Vive la Différence!

Posted 27 June, 2007 in Literary Criticism |

Modern Matriarch on the perils of writing her first sex scene:

After I posted my sex scene at Editred for my peers to critique (I have a couple faithful readers who have been work-shopping this first novel with me), I realized there was no mention of breasts or throbbing members. Well what kind of sex scene is that, I thought. There was, of course, caressing, undressing, and the ultimate climax, but I suddenly began to feel like I had still managed to skirt the issue.

She goes on to differentiate between erotica and pornography; the former, according to Audre Lorde, is “a source of power and information,” while the latter “represents the suppression of true feeling.”

But notice — yet again — the absence of any kind of definition about what constitutes erotica as opposed to what constitutes pornography. How do we tell the two apart? Does it simply have to do with the presence or absence of heaving breasts and throbbing members? Or is this just a bit too vague and narrow to be at all, ahem, satisfying?

I once tried my hand at an erotic short story. As research I read as much erotica as I could find, from Anne Rice to the Marquis de Sade. As I was reading, I commented to one of my women friends that it was a difficult genre to pin down, because its variety and scope were so broad. She looked at me the way one does when forced to explain something that should be patently obvious and said, “That’s because there are as many varieties of sexual experience as there are individuals having sex.”

Which is one of the reasons I get fairly agitated when I read critiques that suppose a kind of Manichean separation between erotica and pornography. This assumes that everyone is working from the same definitions of these terms, which is patently and provably false. One woman’s pornography is another woman’s erotica. (I know several women who find de Sade’s work erotic, whereas others find it reprehensible.) It’s simply impossible to come up with a definition of pornography that will encompass all tendencies and predilections.

Can we not just admit that different people are turned on by different things, and that may or may not include descriptions of heaving breasts and throbbing members? It’s not necessary, and may even be retrograde and reductive, to impose artificial and restrictive labels on the full range of human sexual experience, which is, after all, one of the most mysterious and powerful forces available to us (and therefore one of the perfect subjects for treatment in fiction). Why is this so difficult for some writers to accept?

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