Forum: Author Hangout

Before ubiquitous immediate-satisfaction internet porn, there was a market for a much wider spectrum of eroticism - lots of softcore, and even hardcore was sometimes elevated artistically or more complex plots than "I can't pay the plumber" were explored.

I wonder if we'll ever see that again?

It's my understanding that there's a fair amount of porn (tiny in comparision to zero-plot, but still substantial) that has a story and characters and fits into e.g. 'much sex'. Most of it is marketed as 'female-centric porn', though there are some 'female-centric' producers that are still 'stroke story'-level.

That sounds like a non-mainstream Italian or French soft‑core 'architectural erotica' film from sometime in the early-to-mid 70s.

Most likely it was released under multiple alternate titles. A search didn't turn up any likely candidates given the specific parameters you cited.

The only porn I watch now is found under a "classic" heading or a "retro." Porn back in the early years had a story and was still explicit in the sex content. Now we have a sub standard idea and then banging away in a dozen different ways with a dozen different partners. I challenge any of the authors here to write the story of "Deep Throat," not just the sex part but the whole story. Bet that would take more than a few words.

DH Lawrence was labeled a pornographer during his lifetime. His work contained explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, used heavy profane and "four-letter" words (like "fuck" and "cunt"), and openly portrayed female sexual pleasure outside of marriage. That was porn back then.

Yes, but despite the initial porn label his novels weren't "long-form erotica."

It's always the balance between the sex and the plot / character development. Diana Gabaldon wrote strong sex scenes (and her commentary on how to write them is excellent), but it still doesn't make her "Outlander" novels erotica.

Maybe erotica can't support a long story because doing it over and over again leaves the characters (ETA: and the reader) exhausted.

ETA: Nick Scipio's "Summer Camp" series might qualify as long-form erotica.

~ JBB

Yes, but despite the initial porn label his novels weren't "long-form erotica."

By whose definition? His novels were long-form erotica.

I disagree that "erotica can't support a long story because doing it over and over again leaves the characters (ETA: and the reader) exhausted." You're talking about poorly written stories. Those are like their sister porn movies.

"The Story of O" is an example of an erotica long story (full-length novel). It was well-written because the author had talent. She was an intellectual, a journalist, an author, a literary critic, and even a member of a jury for several literary awards. Of course she used a pen name so no one at the time knew she was the author.

It can be done, but, like any other form of fiction, there needs to be talent. It's even harder because of the porn stigma.

It's all in the balance and the quality.

Unfortunately, I believe it's between behind closed doors and graphically shown.

'Erotica' is a different category than 'written pornography', in my opinion. 'The Story of O' is a great example. So would be some of Anne Rice's 'Anne Rampling' novels.

Heck, quite a lot of what's published as 'romance' (and 'romantasy', etc) qualifies as 'erotica', and some is very long-form.

On the other hand, there's the Greenleaf Press et al books of years gone by. Most of them qualify as 'poorly written stories', but they served their purpose as 'stroke stories' long before online publishing was a thing. They're still novel-length (at least, some are). And they certainly have much more of a plot than most modern porn.

'Erotica' is a different category than 'written pornography', in my opinion.

That's my point. What is the difference? Are the definitions changing over time (e.g., my DH Lawrence example)? I don't even think his novels are considered erotica today, yet they were porn in the 1920s.

An author once gave her tongue-in-cheek definition of erotica vs porn. She said something like, "Erotica is better written; porn pays better."

I don't consider any of my stories/novels porn. Even the ones with "much sex." (ETA: except for my really old stories)

In my case, the porn scenes weren't the point, as they merely preceded the more revealing apres-sex scenes, where the characters actually open up to one another, revealing long-suppressed details I, as the author, never guessed about my own characters.

Thus, there was simply no other way of telling those stories without those 'hot and heavy' sex scenes.

Worse, were when someone would come across a sex scene and then simply skip the whole chapter, and then bitch about how the next chapter didn't make any sense! If you skip every several chapters, you're not reading, you're merely perusing.

Which is WHY I quit writing any sex scenes, despite their being my highest rated chapters, as it was no longer worth the effort.

Given that the ratings are given to a story, not a chapter in a story, what evidence do you have for the above, please?

My guess is he monitors the score after posting each chapter. Score goes up = it was because they liked the chapter. Score goes down = they didn't.

But I'm guessing.

That's my guess, too. I used to pay more attention to that than I do now. There seems to be too much random variation for me to consistently find a signal in the noise.

ETA: This was back when you authors could still get a histogram of the scores for a story, and he was watching one of the '1' votes transforming to a '3' and back on consecutive chapters based on the changing bar lengths and scaling from the modal score, the only number given.

Wow, and I thought I was overly obsessed with my scores. I need a hobby.

'Erotica' is a different category than 'written pornography', in my opinion.

I'll bring out Diana Gabaldon ("Outlander") for her characterization of sex, paraphrased as: sex is a conversation, and what the participants say to each other makes it powerful and effective in telling the story. By extension, in my view that's erotica. Porn results when they have nothing to say to each other beyond body part 1 and body part 2.

That said, I maintain that even when Lawrence has the gamekeeper say to Lady Chatterley that "cock speaks to cunt," it's still not porn, nor is the novel erotica, despite the use of sex to demonstrate class and caste conflicts.

~ JBB

I didn't mean to turn this into an erotica vs porn semantics argument. While porn carries a kind of stigmatized assumption (probably around the idea of being created as a dopamine-delivering masturbation aid) that erotica may not (although why wouldn't it?); there's enough overlap between the two that I don't see much point in drawing lines around the categories.

My original post was basically "I seem to be enjoying erotica over porn as I get older" where I was shorthanding erotica as written sex scenes and porn as video sex. Obviously that was kind of dumb of me! The written word can both be erotic and even pornographic, the same with video. Whoops.

The written word can both be erotic and even pornographic

Fortunately (for me, at least) the UK government disagrees with you, and for now written works are not considered pornography :-)

AJ

When I write, I have a story in mind to which I add sex because that is how I would want to live my life. I've read a lot on this site and if the story wasn't there, I stopped reading because I already know all about sex that anyone can learn, and the sex gets boring if there's no story to balance it.

and the sex gets boring if there's no story to balance it.

And that's pretty much the difference between porn (sex, no story) and erotica (sex, and story).

Paraphrasing Diana Gabaldon again (sorry), in addition to sex being a conversation, there has to be a story reason why those particular characters are having sex.

~ JBB

I would add, there also has to be a story (or authorial) reason why these particular characters are being shown having sex in detail. I have lots of characters who have plenty of sex. Mostly, that doesn't translate to on-page sex beyond the 'We headed to bed, but not right to sleep, having a lot of fun getting tired and messing up the sheets first' sort of 'sex.'

New, unusual, different, renewed relationships - all of that makes some sense to get into some detail about.

One somewhat ironic twist: if two people having sex is limited to the one-liner sort of allusion I noted above, or is omitted entirely, the reader might get the impression their sex life is boring, stale, etc. But if you detail every encounter, try as you may to 'spice it up,' it's likely going to get boring and stale for the reader, making the reader skip right over it.

Perhaps it's a case of 'better to remain quiet and be thought boring than to speak and remove all doubt.'

But if you detail every encounter, try as you may to 'spice it up,' it's likely going to get boring and stale for the reader, making the reader skip right over it.

At first I was never entirely convinced when folks said they were reading a great story but they just skipped over the sex parts but since then I've read more than one story where I wanted to see how it came out but the sex scenes were repetitive and boring.

~ JBB

… they were reading a great story … but the sex scenes were repetitive and boring.

Then it wasn't a great story.

Depends on how you measure it. I can think of quite a few stories (many not on SoL) that are 'some sex' or 'much sex' in which the core story is interesting, the characters are interesting, etc, but the sex scenes feel increasingly like 'fanservice' as things go on, seldom advancing the plot meaningfully.

Perhaps not 'great,' I can agree, but 'very good' seems reasonable, at least.

in which the core story is interesting, the characters are interesting, etc,

Yeah, I didn't mean the story (plot) couldn't be great, but that it couldn't be a great story if you had to skip over boring parts.

That's only because they don't know how to write sex scenes, merely writing Tab A into Slut B, repeat ad ad finitum (where the whole point is the continued meaningless relationships.

Man I would love to read modern reviews of classic erotica. I guess there might be some at Goodreads!

I have fond memories of a fair bit of it. As you said, Lynch and MacLachlan together are fun, no question.

However, 'weirding modules' set me off so badly there was no saving it. It would have been like a 'Star Trek' movie where the Vulcan Mind-Meld was accomplished by some gadget, or a 'Star Wars' movie where The Force was a technological advancement.

I understand why Lynch made that decision. I still think it was a stunningly bad decision and one that seriously undermined the story.

I can honestly say I am not sure there is one movie or TV show that even comes close to the book.

"The Godfather" may.

But then there's the other side of it. My first exposure to Jack Reacher was Tom Cruise in the first movie. I fell in love with the character. That got me to read some of the novels (but not the same one as the movie).

Lee Child didn't want Tom Cruise to play Reacher. Reacher is 6'5" and 250 lbs of muscle. Definitely not Tom Cruise. But I like Cruise's portrayal of Reacher better than Lee Child's. The one in the novels is a sadistic bully. Tom Cruise's is cool.

So in my opinion, the Tom Cruise Jack Reacher movies are better than the novels.

But I like Cruise's portrayal of Reacher better than Lee Child's. The one in the novels is a sadistic bully. Tom Cruise's is cool.

My memory of the novel "never go back", the second Cruise movie, is that it was one of the better Reacher novels. Plenty of fist fights but Reacher came across as a little more interesting than the bully you correctly describe him as in other novels, and Cruises portrayal of him was good.

~ JBB

the bully you correctly describe him as in other novels

I think the last novel I read was "Echo Burning." There was a scene where he was in a bar with pool tables and knew people were coming to beat him up. True to his character, he told them to call an ambulance before the fight started because they were going to need it. After he beat them up, he didn't stop. He took a cue and beat the shit out of a helpless thug. There was no reason for that.

In the first Cruise movie, Reacher kills the Russian bad guy in cold blood at the end. That didn't bother me. My Lincoln Steele character in my novels might do the same thing. That was justice. But that wasn't like the Reacher in the novel clubbing the helpless thug with the cue for no reason other than to do damage.

but looking at someone the size of Reacher from the books, okay I could picture it.

That's why Alan Ritchson plays Reacher in the streaming series. He's huge like he is in the novels. Although in the novels he's ugly.

And it seems to be a consensus view that 'The Godfather' is a much better film than book.

I read the book when I was a teenager and it was one of the best books I ever read. That's why I said "maybe" in my post. The movie is great too.

My memory sucks, but I remember a scene in the book that I loved that wasn't in the movie. In the book, the guy who blew up the car killing Michael's Italian wife had a large butterfly tattoo on his chest. When Michael got even and had everyone killed at the end, he personally went to the pizza place in NYC where the guy with the tattoo owned and killed him. That was not in the movie.

To me, that's part of the point of the movie, though - the seductiveness of that sort of mental illness. Thoroughly unreliable narrator doing thoroughly unreliable narrator things.

The same is true for both movie and book of 'American Psycho'. It's disturbing how many people missed the satire in the book (which might - as Ellis says - make the movie better in that regard), but it's also disturbing how many people take the movie's portrayal of events as gospel and miss how ridiculously unreliable a narrator Bateman is (which makes the book better - for people who got it). Ellis is probably right that the movie is 'unnecessary', but it also probably helped, in that way too many people took the book as misogyny and not satire, while the movie made it rather obvious that it's satire. And, like Brad Pitt's character in Fight Club, there's a disturbing undercurrent of people who think Patrick Bateman is 'cool'. Of course, more than a few people think Hannibal Lector is cool, too.

Audiences not getting the point isn't necessarily the fault of the book or movie (or, at least, not in my opinion). In a different artform, witness the enormous number of people who think 'Every Breath You Take', 'Stay With Me', 'Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)', or 'More Than Words' as feel-good love songs and do things like play them at weddings.

On the other hand, and while I referenced Chuck Palahniuk praising the movie, authors don't get the final word. I think Stephen King is both wrong and right about 'The Shining'. It's not a terrific movie of King's book, but it's a terrific movie, and it's very hard to say which is 'better,' since they're similar but different things.

Or take 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory'. Dahl famously hated it, and it's again not at all a perfect movie of Dahl's book ('Charlie and the Chocolate Factory', for it's problems, is a better movie of the book). But it's a great movie, and many of the things Dahl disliked are things that make it great. So, again, is it 'worse' or 'better' than the book? It depends on what you're looking for, really.

Then there are movies that aren't movies of books. Stephen King tends (not always) to have 'inferior' movie adaptations, but that's partly because he writes long (to very long) books with a lot of texture and subplot. Movies can't do that. 'The Shawshank Redemption' and 'Stand By Me' are both arguably better than the novellas on which they're based, but that's because little is cut (and the cuts tend to make sense) and the additions truly add things.

Sometimes times change, too. 'The Running Man' (1987) in 1987 was a fairly good movie that owed relatively little (but hardly nothing) to Bachmann's (aka King's) novel. It's a better movie in 2026, in my opinion, because much of what the movie saw coming looks more plausible now than it did then. Which is a very sad commentary on society in 2026, but ... it is what it is.

Going with the idea of book and movie sometimes being tangential to each other, 'Starship Troopers' is a lousy movie of Heinlein's novel and a very good satire of fascism, authoritarianism, and militarism. One can like both (I do!), but it's unlikely that someone likes both of them for the same reasons one likes the other. It's again pointless to argue which is 'better,' because the reasons one is 'better' than the other are likely tangential.