What is erotica? How is it different from pornography? Perhaps a rhetorical question hung as bait, certainly a challenge to define in short form as if any definition could ever be more than a justified opinion. Still though, with your permission I'd like to take a swing at it, it is my hobby to attempt such definitions.
I will need your help with one minor visual aid, so please in your minds eye draw three equal circles arranged as an equilateral triangle, leave a radius' worth of room between each and fill them with color, primary colors if you wish. Give each circle a name: sustenance or security or procreation. Draw lines to connect the center-points of the circles, lines that connect tangent to tangent, perpendicular lines to center opposite, lines to represent your understanding of the intellectual forces of life having a bearing on the primal need each circle represents. Now relax your mind from such geometries and release the colors assigned to flow away from the constraints of the intellect, let them flow equally from the circles into the spaces between, let them swirl, mix and blend like the wash of sunset watercolors beneath the geometric pattern. Study what you have drawn, the simpler lines and arcs, the complexity of the emotional boundaries represented within the colors. The pattern you've created is a diagram of one moment in the working erotic, or equally define the defiled state of pornography, as will be made clear in a bit.
Just as no two humans are exactly alike no two diagrams will be exactly alike of course, even though the overlapping field of motives represented in the diagram influences everyone's life experiences. There is no question procreation is the ultimate working load on Life, nature's only real demand: make more Life. Live as you wish or live as you must to satisfy the demands of sustenance and security, but regardless of all else you must find a way to make more Life lest Life end with your ending. In one way or another all things serve nature's one demand, it is an absolute, there is no avoiding the consequences of that demand.
In art Erotica is all things that celebrate humanities' ability to meet that overriding demand nature must have of us in order that Life remain when we are gone. Erotica is art worked in the multiple dimensions formed of the emotional interplay of those who seek to become aligned and allied as mates, an infinite stack of diagrams of the moment such as we just drew arranged along the axis between the lovers; Erotica is the swirling colors of a sexual aurora borealis generated as their lives seek harmony, each reinforcing the other that they might be strong enough to arrange the other facts and facets of their lives into the ultimately adult configuration required to create and nurture Life. In a very real sense the erotic celebrates the lover's ascent into full adulthood.
The test to determine if a work should be called erotica or porn is actually rather simple: erotica always strives to invoke the depth of binocular vision with representations composed of, or compatible with, the explicit or implied interface between individuals willing and able to undertake the burden of creating and nurturing new life. By contrast sexual pornography (there are other kinds) is all things which seek to defeat nature's demand with a sterile monocular perspective, representing to the world by any manner the life destroying lie that the sexual ecstasy enjoyed by fertile mates can be counterfeited by any form or function of social sexuality where the deed is held as higher than nature's intended result, the fertility of family realized. Pornography at it's best can be no more than the relatively simple and flat little Venn diagram we started out with, and with reason: pornography always impacts only one person at a time, pornography cannot accommodate the complexity of any two lives in the same frame of reference, much less the complexity of bonded mates.
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