; why, when he loved Aisha and enjoyed regular rollicking sex with his missus (she was up for it even when she was stacking the dishwasher), did he have the affair in the first place?

The Slap favoured sex devoid of foreplay, and was replete with women who were slutty or not, grateful as mistresses and wives, or whose only role was as fodder for men’s fantasies. Hector, for instance, is overwhelmed by a need to masturbate when he returns home after spying a young woman while out shopping:

He was picturing the luscious buttocks of the Vietnamese woman he had spied at the market. He came in a minute and he wiped the semen off the seat, chucked the toilet paper in the bowl, pissed, and flushed it all away.

Harry is similarly inclined:

Four young girls in thin strips of bikinis were showering in the park. They had pert adolescent tits, they were blonde and lithe. Grinning, he pushed his crotch hard against the dark tinted glass of the balcony wall. He breathed long and hard, his eyes still focused on the girls below, who were now giggling and squealing, splashing water at each other. His penis lengthened and hardened, stretching against the lycra. Slowly, he rocked back and forth against the glass. Come on, bitch, he mouthed to himself. One of the girls had bent over and he let out a small groan at glimpsing her full, toned buttocks. Wouldn’t you want my cock up that hole, you little whore.

The relentlessly nasty portrayal of sex in The Slap was reinforced by a narrative that sounded more like the voiceover from a bad 70s porno movie than a modern take on sexuality:

A stiffening obliging nipple…

He had never been fond of girls who wore thickly applied foundation, powder and lipstick. He thought it was sluttish, and even though he was aware of the ridiculous conservatism of his response, he could not bring himself to admire a heavily painted women…

…his cock had been released from the cavity of his Y-fronts and he could smell Aisha’s desire…

She shook and shuddered as he pushed his cock inside her. She wanted to bite him scratch him, devour him. Fuck me…

Fuck my mouth, she urged and took his cock once more inside her…that’s it honey, that’s beautiful…

It felt slutty, dangerous. His salty masculine taste was in her mouth…

And the sexual manners of the protagonists seem way more suited to pimps and entrepreneurs-made-recently-good than the middle classes who are said to have inspired The Slap. Like Harry, Tsiolkas perhaps doesn’t realise that being middle-class is about much more than owning expensive real estate.

Tsiolkas has been quoted as saying ‘the publishing industry in this country is dominated by an old-school, Anglo-bourgeois elite and I am tired of that voice‘. While I don’t disagree, it’s a shame he has replaced bourgeois stereotypes with gendered and cultural stereotypes that fail to acknowledge diversity.