erotica and pprnography

[schmerica]

Yesterday fox1013 had a very interesting post about porn and fanfiction and reader response, which you can find here; in the comments to it, though, I kind of went off on a weird tangent about my thoughts on erotica and pornography, which I think I'll elaborate more on here, rather than take up all her space in a digression.

(Note: I'm pretty much speaking about women, here, and both fannish and non-fannish related sexuality.)

Basically, it comes down to the fact that I really dislike the common splitting of sexually explicit material into two distinct groups -- "pornography" at one end, and "erotica" on the other. My objections to this have a couple of different root causes.

1. The distinction between the two is fundamentally meaningless and arbitrary.

Pornography is, notoriously, in the eye of the beholder; the disctinction generally being made between erotica and pornography is generally fuzzy to the point of being frustrating. The criteria being used change depending on the specific point the arguer is trying to make, but I don't believe I've seen one argument that uses a set of guidelines for the difference between the two categories that is clear and non-relative. The inability to distinguish the categories in any definite lessens the *use* of those categories.

2. It encourages a sanitizing and restricting of women's sexuality.

Behind almost every set of definitions I've read for the relationship of "erotica" and "pornography", there's been a fairly clear background message of "porn=bad; erotica=good." Pornography is crude and exploitative and loin-heavy; erotica is thoughtful and emotion-heavy and literary.

Obviously erotica is better than porn. Obviously erotica is what *should* get you off -- or at least, you shouldn't talk about it if you like porn. Obviously women like erotica and not porn; porn is for guys.

Women don't like crudeness or graphicness or raunchiness. Women want to see two people in love making sweet candlelit love and proclaiming devotion and snuggling. Women don't want fucking or hairpulling or spurting or cocksucking.

I was actually reading in somebody's journal a week or two ago when they had casually referred to slash in their post as "gay porn" and someone had commented about how, really, it was erotica, and the slashers who wrote and devoured it wouldn't touch real porn with a ten foot pole.

Which both flabbergasted me and pissed me off in the same way hearing "Women don't get turned on by two guys together" did in freshman women's studies and "Women like words, guys like pictures" does every single time I hear. They're blanket statements that in no way reflect the reality of women's complicated sexuality.

I mean, the fact that I know women who write thoughtful, well-written, sexually explicit material doesn't mean that those same women don't turn around and collect and watch hardcore pornographic videos or troll the Nifty Archive at their leisure.

Bowlderizing sexuality makes things tidy, but it still sucks.

3. I find it aesthetically displeasing.

This, of course, is purely personal. My personal connotations with the word "porn" is sexually explicit material; I think porn and I think of boys having sex and girls having sex and all the slash I've read and sitting around in a room full of women to watch boys fuck onscreen. These are all positive associations for me. (Sometimes there's an extra element of "oh, that's *dirty*", which, frankly, only adds to the appeal.)

"Erotica", on the other hand, almost always strikes me as overly precious. It can come across in two ways: either porn that's afraid to call itself porn, or, more commonly, it makes me think of really pretentious and overwritten stories found in overpriced story collections. It's not a sexy word at all; it sounds too overly distanced from its material.

Of course, on the other hand, we could all just avoid this topic entirely and just use the word "smut", I guess.

Unless it makes you think of plant diseases.

Comments

Contrasting Opinion

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

I, uh--well, call me a rebel, but I disagree. Not with the point you're making about value judgments (there are some attached to these words, yeah, and I agree that that's wrong) and not with the idea that women really like carnal visual pornography, because I think lots do, but with this:

I was actually reading in somebody's journal a week or two ago when they had casually referred to slash in their post as "gay porn" and someone had commented about how, really, it was erotica, and the slashers who wrote and devoured it wouldn't touch real porn with a ten foot pole.

I don't think that slash is either "gay" (by which I'm assuming people mean "gay male")or "porn" even though many women who enjoy slash may themselves be queer or have gay male friends or enjoy porn when they're not reading slash. Do you see what I mean? Sure, women who enjoy slash may also enjoy porn (of which a subset is gay porn) but I don't think that that means slash = porn or slash=gay porn. Why do I argue this? Well, mainly because I don't like the idea that this homegrown female storytelling movement just gets lumped into the category of "gay male porn" which was not created by and is largely not marketed to us (however much it may actually be consumed by us).

It's a radical feminist thang. *G*

Now, one can surely argue that slash and porn and gay porn can be used for a similar purpose--orgasm!--and I would say yay to that and amen. Orgasms are good, and I never fail to hope that I get people off even despite my penchant for clowns, mimes, etc. On the other hands, vibrators are also used to produce orgasm but slash is not therefore a vibrator. Similarly, you can read slash for other things but you can not, to my knowledge, read a vibrator, except maybe for the really small print on the side telling you how and where to change the battery.

You take my point.

In fact, I might go so far as to argue that porn isn't a thing but a methodology. By which I mean, you can--and should!--use things pornographically; you should, in fact, masturbate to innocuous things as well as carnal ones, to hard core porn and passages of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Lolita and to slash and to Justin Timberlake's smile. To Spock's ears, to Rob Lowe's haircut, to algebraic formulas if you like math. And women should definitely do this, and they want to do it, and I agree that they've often been slandered as not wanting to. BUT---the fact that one can use things erotically does not mean that they have only this use; hell, even hard core porn is now being studied by filmmakers for it's aesthetics, and they don't mean the cocks. And women sometimes also use porn to bond with friends where the point is NOT erotic but communitarian . So just because a thing has a pornographic use, that doens't mean it's "only" pornography--and in this way, even pornography is not only pornography. Justin Timberlake's smile is also good for other things, like selling soda pop, etc.

Anyway, just a differing opinion for, you know, contrast. *g*

Addendum

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Oh, and by the way, I meant to add--yeah, for some women, slash and other kinds of pornography are contiguous pleasures, and for some women they're not, right? I mean, I don't think we want to pathologize the women for whom these are not analagous pleasures, right? I mean, some people don't even enjoy slash if it's not in their fandom, or doesn't feature their BSO or their type of BSO--they aren't interested if it loses even that much specificity. So I mean, the transfer from fannish to not, word to image--there might be a spectrum of contiguous pleasures, sure, but logically, there are going be people who lose interest somewhere along there too and again, I'm suspicious of any attempt to pathologize them just as I'm suspicious of the people who claim that NO slasher in their right mind would touch pornography. Some would, some wouldn't, no?

Re: Addendum

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

No, yeah, I agree completely; seriously, the last thing I meant to do with this post was to say one thing is good and another is bad, to imply that there's one way of relating to sexuality that we should all follow. I was writing in defensive manner, I think, so that may have affected how well I expressed that.

Re: Contrasting Opinion

[persian-slipper.livejournal.com]

Dude, if all my professors explained things like that, I would be *way* more interested in fem/gen studies, semantics, and jargon.

::loves Speranza's exceedingly cool academic brain::

Re: Contrasting Opinion

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I didn't mean, necessarily, to imply that slash does equal porn. I think describing slash with "gay porn" shorthand really is overly simplistic for a complicated form -- which most of us are writing for different reasons and getting very different things out of. It's easier to say "gay porn" than it is to get into the history of fandom and feminism and sexuality and relationships and psychology, but it does lose a *lot* in accuracy.

But, of course, that's not to say slash *isn't* pornographic, either. And really, what I was trying to respond to there was that same assumption that things that we like *aren't* porn, because if they *were*, we wouldn't like it -- really, the automatic dismissal there of "smart or educated or [insert slasher persona cliche] here don't like pornography; if it was really pornography, they wouldn't like it." I wasn't specifically responding to the denial of slash as gay porn as such.

In fact, I might go so far as to argue that porn isn't a thing but a methodology.

I find this whole paragraph really fascinating, actually; I was really glad to read your whole comment.

Re: Contrasting Opinion

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

And actually, I agree with your entire clarification, so look! Synthesis! *G*

Seriously--I'm obviously with you in disliking the idea that "good girls don't"--what you're calling the "smart or educated or [insert slasher persona cliche] here don't like pornography; if it was really pornography, they wouldn't like it."

OTOH, I'm more and more interested in these terminology debates--erotica vs gay porn (neither accurate, imo), or even recuperating WNGWJLEO as a kind of groping toward something, a way of talking about some complicated literary-televisual-sexual pleasure that doesn't have a name. And I'm suspicious when other names-"gay" "porn" "erotica"--slide onto what we're doing.

Re: Contrasting Opinion

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*Jumps up and down flailing and going YES! YES! Only SHE explains it SO MUCH BETTER!*

The icon expresses my latest approach to the problem.

Re: Contrasting Opinion

[lyssabard.livejournal.com]

Dear god, you're fabulous. :)

Now, I wish all of you were around when I was attacked for calling someone's "erotic roleply" on a messageboard "smut", as in, "Wow, what wonderful smut, good job! Well done!"

I am so in agreement.

Re: Contrasting Opinion

[wemblee.livejournal.com]

or even recuperating WNGWJLEO as a kind of groping toward something, a way of talking about some complicated literary-televisual-sexual pleasure that doesn't have a name.

Have you talked about this elsewhere? Or, if not, do you plan to? Also, may I worship your brain?