Pornography and Erotica

The terms “pornography” and “erotica” are often defined in opposition to each other. As a minimal definition both refer to mediated communication that depicts sexually explicit subject matter, but beyond that the two terms part company in a variety of ways. “Erotica” was coined in the 1950s to designate something more elevated and exclusive than pornography. Social scientists have drawn up typologies for categorizing sexually explicit material. These usually oppose the “ideal” character of erotica, in which no power relations are discerned, with the degrading and sexist nature of “standard” or “violent” pornography. Today the term “erotica” is often used in reference to material produced by and for women as opposed to (male) pornography. There are also a range of distinctions made in terms of intentions and outcomes; pornography is designed to sexually arouse the producer and/or audience, whereas erotica is whatever the individual finds arousing; pornography induces a purely sexual response, whereas erotica combines sexual with emotional and aesthetic responses; pornography stimulates solitary masturbation whereas erotica provides an aphrodisiac for interpersonal sex. Another approach is to see the category of pornography as a function of censorship: that to which the social elite restrict access by means of administrative or legal exclusion. Here we must introduce another important distinction: that between “hard core” and “soft core.” What must be excluded is the pornographic hard core – namely, whatever is left once erotic material with any artistic or scientific value has been redeemed. Another way of drawing the distinction between soft core and hard core is to class the former as the creative representation of sexual subject matter, using literary, graphic, photographic and filmic techniques; and the latter, as the direct documentation of sexual acts, which by definition is confined to photography and especially to the moving image. There is, in short, no universally accepted way of defining either term.