In the latter decades of the twentieth century, television shows, radio talk shows, movies, books, and magazines have steadily included more erotic topics, more clinical detail in the management of such topics, and freer use in public of terminology once restricted to locker rooms, boudoirs, and the streets. Writers more often include terminology which, in the early days of television broadcasting, would have been consistently censored. In the last years of the century, certain items of the old taboo vocabulary are permissible, while others are still banned or beeped from a broadcast.

As mentioned in the discussion of precedents, in They Whisper, Butler falls in line with an ancient pattern of a character in some way associating human erotic experience with an understanding of the supernatural. Although he states that he writes in order for his work to share sensory experience rather than provoke ideological debate...