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

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

I have a less "word"y response to your positive view of the word porn (mine is very mixed, because to me "porn" in the sense of slash is very different from the mainstream porn I've seen, which I did frankly find both degrading and dull), but I am running out the door, so I will try to respond later.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Well, my third point is very subjective -- I do admit that I happen to have very positive assocations with porn; I certainly don't expect everyone else to share them, nor I expect anyone else to just randomly dislike the word erotica. But my main point is less "yay, porn! all porn rocks!" than the first two things: that there's no consistent and determinable criteria for the dichotomy often presented between the two, and -- mostly this one -- that I don't get the vast generalizations stating sexuality and responses to sexual material as if they were flat-out *true*, that that's how things are, and the inability it gives to maneuver other reactions and feelings.

I mean, I'm not saying mainstream porn can't be gross. Because, yeah.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

Nono, I agree on the whole. But I can also understand where the view that Porn Is Degrading comes from. It's like why I have incredibly mixed feelings about strippers -- sure, more power to them, but they did choose a job that makes them an object rather than a job that requires brains or personality or specialized skills.

A friend of a friend got offered a Playboy shoot -- if she got implants first. In my worldview, that's degrading. Of course not all porn is like that. But enough of what most people think of when they hear "porn" is that the tendency to not want to call things we like "porn" doesn't surprise me a whole lot. People want to draw a line between things they like and things that disturb them. But with something as subjective as sexuality, that doesn't work terribly well.

Or something.

I kind of like "smut", myself, the plant-disease thing aside. But I use "porn", too, and very rarely erotica. I think my personal association with erotica tends to be that it's very stylized, but in a different direction than porn; much more about mood and setting in some ways. Very subjective definition.

*shrug* I'm rather incoherent and haven't thought about this recently, so apologizes if it makes as much sense as a weasel on crack.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

No, I think you're making sense -- I definitely see where you're coming from.