Getting the sex right

When does romance become erotica, and erotica become pornography? How graphic should the sex in romance novels get? And is it even necessary?

You're invited to join me as I ponder these questions in The Sex Thing on Novel Spaces today.

We've got a winner!

Remember the Jeff Rivera interview? Well, I got a package in the mail on Friday and it's the prize: a copy of his debut novel Forever My Lady for one lucky person who commented on the post! And there's a copy for me too! :)

Out came my mother's hat again and in went the names. (Vaughn, writer-friend, fair-play enforcer and all-round PITA, was not around to monitor proceedings this time, but I'm willing to be audited by Transparency Int'l. :)

Debs, the book is yours. Drop me a line (my e-mail is in the sidebar) with a name and address so I can mail you your prize!


In other news, if anyone wants my copy of Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin I'll mail it to you (my treat). It's hard cover, beautiful condition, dust jacket like new. I haven't even written my name in - which is something I usually do with a flourish as soon as I get a new book. Why am I giving it away? I don't want anything with people scr**ing corpses in my home. Call me squeamish, call me anything you like, but take it please. Just e-mail me a name and delivery address.

The problem with erotica

Erotic Pompeii wall painting

I once owned a book of erotica. I was browsing a bookstore and bought it on impulse, anticipating robust stories of love and lust, impossibly endowed, abandoned couples in Kama Sutric configurations pleasuring each other in unlikely locations, enjoying ecstatic but improbable sensual marathons. I never finished the book because my stomach just wasn't strong enough to handle it, not even for the sake of research into the genre.

I'm not a prude. I'm a normal, healthy heterosexual female who could never understand the 'not in the mood' phenomenon. Hey, sex is good stuff! I assumed that my first brush with true erotica had been ruined by a particularly nasty example of the genre. Since I had a young child in the house back then, I burned the book. Yes, burned, as in took it outside, tore it apart and set it afire, then breathed a sigh of relief as I hosed away the ashes. Was I glad to see the back of that one - and how I wished I could erase some of those images from my internal memory drive! Unfortunately, that kind of stuff tends to stick harder the more you try to wish it away.

Since then I've read erotic romance novels and quite enjoyed them so, buoyed by these positive forays, I ordered Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin a few weeks ago, fully aware that it was erotica, but with a difference, to my mind: her work is described as literary erotica. I've read a bit of Nin's bio, I'm fond of some of her quotations, and I anticipated a treat.

Now, I know that judging a collection on the basis of a partial reading is not exactly fair to the writer, but the four or five stories I've read thus far, including the very first, have served up an appetizing smorgasbord of incest, rape, genital mutilation, drug addiction, necro.philia, best.iality and pedo.philia - just to name a few. What else is in there, I wonder. Dismemberment? Human sacrifice? The stories also have a tendency to be plotless, consisting of the mindless wanderings of some character from one tasteless and depraved activity to another. I'm not a fan of no-plot, and the activities do not, for me, constitute a great romp.

Maybe I'm missing the point. Maybe it's too exalted a point for my limited faculties to appreciate, but this is not fun for me, it's not exciting, it's not entertaining and quite frankly, it makes me sick to the stomach.

I won't be visiting that particular buffet again, and I don't understand how we can be collectively horrified when this kind of thing turns up in the news in real life, yet endorse and enjoy it in literature. I can't seem to distinguish between this 'literary erotica' and some of the depraved porn out there. What am I missing?

[In case anyone can't figure out the gratuitous dots in some words, they're to (hopefully) keep sickos googling these topics on the net away from my site.]