On Why It's Hard to Draw a Line Between Porn and Erotica

Periodically, I post thoughts on the porn/erotica distinction. This is one of the best ones I've found, again from Jean Roberta's Sex Is All Metaphors:

Most lines drawn between morally-acceptable expressions of sex (including literary erotica) and bad, perverse, unhealthy expressions of sex (including "porn") are scary because the vehemence of the line-drawers is only matched by the arbitrariness of the line.

This is from an essay called "Drawing the Line."

Being Defined by the Past

Another snip from Jean Roberta's excellent Sex Is All Metaphors:

I wonder why sex is usually treated as an exceptional activity which must be judged differently from every other kind. Most people acquire job histories over time as well as sexual track records, yet few middle-aged brain surgeons are permanently stigmatized for having flipped burgers in a part- time job as pre-med students. No one wants to be defined for all time as they were in the past.

This quote is from an essay called, "Retro-Shame, or the Persistence of the Past." I don't have much to add, except that I really like this point.

The Most Fun Suggestion I've Heard for Cooking Up a New Story

Jean Roberta's Sex Is All Metaphors includes a great essay called "The Fickle Muse," about how to cook up new ideas when nothing seem fresh. Advice about writer's block abounds, but I really like the physicality of Roberta's discussion of it:

Focusing on each part of your body in turn, from feet to head or vice versa, is the best way I know of to reawaken the Muse. And despite what prudish authority figures have told you about the animal stupidity of human flesh, physical feelings are rarely crude or simple. (For that matter, even animals have their own wisdom, as pet- owners know.)

Just for the moment, data on which genres are still selling well in a troubled publishing market have no relevance. Feet, arms, tummy and all the other parts connected to them don't care about the market. Neither do they care about deadlines, guidelines, negative reviews, wars in the blogosphere, or grammatical issues. There is a place for all those things, but they don't belong in a quiet room prepared for the Muse.

I don't really believe in writer's block as its own special thing, but I know slumps occur in people's lives and jam them up in various ways for various reasons. Roberta's advice seems like it would be good in any such case, and the full version of the essay gets a little more sensual in its description of how the body can be listened to.

Why Sex Writing Shouldn't Always Be Nice

I recently started reading Jean Roberta's Sex Is All Metaphors, and came across a great passage on the issue of "sex-positive" writing. As she explains, many editors ask that erotica be sex-positive, which generally means avoiding a certain standard list of squicks (including things like very extreme violence). Sometimes, the sense of "sex-positive" is extended to mean a general attitude about sex within the story -- that it should be empowering, pleasurable, and so forth.

I like to write and read sex-positive stories, certainly. I have a story for another time about how sex-positive erotica is actually what made me understand feminism and become willing to call myself a feminist.

However, not all of my writing and reading is sex-positive, and there are a lot of complicated reasons for that. Roberta gives a nice account of why sex writing needs a range that includes the very unpleasant:

If sex is all metaphors, it can't always be a simple way to get happy. Sex can be a desperate, doomed attempt to bridge a gap in credibility or understanding. It can be an extreme form of exploitation. It can be the event that turns a high school girl who is desperate to fit in into a target for contempt from everyone she knows. It can be an attempt to prove something improvable. Sex can be an act of self-hatred, or hatred of the other. It can be the means by which invading armies literally colonize the bodies of civilians, hoping to impregnate as many "enemy women" as possible. Sex, broadly defined, can destroy both body and soul.

Should erotic writers avoid saying anything disturbing about sex? The terms "adult" and "mature" are often used as euphemisms for sexual content, yet to avoid mentioning any negative emotions (guilt, hatred, rage, fear, despair, regret, etc.) in connection with sex is to limit oneself to a fairly childish view of the world.

I started writing erotica because it's the genre where I feel most honest as a writer. It's the subject on which I really have something to say. And I'd definitely be lying if I pretended all my experience with sex has been pleasant or positive. Sometimes, I feel strange about the range of my work. I worry that some of my dark work for Forbidden Fiction, for example, would freak out readers who enjoyed, say, my light piece in the Cleis erotic romance anthology, Passion. I also worry that readers who like the dark stuff will find my happy endings fluffy. But I need that full range to say all of what I have to say about sex, and I try not to censor myself in either direction.