Blog Dis
Erotica or porn?
2024-06-20
"You should be ashamed of yourself," said the curt, dismissive woman, in response to a review posted about one of my novels on a website called The Erotic Woman. Clearly, this woman was miffed w/ my erotic writings, so much so that she felt compelled to wag her disapproving finger at me, thru email, which meant that after she read the review, she navigated to my author site in order to be able to blast out a piece of her mind. "Don't hold back! Tell me what you really think." 😅 I thanked her for taking the time to contact me. Seriously.
Opinions are a good thing, even the ones that are caustic and disapproving. For when the day comes that I refuse to keep an open mind, to hear contrary opinions, I will give up engaging w/ others on this the internet and on this planet. Though, I couldn't leave her comments alone without a retort. I admitted that I don't have any shame because, lest I remind you, Miss Prim and Proper, erotica is about the exploration of desire vs porn which is about the exploitation of sex. There is a distinction. There is!
I've written erotica but I've never written porn.
Porn is pointless drivel, to my mind. Porn has limited thematic content, what I would call an actual thread of a story, other than a woman being overcome by a multitude of men who take her, one at a time or all at ounce. Whereas, erotica explores that most nebulous of territories, the range of human desire. This means there is greater potential to craft a story with depth and interesting angles, as opposed to the tired old clichés that are propagated in porn. Truth: my first novel is splattered with loads of sex, so much so that you'll be ready to mount a bedpost by the time you've devoured a few chapters, much less swallow the whole novel. I don't have any illusions about the quality of my writing in novel one. I refer to the writing as cliterature. Page after page after page highlights orifices being filled, and juices being spilled. I've been told by husbands that the book worked to perfection to put their wives and themselves in the mood, so by my estimation, the novel achieved what I had set out to do: to crank up the volume of lust.
But the second and third instalments in my Crimson fantasies are less sex and more story so that by the time you make it to the end of novel three you'll be asking yourself, "What happened to all the sex?" Try to please everyone and you'll wind up with a headache. There's just no pleasing everyone, nor should you base your writing on such a foolish aim. And if I were to apply this philosophy of infusing in every novel going forward, I, too, will get bored out of my skull, despite accepting that the majority of us don't want to create a society that excludes sexuality. I like the simplicity of Marilyn Monroe's thinking, "Sex is here to stay...." She's right, that bombshell of a woman, full-bodied, curvy, who embodied sexuality in all shapes and sizes. Sex is surely here to stay. We like it in novels. We like it in pictures and paintings and various other forms of art, like music, and especially in novels when the sex is cleverly written, and with a dash of panache.
I've got nothing against porn. I'm just not for the harsh variety of porn that depicts kids being used or abused. For me, this is the line that crosses into criminal behaviour. But erotica... again I'm reminded of some of the old writers like D.H. Lawrence and Anais Nin, Henry Miller and even the Roman poet Ovid. These writers broke ground with tales of lust and passion and they were judged for it because the public at that time was ill-prepared for demonstrating a brazen and flagrant disregard for social convention.
Indeed. I believe erotica and porn are here to stay for the long haul. So long as penises continue to inflate and vaginas continue to pulsate, there shall be lust and desire and sex and erotica and equally as vital, a need to dive into this manufactured world, that isn't quite like our own reality. Only thing I'd change about porn, if it was in my power to do so, would be to dial back the depictions of female abuse, what's being produced in bootleg porn: brutal rapes that are staged but look a tad too real, and atrocious acts like swirlies, where the young girl's head is stuck in the toilet while a guy is nailing her, or the abuse of deepthroating with far too large dildos to the point of choking the young woman, who throws up.🤢Young men are influenced by porn to the point of normalcy, thinking it's what we want, for them to try this out on us. I guarantee you it's not. We don't fantasize about being choked, or raped, or abused. We don't fantasize about this sort of thing at all. It's all in your head. And speaking of that organ resting atop your shoulders, inside is contained your imagination. Why not exercise this muscle and use your fantastic imagination toward erotica, to engage with your partner on a reciprocal basis, that is to say to be seductive and sexy, to be playful and fun, rather than pornographic, that borders on abusive? [Hard play, incidentally, has hard rules, most notably the one failsafe rule: to agree to the use of safe-words, so that if your partner at any point feels scared or unsafe, and they utter a safe word, it means you desist whatever you're doing to them immediately. It sure AF doesn't mean that you keep going].
Your imagination is the power house that generates your vivid fantasies, and your fantasies refuel your imagination, around and around, and these outshine old, boring porn. That's what writing erotica is all about, to let go, to submit to the imagination. You'll love the release and you'll feel like a new woman or man in the end. Practice makes perfect. Keep trying. Keep working with your partner to establish your erotic dance, to learn through trial and error how to hit each other's buttons. Sometimes it will be word-play that you speak to your partner, that curls their spines. At other times, it might be images of erotica in books which are aplenty is this field. And again, it might also be a sexy movie that you watch together which fills your heads and imaginations with more electric ideas on how to turn each other's cranks.
Opinions are a good thing, even the ones that are caustic and disapproving. For when the day comes that I refuse to keep an open mind, to hear contrary opinions, I will give up engaging w/ others on this the internet and on this planet. Though, I couldn't leave her comments alone without a retort. I admitted that I don't have any shame because, lest I remind you, Miss Prim and Proper, erotica is about the exploration of desire vs porn which is about the exploitation of sex. There is a distinction. There is!
I've written erotica but I've never written porn.
Porn is pointless drivel, to my mind. Porn has limited thematic content, what I would call an actual thread of a story, other than a woman being overcome by a multitude of men who take her, one at a time or all at ounce. Whereas, erotica explores that most nebulous of territories, the range of human desire. This means there is greater potential to craft a story with depth and interesting angles, as opposed to the tired old clichés that are propagated in porn. Truth: my first novel is splattered with loads of sex, so much so that you'll be ready to mount a bedpost by the time you've devoured a few chapters, much less swallow the whole novel. I don't have any illusions about the quality of my writing in novel one. I refer to the writing as cliterature. Page after page after page highlights orifices being filled, and juices being spilled. I've been told by husbands that the book worked to perfection to put their wives and themselves in the mood, so by my estimation, the novel achieved what I had set out to do: to crank up the volume of lust.
But the second and third instalments in my Crimson fantasies are less sex and more story so that by the time you make it to the end of novel three you'll be asking yourself, "What happened to all the sex?" Try to please everyone and you'll wind up with a headache. There's just no pleasing everyone, nor should you base your writing on such a foolish aim. And if I were to apply this philosophy of infusing in every novel going forward, I, too, will get bored out of my skull, despite accepting that the majority of us don't want to create a society that excludes sexuality. I like the simplicity of Marilyn Monroe's thinking, "Sex is here to stay...." She's right, that bombshell of a woman, full-bodied, curvy, who embodied sexuality in all shapes and sizes. Sex is surely here to stay. We like it in novels. We like it in pictures and paintings and various other forms of art, like music, and especially in novels when the sex is cleverly written, and with a dash of panache.
I've got nothing against porn. I'm just not for the harsh variety of porn that depicts kids being used or abused. For me, this is the line that crosses into criminal behaviour. But erotica... again I'm reminded of some of the old writers like D.H. Lawrence and Anais Nin, Henry Miller and even the Roman poet Ovid. These writers broke ground with tales of lust and passion and they were judged for it because the public at that time was ill-prepared for demonstrating a brazen and flagrant disregard for social convention.
Indeed. I believe erotica and porn are here to stay for the long haul. So long as penises continue to inflate and vaginas continue to pulsate, there shall be lust and desire and sex and erotica and equally as vital, a need to dive into this manufactured world, that isn't quite like our own reality. Only thing I'd change about porn, if it was in my power to do so, would be to dial back the depictions of female abuse, what's being produced in bootleg porn: brutal rapes that are staged but look a tad too real, and atrocious acts like swirlies, where the young girl's head is stuck in the toilet while a guy is nailing her, or the abuse of deepthroating with far too large dildos to the point of choking the young woman, who throws up.🤢Young men are influenced by porn to the point of normalcy, thinking it's what we want, for them to try this out on us. I guarantee you it's not. We don't fantasize about being choked, or raped, or abused. We don't fantasize about this sort of thing at all. It's all in your head. And speaking of that organ resting atop your shoulders, inside is contained your imagination. Why not exercise this muscle and use your fantastic imagination toward erotica, to engage with your partner on a reciprocal basis, that is to say to be seductive and sexy, to be playful and fun, rather than pornographic, that borders on abusive? [Hard play, incidentally, has hard rules, most notably the one failsafe rule: to agree to the use of safe-words, so that if your partner at any point feels scared or unsafe, and they utter a safe word, it means you desist whatever you're doing to them immediately. It sure AF doesn't mean that you keep going].
Your imagination is the power house that generates your vivid fantasies, and your fantasies refuel your imagination, around and around, and these outshine old, boring porn. That's what writing erotica is all about, to let go, to submit to the imagination. You'll love the release and you'll feel like a new woman or man in the end. Practice makes perfect. Keep trying. Keep working with your partner to establish your erotic dance, to learn through trial and error how to hit each other's buttons. Sometimes it will be word-play that you speak to your partner, that curls their spines. At other times, it might be images of erotica in books which are aplenty is this field. And again, it might also be a sexy movie that you watch together which fills your heads and imaginations with more electric ideas on how to turn each other's cranks.
