From the dictionary.

Erotica: Literature or art intended to arouse sexual desire

Pornography: Printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of … activity intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.

On various social media platforms I am in touch with writers, many of them, and a not insignificant portion of them (mostly women) write what they call “erotica”. I’ve read a smattering of these books, and what I have found was erotic certainly, but also pornographic. I do not mind pornography, though, like all other art, I think there are better and worse examples of it. I thought it would be interesting to set down what I take to be the difference between the two. Perhaps some interesting discussion will ensue.

There are, of course, many sorts of both erotica and porn, divided largely along the lines of who the characters are. I happen to be heterosexual, and so my focus throughout will be books of that sort, but there is also some great lesbian erotica (and porn) with which I am familiar, and also male homosexual erotica (and porn) with which I am not. There must be, I assume, bisexual and transsexual variations to be found. The distinction between erotica and porn set out below applies equally to all of these.

Erotica is the broader term. “Erotic literature” is literature in which the story revolves around the characters having sex. In pure erotica (see note on Don Juan below), there is always some story through which the sex is threaded because the sex, while it happens throughout the tale, is not described in any detail and so cannot be the story as such. The story’s power to arouse emerges through the connection between the sex and the story’s other action. Fifty Shades of Grey contains some minimally explicit sex—and so to some qualifies as porn—but the story is about much more than the characters having sex. It is arousing because the sex, wherever it appears, is made to serve the wider story and not be the story. I would call it erotica with pornographic highlights.

Pornographic literature (some would say that no porn is literature, but I beg to differ, though there are lesser and greater examples) is descriptively explicit. Like erotica, there is often both sex and a story, but typically, the story is threaded through the sex rather than the sex through the story, as in non-pornographic erotica. There is, however, also pornographic literature in which sex is, essentially, the story, something that cannot be pulled off in erotica. Explicitness, and not sex-in-story-context, is the titillation mechanism of pornography.

In the better pornography, the first few sex acts are described in considerable detail, while the description of later acts is shortened. There is less detail, but also back references (there are various literary approaches to this) to prior, more detailed descriptions, with the link between them left to the reader’s imagination. This device prevents the reader from becoming overwhelmed by repetitive description. There are many variations in the sex act, but by and large, they usually come down to the same few core activities. Literally describing that same core over and over becomes redundant. As it progresses, the story’s explicit description restricts itself to what varies between sex acts.

I’ve read many of both types of books, but I will leave you with a few recommendations. On the erotica side, The Education of Don Juan by Robin Hardy (1985) is the greatest purely erotic, not pornographic, novel I’ve ever read. There is sex in every facet of the story, but the sex acts, marvelously composed, are never explicitly described. A close second is not strictly a novel but an autobiography of one very sex-filled year in the life of Anaïs Nin. Henry and June stretches the erotic/pornographic envelope here and there, but by reference to sex that has already occurred and ended, never in progress. Sometimes, only a single sentence touches the explicit.

Examples of “pure erotica” are harder to find than porn. In the 1950s, a few lesbians began writing erotica, material lost for decades, but recently republished and available on Amazon. In those days, homosexuality was literally illegal (it may become so again if American Republicans get their way) so these women wrote their stories without any explicit sexual description. They are erotic, but like Fifty Shades, the stories, and not the sex, are dominant. Good examples include: I Prefer Girls by Jessie Dupont, Women’s Barracks by Tereska Torres, The Girls in 3B by Valerie Taylor, The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan, and the Beebo Brinker Omnibus by Ann Bannon. I should also mention the Marquis de Sade’s Justine. Pornographic when it was written in 1791, it is purely erotic in the modern vein.

On the pornographic side, I think much of the better literature was written in the late 19th and early 20th century, though much later examples also exist. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (John Cleland), known also as Fanny Hill was published in 1749 and is considered the first great English pornographic novel. But the best, in my opinion, is The Black Pearl by Anonymous (not the famous one by Scott O’Dell).

Written in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, its real provenance is difficult to determine. The Black Pearl follows many characters who, at the beginning, have sex (the women) with the main protagonist (Horby, a man) and then go off on adventures across Europe, reporting back to him on their exploits via letters. Horby has his own adventures as well, and there is a raft of other characters who were famous artists, playwrights, and others of the English upper classes in the 1880s and 90s. The description of these characters by the protagonist (the story is told in first person) suggests that he was, in fact, a real person of substance and knew these people intimately.

My favorite line in pornographic literature comes from this book. One of the women finds herself embroiled in a Satanic cult. Having described (in a letter) in luscious but shortened detail her liaison with the cult’s high priest (witnessed by a circle of initiates, and in which she is a willing participant), she makes perhaps the most pragmatic assessment of Satanism I have ever read: “Oh Horby!” she declares, “This Satanism is just fucking with frills!”

Other examples of good porn include The Story of O by Jean-Jacques Pauvert (1954) and Enrolling Little Etta by Alta Hensley (2016). I leave off by mentioning the four-volume BDSM set Sleeping Beauty by A. N. Roquelaure (Ann Rice 1983-2015). The sex in this last gets a little boring, but it is explicit.

I suppose you want a few examples now? Here are two

Erotica: Clothes shed they embrace. Falling on the mattress, entangled in one another’s bodies, he enters her…

Pornography: … entangled in one another’s bodies the tip of his tumescent gourd finds the moist outer petals of her flower and buries itself to the root in her soaking wet volcanic channel…

You get the idea?

This all leaves me with one further question. Why do women seem, at least in this time of global social media, to be more often successful authors of erotica and pornography than men? But I take leave to address it another time.