Interesting little article that says what visitors to this site know already: reading is a great way to explore the erotic. Although ethical considerations are briefly mentioned, the author apparently feels that anything can go since the only ones affected are the author and the reader.
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I love this. In my mind, porn and erotica aren’t the same. Erotica is more about the tease and the seduction and the hunt. Porn is just about fucking.
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I’ll get on my hobby horse here and say that I’ve never liked the term “erotica.” I can see what you’re saying when you claim that “Porn is just about fucking,” but in my experience studying the history of gay pornographic fiction (the subject of my dissertation), that was never really the case. The books may have sometimes advertised themselves as “fuck books,” but there was always a lot of other stuff going on within the stories (often having to do with discourses about masculinity, as well as capitalism).
When the term “gay erotica” got popularized around the early 1990s, the books themselves got more expensive and upmarket. And a lot of that “erotica” itself is about the performance of expensive taste. So you’re likely to get lots of descriptions of expensive clothes and home decor, as well as lots of figurative language being used to describe body parts and sex scenes. Give me good unpretentious porn any day over that “Red Shoe Diaries” yuppie garbage!
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When I say erotica, I mean written stuff, like you’d find on GSS. When I say porn, I mean visual like photographic or video. That’s how the article was using them, so I just went along with it - happy to hear if there are better terms.
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I can tell my mom I write “gay erotica” but she knows I mean “porn”
It sure do sound classy, tho, don’t it?
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I’m in the erotica camp; as a no-sex author, I don’t write sex into my stories. For me, the erotic thing is the mind control, so I’m cool with the erotica label.
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But saying you write “no-sex porn” would sound so much cooler!
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hi…email me. love to discuss fin-dom with you…cracker
I don’t know what that means.
I saw your comment on my story about Fin-dom .I thought it would be fun to chat with you ; the story has my email.
Hope to hear from you
What is “fin-dom” ?
Financial domination
Okay I am hooked any classics? Stuff I want to consider? Just where the written and etc headed or consumable?
I AGREE
I’m sorry, what was the topic?
My recent story has a lot of romance and I would consider it primarily as a romance with fantasy (magical not sexual, ok wait, both) elements. But it also has a lot of sex- I mean like there’s pretty hot action in at least two thirds of the chapters. So is it porn or erotica? I don’t know how best to describe it. Is it okay to just call it a romance novel, and assume people understands that means that sometimes there will be a lot of sex to the point Jackie Collins would approve?
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I don’t know if it’s fair to classify it as a romance novel — aren’t those fairly PG-rated?
I think erotic novel encompasses it. I think that implies sex, but promises to be a good read, too. I’m not in love with this “it’s porn, call it porn” argument in this thread, unless that’s what the story is trying to be, then okay.
But if I’m trying to elevate the work and be slightly “artsy”, then I want to be classier in my label: erotic novel.
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There are a lot of “gay interest romance” stories self-published on Amazon that get pretty damned explicit in parts, though the focus remains on emotions and relationships (and since I usually go for the genre subsets of science fiction/romance or urban fantasy/romance, there’s plenty of space devoted to world building and adventure stuff too).
I think the point I’m trying to make is that all these labels are evolving, almost too rapidly to be useful shorthands.
Hypnothrill’s comments on the origins and original meaning of “erotica” resonate with my experience - though besides being a sort of gentrification of pornography, I think at least part of the impetus behind it was avoiding censure, censors, and legal problems, back when those were bigger issues.