By way of comment…

I offered this in a comment to an artist on DeviantArt.com who spoke of not really knowing the difference between erotic art and pornography.  The tone of their post was they had been beat up by the question to the point of not really caring.   I’m reposting it here because this is about as succinct a definition as I’ve ever managed to capture.  I feel this is an important thing to care about since in truth the subject runs a great deal deeper than simply the realms of art.

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In your journal you pose a most pertinent question concerning the difference between erotic art and pornography.  Please, allow me to offer for your consideration the definition I've found that fits observable reality without contradiction.

As you say, there is sex, and there is death.  From nature's perspective there is one absolute demand placed on all life: make more life so life will not end with your ending.

From this it then follows that the erotic arts are all things, sexual or otherwise, that celebrate the ability to make more life.  The erotic arts are in fact quite wide ranging, but always share several things in common: they imply fertility; and, by literal or implied content are taken from a binocular perspective, more than one, for it takes more than one to create new life. By way of example, for those who truly understand the erotic an image of a fruited orchard is just as erotic as an image of a man and a woman sharing sex, for the end result is the same... more life.

The pornographic is however all things, again sexual or otherwise, that abdicate the responsibility of creating new life to replace the current life that death will, ultimately, set non-living.  There are many forms of pornography, sexual pornography being the most recognized but hardly the most damaging.  To my thought the defining characteristic of pornography is a monocular perspective, the perspective of one and only one, and in that lonesomeness ultimately sterile, and in sterility doomed.

Since pornography presents a monocular focus it, like the erotic arts, is indeed a wide ranging thing. Pornography of any form presents to the world the lie that some single point of focus can create the life desired rather than the truth which is that any single point of focus can but reflect the content of the life already existing.  To those who truly understand the pornographic there are so many forms of pornography: pistol porn, power porn, pain porn, money porn... the list just goes on and on, our world is saturated in pornographic thought.  But in common to all of them is the implication that this one thing is what validates life to continue.  To understand pornography is to understand the mechanisms of death, and death is always faced... alone.

The erotic arts reflect the courage of life determined to live on, pornography reflects the fear and despair of death.