My High Price Paid to Write Erotica
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Framing Erotica free porn video
Framing Erotica
By Cal Y. Pygia
The aim of erotic literature is to excite its reader sexually. Its goal
is to cause male readers to attain and maintain a penile erection. Its
intent is to cause female readers' vaginas to lubricate themselves
and/or to cause women to attain and maintain a clitoral erection. More
than most--perhaps all--other forms of literature, erotica demonstrates
the physiological effects of fiction upon readers.
One--and perhaps the primary--way by which writers accomplish this feat
is to frame their subjects. Framing draws attention to the subject. By
including certain features while excluding others, framing isolates a
subject, showcasing it. In the process, framing the subject can also
provide it with a context according to which the subject should be
interpreted, layer one's narrative (providing a literal foreground, as
it were, that is set against a symbolic or figurative background), focus
the reader upon the writer's intended theme, and enrich the depth of the
composition itself, as a whole.
Framing a subject accomplishes more than these technical feats, however.
Framing a subject also values its subject while devaluing those elements
that it elects not to include. By collecting elements to be included in
the narrative, the writer suggests that these features are preferred to
those which he or she has, as it were, rejected by having chosen to
exclude them. Selection is election; in nominating, the writer
approves, imparting value to the items that are chosen for inclusion.
Exclusion is dismissal; in opting not to nominate, the writer
disapproves, devaluing the elements that he or she has chosen to ignore.
Alternatively, something or someone (a woman, for instance) can be
rejected by being replaced with something or someone else (a man or a
shemale, for example). By attributing to a man or a shemale the
attributes that are normally associated with a woman, these
characteristics are, as it were, transferred to the substitute woman,
whether "she" is a male or a shemale. In either case, the female is
thereby rejected; she is excluded. Therefore, she is devalued. All
stories in which two males or a male and a shemale, rather than a male
and a female, form a couple (or merely couple) are tacit rejections-by-
exclusion of the female. Erotic stories involving homosexual or a male-
to-female transsexual and a male partner devalue women by excluding them
from consideration.
But let us return to an earlier point. Framing, by including some
details while excluding others, also focuses the reader's attention
where the writer wants it to be, thereby valuing those elements or
features of the story's subject (as well as the subject him- or herself)
over others which, by virtue of their having been excluded, are
devalued. Often, in heterosexual erotica, what is ignored, or rejected,
is the personality of the female character. Often, she is rendered as
an object--a sex object--or as a barely human persona. The treatment
that female (and, sometimes, shemale) characters receives is summed up,
visually (and in an exaggerated fashion), by cartoons which purport to
depict the "perfect woman."
In one such cartoon, she is depicted as two headless and armless pairs
of legs and buttocks, complete with a pair of vaginas. While one pair
of legs kneels, the connected pair, knees bent, rest upon their buttocks
and the soles of their feet. Nothing is left of the rest of the woman:
no brain, no vocal cords, and no arms are necessary in this view of the
"perfect woman." The essence of women, the cartoon suggests, is
comprised of the features that are included in the drawing; those parts
that are excluded are unimportant. In a similar cartoon, a Baubo-like
figure (see my novel, Baubo) is presented as exemplifying the ideal
woman. She consists of a pair of legs which end in a truncated torso
which consists of breasts in front, under which is a vagina, and
buttocks in the rear. There is no back, stomach, arms, neck, or head.
The point that these cartoons make seems pretty clear. The "perfect
woman" is a sex object, without need of a mind, a heart, or a soul. As
long as she has the essential features of womanhood--tits, cunt, and
ass--she is "perfect."
Erotica--especially the stories that men write--are only slightly less
guilty than such cartoons are of dehumanizing and objectifying women, of
reducing them to the level of things rather than portraying them as
human beings, a criticism that many feminists have argued concerning
erotic literature, or "pornography," as they are wont to call fiction
that concerns itself with sexual conduct and themes. It seems clear
that such critics have some valid points in this regard. All men are
Pygmalion who want women to be their Galatea. However, on a broader
scale, such reification seems inevitable, both in erotica and all other
genres of literature. It is impossible, after all, to write of all
persons, places, things, qualities, and ideas at the same time. To
write at all, one must be selective, and to be selective is to include,
to prefer, to elect, to nominate, to appoint, and to value, just as it
is also to reject, to ignore or to replace, and to devalue.
Whether his or her subjects are a man and a woman, two men, two women, a
man and a shemale, a woman and a shemale, or some combination of these
possibilities, individual or collective, the writer of erotica (like
writers of literature in general) must further isolate them by inclusion
and exclusion, in this paragraph describing breasts, for example, and in
the next buttocks, before, in subsequent paragraphs, describing penises,
testicles, vaginas, legs, and so forth. Both because erotic literature
chooses sexual organs and sexual acts as its subject matter and because
of the very nature of language itself as a process of revelation through
the stringing together of syntactical elements in phrases, dependent
clauses, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, according to chronological
sequence and grammatical requirements, erotic literature is reductive,
dehumanizing, and objective. It can't be otherwise.
To provide depth and context to the description of bodies in collision,
writers of erotica must employ the same set of tools that any other
author uses to accomplish this feat: figures of speech (especially
metaphor), analogy, symbolism, juxtaposition, and other poetic and
rhetorical devices. Some--too many, by far--of these devices are built-
in, as it were, to erotica. It is a rare story, indeed, for example, in
which a penis is not described as a ramrod (which "rams"), a sword or a
knife (which "thrusts," "penetrates," "pierces," or "stabs"), or, in
ejaculation, as a volcano (which "erupts"), a bomb (which "explodes") or
a gun (which "shoots" or "discharges"), or according to some other
equally familiar metaphor. Attempts to add new tropes to erotica's
storehouse of metaphorical images is difficult, and the author who
succeeds in doing so is apt to accomplish this feat only infrequently
and rarely. (I myself have added "column of flesh," for an erection,
and "gum-drop-shaped" to describe the tip, or glans, of the penis. In
addition, I have described breasts as "buoyant" and semen as
"fecundating fluid." However, these and one or two other exceptions
aside, I have, admittedly, added precious little to the treasury of
erotic tropes.)
Unless new poetical and rhetorical figures can be created, the old ones
will have to do. However, such images and figures of speech have
already become clich?s, and, as such, they simply reinforce the
traditional ideas and feelings that readers and writers have already
accumulated concerning sex and all things sexual, including women's
bodies (and the substitute for women's bodies that are the physiques of
shemales or, more often, feminized or effeminate males). Therefore, we
shall continue to think of women in terms of natural objects, as having
breasts like apples, pubic hair like forests or thickets, buttocks like
mountains, hair like gold or dusk, and men (and the substitute for
women's bodies that are the physiques of shemales or butch lesbians and
dominatrix, or "phallic women") as technological devices, such as
machines, engines, instruments, and tools.
Traditional erotica represents women as natural objects--as the earth,
as fields, as fruits, or as ore--to be exploited by men, who plow,
pluck, or mine their sexual resources, and to represent males as equally
soulless mechanical men. If women are heartless, mindless features of
the landscape, men are unfeeling, unthinking contraptions which farm or
excavate or manufacture the natural resources of femininity and
womanhood. Only by creating fresh metaphors, analogies, and other
rhetorical and poetic figures can writers and readers begin to think of
men and women anew, in new terms. Gay fiction sometimes attempts to
portray some men as feminine, just as lesbian literature occasionally
depicts some women as masculine, and a few writers (those, perhaps, with
a bisexual or pansexual leaning) seek to represent both men and women
alike as more-or-less androgynous figures who are willing to have sex
with anyone, anywhere.
Sex and gender need not be represented as polarized opposites or in the
natural and technological terms in which we have come to depict women
and men, respectively, but framing depends upon the cultural, social,
historical, environmental, and political milieu in which writers write
and readers read. Not until we transcend ourselves--which may be an
impossibility--can we transcend the limitations that result from framing
subjects. Just to be aware of these limitations, however, is to
something. At least with the knowledge that these limitations exist, we
can use them to our best advantage as writers of erotica.
Perhaps, as climate change develops as a consequence of global warming,
we can use the consequences of these (probably sometimes catastrophic)
changes as a basis for developing a new paradigm of human sex and gender
that allows us to move beyond the male-female dichotomy to a spectrum or
continuum of sex-and-gender that includes continuous and inevitable
change, transformation, and metamorphosis in which sex and gender become
as fluid as nature itself has had to be, in times both past and present,
simply to survive.
Maybe there is hope for men and women, after all; maybe we can evolve
beyond mere masculinity and femininity and beyond even maleness and
femaleness. Maybe we can all become chicks with dicks or dudes with
boobs, both is a social and an emotional, as well as a sexual, sense.
Even better, maybe transsexuals will be only the start of a new and
endless evolution of human sex and gender, the forms of which are,
today, unimaginable.
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