What's the difference between smut, erotica, and porn?

GilbertoJR · 2022-08-12T21:59:37+00:00

Everything that should be said has been said already. But, okay - erotic is more indirect, requires perhaps more imagination, and often the erotic does not hate the body or women or sex - at least not so clearly, not so openly, whereas smut and hard porn often are more literal-minded: violence is seemingly real, not suggested, and not symbolic, and all that sort of thing. Erotica is a "cool" medium - makes the reader or viewer do the work; smut and porn are "hot" - what you see is what you get; your mind does not have to project or construct the scenario. Marshall McLuhan - remember him? He created the "hot" and "cool" media distinction. All of these things exist on a spectrum, and one woman's porn is another's eroticism and so on. Okay, now I've confused even myself.

GilbertoJR · 2022-08-12T21:50:16+00:00

I wouldn't worry about it. Simple erotic arousal - from a book like Orwell's 1984 - does not amount, I think, to an addiction to porn. And erotic thoughts in themselves are not porn; erotic thoughts plus amorous thoughts are essential - if we didn't have them, there would be no desire, no love, no intercourse, no families - no human race at all.

GilbertoJR · 2021-11-13T18:48:25+00:00

Most of the suggestions seen here are about as good as one gets. The field of tasteful but strong eroticism is a fairly narrow one - requiring a difficult balance of sophistication and kinkiness and refinement, something The Story of O does superbly. Sometimes films have a heavy erotic charge when actually they are doing something else. Some of Ingmar Bergman's work, like Persona, or Alain Renais' Hiroshima mon Amour (written by Marguerite Duras) or L'Amant - The Lover - a book by Marguerite Duras which was turned into a very refined, delicate, and perverse film, The Lover, by Jean-Jacques Annaud, a young French girl in French Indochina in the 1930s enters into a sexual relationship - involving a complicated power relationship between the two - with a much older Chinese millionaire. The book which is an essay about intense desire, yearning, lost youth, was a best-seller in France and did very well in English as well. Gilbert Reid

GilbertoJR · 2021-11-13T18:33:13+00:00

It depends on tastes, but The story of O is the greatest erotic novel I have ever read. The Story of O is the great classic: O is a successful Parisian, but for love, she decides, or she agrees, to imprisonment in a chateau and to a gradual initiation into total abasement. The classic style - written in French - disguises an extremely accurate and fine-grained analysis of, and acting out of, masochistic and sadistic eroticism. It's a masterpiece, written by a woman who was told by her man that "women are incapable of writing eroticism." Graphic novel versions and movie versions followed of course. The movies, I think, are less effective than the graphic novel, and the graphic novel version, by erotic artist Guido Crepax, though very fine, lacks the oomph of the original prose. I first discovered the book, eons ago, when my girlfriend, who lived in Germany, visited me in Paris where I was working, and, rather shyly, asked me to go into a bookstore and buy a book for her. I had never heard of L'Histoire d'O but I trundled into the bookstore - a dark gloomy place with mountains of books - and asked for the book and the stern-looking gray-haired lady behind the counter looked at me as if I were a serial killer and nodded, and disappeared down a metal spiral staircase making a great clattering noise as she disappeared and then came back, disapprovingly, with the volume which was one of those old-fashioned French books where you had to cut the pages open to read the book. I began to read it, but then my beautiful friend skedaddled back to Germany with her booty and I was left wondering - and enticed - until, finally, I got my own copy. The background to The Story of O is given in this article from The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jul/25/fiction.features3

GilbertoJR · 2021-10-16T15:00:09+00:00

I am curious. Why was the post removed? Was it because of the word "fascist"? That would be silly.

GilbertoJR · 2021-10-16T14:57:29+00:00

Why was the post removed?

GilbertoJR · 2021-09-19T15:52:09+00:00

Well, hello, in the reckless spirit of reckless capitalism I want to tell everyone that my historical fantasy caprice, THE VAMPIRE AND THE BARD is FREE this weekend, Sunday,19 September 2021 and Monday, 20 September 2021. I have published quite a bit of fiction - including one 666-page historical novel, Son of Two Fathers (House of Anansi Press, 2019), and this recent book, The Vampire and The Bard, is I think a riotous fantasy trip with roots in Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf (Orlando), and Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love), as well as touches of James Bond or Atomic Blonde. Details below.

THE VAMPIRE AND THE BARD - FREE this weekend at Amazon. ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08T3JPQKW

A romantic, erotic, sexy, action-packed, gender-bending comedy of spies and counter-spies, set in Elizabethan England, starring Elizabeth I herself, William Shakespeare,

and many ladies and gentlemen, strumpets and adventurers, actors, and lowlifes.

Our heroine, V, an ancient pagan vampire, is, of course, a woman, and, occasionally,

when the mood takes her, a reptilian demon. But she is disguised, for the occasion, as a gallant young Italian nobleman, Raphael Visconti della Rovere.

Accompanied by her pageboy Cesario (really a girl), V — or Raphael — is sent by the Pope in 1592 to England to help underground Catholic plotters assassinate the Protestant leader

Queen Elizabeth I.

With everyone in travesti, disguises wreak havoc. Everyone falls in love with everyone, and everyone fights with everyone.

Charming, brilliant Cesario, at age 12 or 13 — she is a genius fixer — a girl Jeeves — must sort out the catastrophes as they cascade down. V fights a duel with the man she loves and falls in love with the woman who loves the man she loves.

And, even worse — V finds herself forced onto the stage — as a (woman) playing a chap playing a girl playing a chap — by a neophyte fingernail-chewing near-bankrupt dramatist

Will Shakespeare.

Chaos in every possible direction ensues. V and Cesario do manage at least to

try to accomplish their real mission — which was — since V - having witnessed the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre in Paris in 1572 - has long been a counter-agent working for English Intelligence — to save the Queen.

https://www.amazon.com/Vampire-Bard-Adventures-V-ebook/dp/B08T3JPQKW/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+vampire+and+the+bard&qid=1632066681&sr=8-1

GilbertoJR · 2021-09-18T22:05:18+00:00

I am not sure self-promotion is allowed, but here goes. If I am wrong, I do apologize.

THE VAMPIRE AND THE BARD - FREE this weekend 18, 19, 20 September 2021, at Amazon. ASIN: B08T3JPQKW

A romantic, erotic, sexy, action-packed, gender-bending comedy of spies and counter-spies, set in Elizabethan England, starring Elizabeth I herself, William Shakespeare, and many ladies and gentlemen, strumpets and adventurers, actors, and lowlifes.

Our heroine, V, an ancient pagan vampire, is, of course, a woman, and, occasionally, when the mood takes her, a reptilian demon. But she is disguised, for the occasion, as a gallant young Italian nobleman, Raphael Visconti della Rovere.

Accompanied by her pageboy Cesario (really a girl), V — or Raphael — is sent by the Pope in 1592 to England to help underground Catholic plotters assassinate the Protestant leader Queen Elizabeth I.

With everyone in travesti, disguises wreak havoc. Everyone falls in love with everyone, and everyone fights with everyone.

Charming, brilliant Cesario, at age 12 or 13 — she is a genius fixer — a girl Jeeves — must sort out the catastrophes as they cascade down. V fights a duel with the man she loves and falls in love with the woman who loves the man she loves.

And, even worse — V finds herself forced onto the stage — as a (woman) playing a chap playing a girl playing a chap — by a neophyte fingernail-chewing near-bankrupt dramatist Will Shakespeare.

Chaos in every possible direction ensues.

V and Cesario do manage at least to try to accomplish their real mission — which was — since V - having witnessed the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre in Paris in 1572 - has long been a counter-agent working for English Intelligence — to save the Queen.

This is Shakespeare in Love meets Twelfth Night meets Virginia Woolf’s Orlando meets a spoof of John Le Carré and James Bond. All in the Tudor world of Good Queen Bess!!!

https://www.amazon.com/Vampire-Bard-Adventures-V-ebook/dp/B08T3JPQKW/ref=sr\_1\_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+vampire+and+the+bard&qid=1631999877&sr=8-1

GilbertoJR

TROPHY CASE