My co-author Eunice and I write porn. We call it ‘porn’ without flinching; where some people like to claim there’s a categorical distinction between porn and erotica, we both are of the opinion that po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to, it’s all a tempest in a linguistic teapot.
I bring this up because, having co-authored five books of the most twisted pornography ever conceived with Eunice, filled with kinks so esoteric they don’t even have names (we looked), I thought I understood the purpose of porn pretty well.
Image: Jan Kopřiva
Porn is when you use explicit, super-kinky sex to explore themes like personhood theory, agency, autonomy, philosophical ethics, atonement and redemption, social values, and community.
Obviously.
So imagine my surprise when Joreth, my wife, suggested in a Quora post:
My spouse doesn’t watch porn. He doesn’t get it. To be fair, almost all porn is bad bad BAD filmmaking, and as a filmmaker myself, I don’t disagree at all. But I understand that the point of mainstream porn is just to put naked bodies rutting on screen for those who are visually aroused, and nothing else.
My spouse, however, writes porn, but not, like, mainstream porn. He writes literary tomes, super-accurate far-future science-fiction, and detailed world-building urban fantasy. That happens to have sex scenes in them. He does. not. understand. the point of porn. To him, “porn” is for arousing the intellect, which will then follow with physical arousal.
I’m just back from Dragon*Con, where I spent most of my time alternating between the writers track and the skeptics track, so during a panel on written porn, I put the question to the panelists.
All of whom sided with my wife on this.
As did, for that matter, most of the Internet.
Now, a lot of folks do draw a distinction between porn and erotica; something I heard often is that erotica can explore complex themes but porn can’t. There’s a fair amount of this gatekeeping in the erotica writer’s scene: “erotica is what I write; porn is that dirty nasty filth that other people write.” I personally don’t draw that line; to me, it smacks of classism, of “porn is bad but erotica is okay.” If your goal is to arouse, to quicken the senses, then it’s porn, no matter what else you may be doing.
But that also seems a minority opinion.
The porn Eunice and I write is incredibly explicit and very kinky indeed. It’s also, quite often, highly uncomfortable. (Eunice likes to say she’ll keep scaling the kink factor up and up until I cringe; that’s the sweet spot we’re aiming for.) The explicitness and the discomfort are part of the point—we explore ideas that are intrinsically uncomfortable, like “is it ethical to give consent to sex in such a way that you cannot revoke it?” (Spoiler: we both think the answer is yes. It’s strange that doing this is so wildely accepted in anything but sex—joining the militart, for instance—but when it comes to sex, people—even people in the kink scene—struggle with it.)
Image: 1MilliKarat
The word “porn” is emotionally charged. Using “erotica” in place of “porn” feels to me like a way to try to soften it, to hide from sexuality rather than engaging with it directly. Our novels confront uncomfortable ideas directly, without evasion; why not call them porn?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. What say you?
I think that any viewpoint from the 70% of people in the USA who are Christians will be contrary to most of the rest of the western world. The USA is heavily influenced by Calvinism to the point where I just don’t mention porn and its uses and appreciation in any casual conversation.
As far as erotica verses porn. I agree, the same thing, just different names. I tend to use erotica when searching for written porn as it finds the sites like literotica that I have a few submissions to. Searching for porn will give you more visual hits on various websites and if you want to find anime related sites search on Hentai.
I should add I am very introverted, an atheist, and probably more than a little bit autistic so I don’t expect to be anywhere in range of the mainstream on how I look at things.
Your novels are indeed uncomfortable, and as we say in the UK, “not my cup of tea”. That doesn’t make them wrong.
As for distinction between “porn” and “erotica” – in my mind, erotica is the softer, more vanilla end of the spectrum. It teases and gently tillilates. Porn has less of an emotional connection and is about the mechanics and less about emotions.
But these are just the thoughts of an old lady. I’m sure others differ.
In porn, the whole point is the sex act. In erotica, the point is the arousal. Those are very different things in the visual media, but in writing, the boundaries blur. A story doesn’t take place in the action. “He put his cock into her pussy” is neither good porn or good erotica. All story in any genre happens in the internal and external dialogue.
Dialogue needs context. It’s impossible to write an engaging scene without characterisation, even if it’s just a landscape. Put in one or more people and immediately we need to know who they are, why they are here, how they relate to each other. There have been entire plays about nothing else. (Waiting for Godot, The Dumb Waiter)
We can’t write a story, be it porn or erotica, without a contextual frame. The sort of porn we get in video, which starts and ends with the parties mated, doesn’t work in print. Even in video, we get context from the action and the vocalisations. We can distinguish a rape from a seduction, we know who the dominant partner is. In print we need to get deeper than that because we need to have something to say. We need to fill the word-count to build the tension at an acceptable rate. Even stroke porn has to last long enough to achieve its objective.
As I said, the lines are blurred. To my mind, a story with three or four sex scenes in, however they are written, is spicy SF (or whatever). You need at least a scene every couple of chapters to qualify as either porn or erotica. In erotica, the scenes don’t have to include a sex act, only arousal. In porn, they do. Both porn and erotica can, and probably must, explore themes such as the ones you mentioned. They will probably have an external frame where other stuff is going on that reflects the physical relationship. But the story is about the sexual relationships and interactions — physical interactions in the case of porn.
Hey Franklin,
As a writer myself, I’ve always had an appreciation for your style, and the courage you and Eunice have exploring themes others wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole (or a five-foot Russian selling life insurance). I’ve tried to read a bit of the porn you two write, but my cringe factor is waaay lower than yours, and I haven’t been able to get very far into them.
As to your distinction between porn and erotica, I believe there should be a third category, ‘Speculative Porn’, for writings that explore different, often radical themes, but with hardcore imagery (with erotica, I always think of romance with lots of sex, but what do I know?).
Now, you might say ‘But porn is porn’. It is, but let me share something with you that hopefully will clarify my position. About 15 years ago, my wife suffered a traumatic car crash that altered her brain, so she became more logical (along with getting perpetual vertigo) and flipped her sex drive button to ‘off’. Because I’ll never leave her or become emotionally involved with someone else, I use porn as a physical and emotional safety valve. However, with your writing, I’d likely skim over the cringe-worthy bits and concentrate my attention on the characters and the story.
Porn doesn’t need a story. Speculative porn does.
Speaking of stories, on LinkedIn I’ve been giving away a download of my novel, ‘The Guardian of Xibalba’, so if you’re on that site, send me a connection request and I’ll send you a pdf copy (look for the guy in 19th Century clothing sitting next to a Gramaphone). If you’d prefer an e-pub or Mobi file, email me at davidtalon58@gmail and let me know which you prefer. I use Draft2Digital, which is free (they take a small piece of the sales) and not only formats beautifully, but submits the novel to a bunch of different retailers, including Amazon. They also do print books and provide a link to a company doing audiobooks which works the same way.
I’m afraid I’ve abandoned Quora, so you won’t see me there anymore. Take care and have a great weekend!
David
I’m of the firm opinion that erotica and porn are not precisely the same, but they do often overlap. I think the Internet writ-large is more correct than you on this particular topic, Franklin: it is a bit misleading or even straight-up incorrect to interchangeably use the two words.
Erotica is meant to stimulate sexual arousal. Can you do this without specifically showing or writing about sex? Absolutely you can. Just think of the many creative ways we can use language to suggest sexual innuendo without ever explicitly stating what we mean. And while the field of erotica is no doubt vast, in my mind, erotica tends to build up that tension to heighten the strength of that feeling of arousal, because as many of us have probably had the pleasure of experiencing, sex is better when you ramp it up slowly to a crescendo, rather than flooring it from the first moment and arriving at ‘destination’ 60 seconds later!
But porn, while it can indeed be very erotic (there is a whole subsection of porn that leans that way) does not necessarily have to be about slowly building up that tension to stimulate maximum sexual arousal. Indeed, many porn flicks aren’t particularly long at all. Speculatively I would suggest that many porn videos available online are under 10 minutes in length. Would you want your real sexual interactions to last 10 minutes or less? I highly doubt that! So what is porn setting out to achieve? In my opinion, much of porn is about that ‘flooring it’ I mentioned above: you get the people in a situation, and you quickly get them into the physical act of having sex. In visual media, you might use mere seconds or a few minutes to set a very basic stage before you are literally seeing the act of sex occurring, while in written media, the author wastes little time on trivial details like character personalities, environment, and so on, and just dives right in to writing about the physical aspects of sex, with a particular emphasis on exactly how the body or bodies involved are interacting with each other, and extremely explicit descriptions of the sights, sounds, smells, and physical sensations experienced by the participants, bringing the reader as closer to a visual-media experience as one can get with mere words.
Anyways, that is my take for what it is worth. Looking forward to hearing what others have to say as well. Thanks for writing as always Franklin. Whether I agree with you or not, your writing is always a pleasure to read.
For me, porn is meant to titillate and nothing more. Erotica satisfies my mind and my senses. I read a lot of both.
What is the point of movies? What is the point of TV shows? What is the point of literature?
They can be for many different things. They can be to challenge the audience and explore uncomfortable ideas. They can be pure escapist entertainment. They can be anywhere in between.
Just like science fiction: I like hard sci-fi that explores the consequences that, say, the invention of faster-than-light travel would have on human society, and I like campy space operas that don’t take themselves at all seriously.
So in porn: I like being challenged and exploring my boundaries sometimes, but I want a ratio of about ten stories about stuff I know turns me on to every one that makes me cringe. The latter is like a really rich meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant: a wonderful experience, but I don’t want to eat that three times a day every day.
I love erotic stories that are good as stories: strong plot, strong characters. I also love short scenes that aren’t trying to do anything except get the reader off as fast as possible.
For pure arousal, what I really like is a story where I can immerse myself, let myself feel everything the characters are feeling, experience the sex they’re having second-hand and cum when they cum.
And then… well, there were a few years when my wife was undergoing cancer treatment and we were physically unable to have sex, masturbation was my whole sex life and the more “junk food” type porn became an important part of keeping me sane. I’ve worked a full-time job al day and then straight into being a full-time carer once I get home. I’m really not interested in having my worldview challenged right now. Just tell me a story about a guy with a big dick fucking a woman with big tits so I can get off quickly and then go to bed, please.
Those years are also – my therapist and I came to believe – the reason I’m not really into pain, humiliation or other edgy stuff in my porn. I want the flood of endorphins to make up the deficit. I’ve had enough second-hand pain for one lifetime, thanks. Flood my body with second-hand orgasm instead, writer.
Tl;dr: “porn” can be for any number of different things, and none of them is better than the others.