by Gary Meyer
(03/07/01)

You know what they say: if it's about sex with ostrich feathers, it's erotica; if it's about sex with the whole ostrich, it's porn. Or it depends on whether it's supposed to get you off. Like we're gonna ask some dead writer what the deal was. "Hey, Henry Miller, that Trollop of Capricorn stuff -- was that art, or were you just trying to give us boners?" Human divining rod and Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wimped out trying to define porn, but he claimed, "I know it when I see it." Great. All we gotta do is dig him up and our troubles are over.

Or you gotta go back to the ancient Greeks. Sure, the archer formerly known as Eros was running around back then, and there was this pornographos thing that was like the People Magazine of its time, with life stories of famous courtesans, cause they didn't have J.Lo and Nicole and Mena, but pornographos wasn't even necessarily dirty. Not till the 1860's did the English word pornography come forth, because people really dug the Pornographic Collection at the National Museum of Naples, which had stuff like a marble statue of the god Pan making it with a she-goat. Bam! Right into Webster's 1864 edition: "Pornography: licentious painting employed to decorate the walls of rooms sacred to bacchanalian orgies."

It was the Victorians who got so uptight about all the X-rated books jumping out of the wainscoting, pulling knives, and demanding, "Read me!" that they decided to call them pornography meaning "the writing of prostitutes," the lowest sexual outcasts they could think of. They blamed all those books they didn't read -- in 1834, there were 57 porn shops on London's Holywell Street alone -- on all the harlots they never hired, and called it a job well done.

So erotica is this chubby cherub zapping you with an arrow dipped in love potion, and pornography is a prostitute lapping at your lower parts in a literary fashion. What's so awful about writing that's trying to make your blood flow south, anyway? If a cookbook makes you hungry, it's a great cookbook. If writing about sex doesn't make you feel it in your fun zone, you call that writing? Nobody complains about Stephen King trying to scare you shitless, or Dave Barry trying to crack you up.

You can read King and Barry anywhere. You can even shudder or chortle in public. But try whipping out Lady Chatterly's Lover in the waiting room. And that Fanny Hill, just try reading that out loud at a PTA meeting: Thus we spent the whole afternoon, till supper-time, in a continued circle of love delights, kissing, turtle-billing, toying, and all the rest of the feast! Turtle-billing. Whoo-hoo! Animals again.

Or people say it's porn and not erotica if it gets you off, dear reader, regardless of the author's assumed intent -- the peter-meter, the wet test; porn is in the groin of the beholder. Remember the movie Clockwork Orange, the part where Malcolm MacDowell is in the prison library grooving on Biblical verses about orgies and whipping slaves? If the Bible * gets you hot, is it porn? What if you get hot and I don't? Then which is it, porn or erotica? W.H. Auden had this hypothetical solution where twelve "normal" guys read a book, and if a majority of them spring stiffies, it's porn.

Nowadays you have to work in Canadian Customs to get a job like that.

I am a connoisseur of erotica myself, but, let's face it, if you read something to get off, you're a porn user. The fear is that all these guys with a severe depletion of cranial blood flow are going to run out and assault women, children, and the larger house pets, rather than stay indoors and assault wastebaskets with volleys of wadded tissue. And what about hordes of hot, wet, porn-crazed women? Send 'em this way!

Maybe it's all in the words -- you know, Latino versus Anglo-Saxophone. Do you osculate or kiss? Fornicate or fuck? Ejaculate or cum? Perform fellatio or suck cock? Practice cunnilingus or muff dive? Now you know whether you're an erotica collector, or a porn addict.

Maybe the difference between erotica and porn is the percentage of the time the characters are naked and busy fitting various tabs A into sundry slots B. We could impose a hard and fast limit, just like Mayor Giuliani does in New York City with the porn shops: only forty percent of their merchandise can be sex-oriented unless they want to be subject to zoning restrictions that generously allow them to relocate next to a sewage treatment plant in outer Queens.

Then there's the literary merit approach, as if we could ever agree on what that means. Porn is despised because it's poorly written, because porn writers have to pound it out because porn publishers pay peanuts because they can't market it or distribute it effectively because it's despised.

Time for some quotes from imaginary people:

Felicia Corning (linguist): "Erotica is apologetic; porn is pejorative."

Oscar Wired (cyber Goth): "Erotica is the porn that dares not speak its name."

Carla Climatize (meteorologist): "Erotica is dry; porn is wet."

Needless Sequel (film student): "Blow me! In this whole freaking editorial, you're not once gonna mention the money shot, the cum gush, the lovin' faceful, the pearl necklace, the jism jet, the spunk spasm?"

Percival Carruthers (freelance esthete): "Erotica is the tender communion of two souls embracing in the mystical void, a feast of the five senses where each moment must be savored. The sight of the beloved across the room watching TV, the heady aroma of her hairspray, the sound of her gentle remonstrances, the taste of a proffered cookie, the electric brushing of her fingertips, these sublime sensations should be enough for any man. Or so my girlfriend tells me."

Case in point: that popular destination for sticky-fingered web snurfers, Clean Shorts. Removing our shoes to climb over the puppy pile, we open the safe and pull out two tattered scraps of parchment:

1. "It's really not his fault that I am the way I am, that I fall to my knees the instant he expresses a desire that I suck on his long, lean cock. That I spread my pussy lips wide for him the second his gaze indicates his intention to lick my always swollen clit."

2. "Imagine a dream world, if you can, one infused with a pale wash of color, pastel shades. Now imagine the softest of sounds and the most delicate of flavors, and a searing, sweating, intense heat. And now mix all that up with the smooth and sexy haze of slow motion, so that every touch, every sigh, seems to last an eternity."

Maybe erotica versus porn is a false dicotyledon after all, like human versus animal, or foreplay versus going for the O. Maybe there's room for both. Maybe great writing about sex needs both. Maybe either one alone is missing something. Eroticorn! Pornotica! It's a Brave Nude Whirl and the breast is yet to come.

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