“I agree with you that the whole pornography/erotica distinction
is a subjective and rather useless one. IMO, “erotic” and “pornographic”
are just adjectives for describing different qualities of sexually
oriented materials; the degree that something is pornographic has to do
with the physicality and amount of explicitness of the presentation, while
eroticism has to do with the mental and emotional aspects of sex. Good sex
is stimulating to both the body and the mind and good sexual materials
should do likewise; unfortunately, by creating the ossified categories of
“pornography” and “erotica”, we end up with material that only focuses on
one side of sex. Hence, there’s plenty of erotica which is all about
feelings and metaphors, but steers clear of the actual physical act (and
often steers clear of the body entirely) and plenty of pornography that
shows the act in copious detail, but the sex has a very fake unfeeling
quality to it. In both cases, what you end up with is pretty boring.
Pornography, erotica, or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t have to be
this way, but that’s what were stuck with as long as we take “erotica” and
“pornography” to be two mutually exclusive categories, and Steinem,
Russell, etc. are doing a real disservice in trying to keep this division
going.”

(The blessing/curse of Google Groups – anything you ever write on Usenet lives forever!)

I still stand by what I wrote at the time. The porn/erotica or porn/art debate simply frames the question in entirely the wrong way, taking as a given that the two must be defined against each other, to the ultimate detriment of good smut. To me, the best porn/erotica hits both bases copiously.

I suppose my greatest difference with your persective (at least, from what I’ve seen of this blog) is that I’m not quite so dismissive of the larger porn world. I think over the last 5-10 years there’s been some very high-quality erotic porn produced, and I think the diversification encouraged by internet porn has played a big role in that. Some examples – some of the videos produced by Thursday Night Video, Abby Winters, Viv Thomas, Sweet Photography/ATKPremium.com, and Grigory Galitsin are very very good and manage a high degree of eroticism in the context of a sexually explicit movie. Obviously, most of these are not as naturalistic as the way you shoot sex videos, but I don’t think that invalidates their erotic content.

I also just saw “9 Songs” and really liked the sex parts. I don’t know if its going to have much influence in the film world, but pornographers could learn a lot from it.