PoppingTom
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OK, define it.
Your preceded definition was, that if it's love or about love, it is erotica.
Who says it's no love between Rob and Carrie?
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Erotica and pornography: Is there a difference?
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OK, define it.
Your preceded definition was, that if it's love or about love, it is erotica.
Who says it's no love between Rob and Carrie?
In the fourth post on this thread I define it a number of ways. My definition in a previous post wasn't 'love' but 'sexual love' and that's not even my definition, it's Merriam-Webster's.
In a porno movie you can have characters say, "I love you. Let's make love." and the scene is then about a loving couple having sex, right? No. Erotica doesn't have to be about a loving relationship at all, but some level of intimacy or sensuality between characters which porn lacks. Sexual love is just something all porn lacks. All sex on camera isn't porn either, but that's not what we're talking about right? We're talking about writing.
PoppingTom
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Why not ?
Well, this is something I mentioned earlier: If communication is the only difference between erotica and porn, I write erotica. And my concept of communication features more than talk. Even looking in the eyes, looking at the effect you do on your opponent, is a kind of communication. You got the feeling, everything may be possible by that communication, which makes it such a thrill.
Yes, porn lacks that often, but not by definition.
You could say that by most of porn movies out there, for sure, but.....
....and there is a difference, as you got the free ability to put sexual love into porn.
So, again, and I really don't want to be dogmatic, but: where's the difference ?
UltimateSwitch
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What is the arguement? Erotica is pornographic literature, while pornography is visual and not written. Plus if it's abut Love its in the Romance Category. i mean two people can be in lvoe in any of them, but if it's about love it's Romance.
CharleyH
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I did use the word 'the' didn't I (it's shameful on my part.
) - I suppose to narrow my definition I should say that porn is gooey bukkake, a cum-splattered bitch, hard hairy balls dripping with cunt juice, raw wet cunny and a gaping hole you can spit into when it's been fucked so hard that you have to wonder if you could take it if you were on a receiving end. It's cunt, it's cock, it's cum and gape and it's down right dirty. Porn is nothing if not dirty. Erotica can be explicit, but it's never dirty. (of course, what is 'dirty' depends on the individual reader/ viewer)
PoppingTom
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Which, again, shows the erotica/porn-definition to be something total subjective.
This is probably a side issue, but I'm not sure I'd call 'Ulysses' either an erotic novel or a piece of erotica. I tend to agree with WRJames that:
"... there is, possibly, a distinction between stories that have some sexual content in them as opposed to ones that are about sex."
There's certainly a great deal of sex in 'Ulysses' but I wouldn't say it's exclusively or even predominantly about sex. I think Joyce was trying to write something 'holistic', or 'all-encompassing'. (Both terms are terminally clumsy, I'm afraid.) He was probably the first writer to include mundane sexual fantasy as a necessary part of a multi-faceted description of life. In Bloom's stream of consciousness passages, for example, sex is constantly popping up - just as it presumably does in most people's inner thoughts on a minute-by-minute basis - but it's intimately mixed with other things: thoughts about his dead son, his daughter, his father and wife; thoughts about religion; random memories; scientific conjectures; thoughts about his job; thoughts about the people he meets and the food he's eating - and so on, almost to infinity. And Joyce is also concerned to a very large extent with style and language: he seems to believe that reality is as mutable as the language used to convey it. So I'm loath to characterize "Ulysses" as an erotic novel - though, interestingly, Molly asks Bloom to get her some fresh erotica before he leaves the house in the morning:
"...He turned over the smudged pages. 'Ruby: the Pride of the Ring'. Hello. Illustration. Fierce Italian with carriage whip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor naked. Sheet kindly lent. The monster Maffei desisted and flung his victim from him with an oath. Cruelty behind it all. Doped animals. Trapeze at Hengler's. Had to look the other way. Mob gaping. Break your neck and we'll break our sides. Families of them. Bone them young so that they metempsychosis. That we live after death. Our souls. That a man's soul after he dies. Dignam's soul ...
- Did you finish it? he asked.
- Yes, she said. There's nothing smutty in it. Is she in love with the first fellow all the time?
- Never read it. Do you want another?
- Yes. Get another of Paul de Kock's. Nice name he has.
She poured more tea into her cup, watching its flow sideways. ..."
("Ulysses"; 1922; Penguin, 2000; pages 77 to 78)
And we shouldn't forget that "Ulysses"was banned in Britain in the 20s. So it used to be porn. But now it's Great Literature! Imagine!
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Verdad
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I think the pertinent question is this: What is it that we'd call erotica today?
Our paradigmatic examples, the ones which taught us what is meant by the word, come from the past. By today's standards, half of them would belong squarely in the mainstream. Ulysses could be an example of that, or even Henry Miller's Tropics. They were deemed scandalous in their time simply because they featured a couple of explicit scenes, but a contemporary writer wouldn't hesitate to include such scenes in a mainstream piece and we wouldn't label the piece erotica just because of them.
The other half of the examples, those where it's undeniable that the main thrust is erotic (e.g. Anais Nin) would probably just fall under porn today. To be sure, they're written with a literary flair we don't find in 'common' porn, but would that suffice today? They rose into the literary pantheon (or at any rate, its lower echelons) in a certain time and a certain context. In today's hyper-production, writing as beautifully as Nin wouldn't suffice to exalt a piece above the mass. It's questionable, too, whether writing literally like her wouldn't be simply a contrivance—a different time, after all, calls for a different voice.
All in all, what is erotica today? Have we any examples to serve as contemporary yardsticks? Has it simply dissolved in mainstream on one side and porn on the other?
Our paradigmatic examples, the ones which taught us what is meant by the word, come from the past. By today's standards, half of them would belong squarely in the mainstream. Ulysses could be an example of that, or even Henry Miller's Tropics. They were deemed scandalous in their time simply because they featured a couple of explicit scenes, but a contemporary writer wouldn't hesitate to include such scenes in a mainstream piece and we wouldn't label the piece erotica just because of them.
The other half of the examples, those where it's undeniable that the main thrust is erotic (e.g. Anais Nin) would probably just fall under porn today. To be sure, they're written with a literary flair we don't find in 'common' porn, but would that suffice today? They rose into the literary pantheon (or at any rate, its lower echelons) in a certain time and a certain context. In today's hyper-production, writing as beautifully as Nin wouldn't suffice to exalt a piece above the mass. It's questionable, too, whether writing literally like her wouldn't be simply a contrivance—a different time, after all, calls for a different voice.
All in all, what is erotica today? Have we any examples to serve as contemporary yardsticks? Has it simply dissolved in mainstream on one side and porn on the other?
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Good Lord (tongue firmly in cheek)
Grow up!
Don't tell me you can't desire any of our fellow posters, what planet are you from?
I am also European... does that make a difference? How so? Please justify - just fior idle curiosity.
(all Berliner's need a kiss, ever since JFK.)
PoppingTom
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I am also European... does that make a difference? How so? Please justify - just fior idle curiosity.
OK, let's rewind.
Somebody tells, that we all go to hell because we read erotica.
He writes that in an erotica forum.
I think it's fun.
The european thing on this is my absolute insecurity of how the ordinary american writer from the bible belt takes that seriously.
"I'm afraid of americans!" (David Bowie)
oggbashan
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Any "ordinary American writer from the bible belt" is either not ordinary for the bible belt or isn't posted here.
Why ordinary readers from the bible belt come here at all? I don't know. I hope that they confess all at the next church meeting.
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The Bible Belt quip is stereotypical nonsense. Your arrogance is peeking.
Of course Fool was joking. And neon, naughty lad, was continuing his train of thought.
This porn vs erotica discussion has happened before. It's happened a great many times, as a matter of fact. Many of us don't bother to get worked up about it.
Do the characters fuck, have sex or make love?
Is it explicit? Well, that depends on the readers' opinion.
Is it arousing? Well, that depends on the readers' kinks.
Does it use clinical descriptions (vagina, anus, penis) or do the characters get raw and nasty (cunt, asshole, cock)?
I write smut. Hopefully it isn't poorly written.
Ahhh... a voice of insanitary,
How I love your explicit tremor
that leaves readers o'pining
explicit arousal. And kinks penned,
clinically described as raw: cunt, ass and
smitten prick. Nasty is thy refusal
to copulate twixt velum sheaths of inkjet spawn.
But,
thy pen is mightier than my own very dear sword
that last lanced a comely lass at devil's dawn.
I am, Madam,
and will thus always remain,
Your obedient Servant,
A humble Squire to thy Fool.
Will (not at all Scarlet unless fucked really hard
)Ulysses is sensuality, Bloom's walking around obsessing over his wife's sexuality. The point isn't about sex scenes in Ulysses, just that it's sex imbued, sensual. Henry Miller is still super smutty in comparison to today's erotica or Ulysses. Whether something's banned or deemed pornographic is worth considering, but the French, most consumers of literature in America had no problem with Lolita or Ulysses when they were banned in America.
Handley_Page
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Handley_Page
Draco interdum Vincit
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Ya gotta love Tom Lehrer.
(My favorite is the Masochism Tango. Ahem.)
Mine is "We'll all go together when we go"
PoppingTom
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The Bible Belt quip is stereotypical nonsense. Your arrogance is peeking.
Of course Fool was joking. And neon, naughty lad, was continuing his train of thought.
Thanks for explanation
But I don't know if this is arrogance. I only read about how much more serious every religious thing is taken in the states in difference to where I come from. And I saw a video, where teenies rapping about even "a hug from the front is a sin", but not "beaten someone in a coma".
( http://www.youtube.com/user/RayWilliamJohnson#p/u/15/ZN3WdIf0gnw )
On the other hand, I read about more than 50% of the teenage girls in America had oral sex. Sometimes it's really hard for me to put this all in a logical frame.
Anyway, I'm not a fun spoiler. Don't take me that serious.
impressive
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AMEN!
That's a bit strong!!
There's many a gal here I've rubbed all over my body and not once have I gone to hell!
I've gone to heaven a few times
Actually... loads of times... SJ,SSS,CM,SRDS,Mty,MP,P,BS, et al, Brutus!
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The_Fool
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Well, the "states" is a big-ass place.
The styles and customs, dialects and mannerisms are markedly different from state to state. Hell, in some of the larger states things vary from city to city!
No worries.
I worry lots...
WRJames
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Well, the "states" is a big-ass place.
The styles and customs, dialects and mannerisms are markedly different from state to state. Hell, in some of the larger states things vary from city to city!
No worries.
We've got all kinds living cheek by jowl. If I go into my local Walmart I see high school whores and Hassidic Jews.
The_Fool
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Now that sounds like a good porn story to me...
Yes, I certainly agree with the points you've made here.
1. I think the modern use of the term 'erotica' is largely a matter of commercial usage. The only writer of contemporary, out-and-out erotica I've read (outside of Literotica, of course) is the British author, Penny Birch. I've just done a search with her name and the word 'erotica' and I found lots of listings. I did a similar search linking her with 'pornography' and turned up only one of her books, which happens to have her characters 'making a tour of the American pornography industry'. So her publishers seem to be making a distinction between erotica and porn. But that's perhaps to be expected. 'Erotica' - whatever its actual content - is a much softer term than 'porn' and I'd guess that many readers ordering online would feel much more comfortable about buying 'erotica' than 'pornography'. (And, yes, I do take StellaOmega's point that modern erotica isn't necessarily 'softer than, sweeter than, nicer than, less violent than, girlier than, or any less graphic, than is "porn", but I believe the connotations of the two words are still different - for the public at large, at least.)
Despite the label they're sold under, Penny Birch's books are decidedly dirty - dirtier, in fact, than most of the stories on Literotica. So the use of the term 'erotica' here seems - to me at least - largely to do with marketing considerations. It's a publishers' ploy. I'd guess they sell far more books under the banner of 'erotica' than they'd ever sell as 'pornography'.
2. On your second point, Verdad, I agree that many modern novels have strongly erotic elements but shouldn't be classed as 'erotica'. To be 'erotica' in pubisher-speak I think the book has to be wholly focussed on arousing the reader - and of course, there are plenty of publishers that concentrate on exactly that.
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Just as an afterthought, I think a couple of the stories in Angela Carter's 1979 collection, 'The Bloody Chamber', could be described as self-consciously and deliberately erotic. See, for example, 'The Snow Child' - or consider this, to me, wonderful sentence from the title story:
"Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like the scimitar he held."
However, most of the stories are only erotic in the most general sense, and anybody going to them purely in search of 'stroke' material would probably be disappointed. So, even here, I think we have 'writing that includes the erotic' rather than 'erotica' per se.
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"Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like the scimitar he held."
However, most of the stories are only erotic in the most general sense, and anybody going to them purely in search of 'stroke' material would probably be disappointed. So, even here, I think we have 'writing that includes the erotic' rather than 'erotica' per se.
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