Eh. See, in SoIaF the sex usually works for the purposes of character development--it worked particularly well with Tyrion and Jon Snow, though it missed the mark a little with Dany in that though I can remember the scene I can't recall exactly what impact it was supposed to have on her other than making her uncomfortable and supposedly signifying... something about her moving past the horse lord whose name I forget from book 1. It gets a little much at times, but I would be hard pressed to say it's gratutious; read contemporary fiction (EDIT: published fiction, mind, not internet publications or something published through the far more sketchy self publication companies) and there's about a 30% chance sex will be talked about as explicitly as it is in Martin's series, and about a 5% chance that it'll be talked about more explicitly. Mary Gaitskill, Miranda July, Alan Hasset (Oh man, Alan Hasset... If you think the depictions of sex in ASoIaF are bad go read "The Beginnings of Grief." Though arguably it's utilized better in that work than it is in ASoIaF), and others I can't list off off the top of my head (those are just the ones I've read recently and thus the ones more prominent in my mind), have all published stories with more explicit depictions of sex acts than ASoIaF. Honestly, saying that the series has "more sex than works supposedly about sex" is naive (especially regarding works ostensibly about sex! But you're Alex so that's O.K.) and blows the scenes in question out of proportion both within the books (EDIT 2: hey, look, another tangent that makes this sentence hard to read) and within trends in modern literature.
Which, of course, brings us back to the point I made in my last post: MC's worries about something not being valid enough of a piece of fiction to talk about in this topic are stupid.
Serious EDIT2: Of course, though anthologized or published in collections of stories through the traditional channels they are certainly less popular; ASoIaF is one of the few pieces of pop fiction that takes as frank of an approach to sex as it does. An argument could be made that this is an artifact from the works being closer to literary fiction than other fantasy or pop fiction works, but an equally compelling argument could be made to that connection being superficial. I would probably say that the lack of such an approach to sex in much pop. fiction stems from the fact that pop. fiction is written for and marketed to the public at large (even most fantasy; moreso than literary fiction, anyway) and is more a reflection of the public's tastes than it is a qualifier of... well, anything else.
EDIT 3: Also, after rereading MC's first post, hahahahahaha. Mathematical inconsistencies. Hahahaha. Oh, man, what do you expect? A writer to not fail at math to a degree? Hahahaha. Haaaaah.
