My interpretation is that it is this thinking that the author is describing in their article. In short, if someone wasn't prudent, they would't feel to have to edit-out "not good" things. You could take them as just being a part of reality.
For the author, certain info (such as him very his usual briefs or she climaxing or someone smoking) is just to add "reality" to the scene. It doesn't say anything about the character per se. Yet, to Americans, it does. To them if it wouldn't say anything about the scene, it wouldn't be included. But that's only true for a subset of topics, them being body/sex stuff and smoking. Nobody would raise an eyebrow if the character was watching a football game.
> American readers need body/sex stuff to be told as stories and not as facts (so says my friend Sara Marzullo, about whom more later). The problem is that even if sex always requires storytelling, you can still just show a body—or a feeling, a glitch in the software of life where sex transpires—in a way that is not easy to interpret, or in a way that maybe doesn’t need to be interpreted at all, but that only needs to ring true. And even if this thing I just wrote sounds wholesome and real, somehow American literature—writers, editors, critics, readers—needs sex always to be contextualized. It should be raunchy. Or loving. Or a cautionary tale. It cannot be open-ended.
> This is a good chunk of what literature is for me. An opaqueness that affords us openendedness. Openendedness that is based on a feel for the world where details create facts so vivid you can touch them. They make you say « that’s real ». If stuff is put in a story only to create the sense of a story, then often it won’t coalesce into a simulacrum of reality.