[QueenLothirielcc]

I have read a lot of "Adult Content"stories.How do you keep it from devolving into pornographic material? I prefer erotica myself.

[NancyBrooke]

As Tom Lehrer would have it:

As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
"To be smut
It must be ut-
Terly without redeeming social importance."

Por-
Nographic pictures I adore.
Indecent magazines galore,
I like them more
If they're hard core.

Stories of tortures
Used by debauchers
Lurid, licentious and vile,
Make me smile.
Novels that pander
To my taste for candor
Give me a pleasure sublime.
Let's face it I love slime!

All books can be indecent books,
Though recent books are bolder.
For filth, I'm glad to say,
Is in the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
I could tell you things about Peter Pan
And the Wizard of Oz - there's a dirty old man!


But what matters is, what do you think? If Mr. Lehrer and I haven't been helpful, try this exercise:

On a piece of paper or your computer, not to share with anyone else, define 'erotica'. Now, on a separate piece of paper or in a separate document, define 'pornography.' Don't be shy; use whatever words you think are most appropriate.

Not everyone, in fact most people, will not agree with your definitions in some way (one reason to keep them to yourself), but this will help you understand what you see as the differences between them, the desirable elements of one, and the undesirable elements of the other. Okay, now stay away from the latter and steer toward the former.

Right, just kidding - I know it's not that simple. But break the question down into its simplest components: in terms of writing, there's content and expression. With pornography and erotica, the content isn't going to differ a whole lot - it's all essentially plumbing, right? Or, as a course I took in college had it: "holes and poles." Perhaps erotica is more 'romantic,' but then on this site we have a lot of PWP ('porn without plot') which is usually romance-lite, or romance-free. So, is it truly pornography?

That leaves us with expression, language, words. What words you use makes a huge (enormous/substantial/staggering/hung-like-a-horse) difference. If you check out my story Gaming a reader I greatly respect felt a term I had used for the male sexual organ was inappropriate for Tolkien, that it disturbed an otherwise 'beautiful passionate encounter.' One might say I'd stepped over into the realm of pornography from erotica.

Similarly, we had an author here a while back whose stories, many of us agreed, were rife with terms more frequently found in 'pornography' than erotica.

Ultimately, where OSA is concerned, it's that Admin's definition that counts, assuming they wish to archive one and not the other.