Not like I've been in that situation, or anything.(And I'm worried I do that to somebody right now, AINFG.)

Oh, I dunno. I thnk it's quite bad enough.

Err... thank you, I think.

I've drafted a response to the flame I recieved yesterday-- though I do wonder if I'm spending too much time on this woman. Looking at my website, I think there's actually only one story she can be talking about (and yes, I had to Google to see if I'd published an S/X story somewhere else and forgotten to add it to the website. But nothing, so I think I'm fairly safe in my deduction).

Edit: I had put it here, but I think I'll move this to my lj, where I can f-lock it-- she's quite unlikely to be lurking here, but I'm having a paranoia moment. Most of you are on lj, and on my f-list, I think (if you're not, I'm amchau, let me know who you are and I'll friend you).

Am-Chau, I saw the response in your journal, and I think that it's fine if you want to enter into a dialogue with her. (I might just delete her message, myself.)

Thank you, Lyra. I've sent it now. Apparently, I don't have 'peaceably letting it go' in my nature, even though I don't have time to follow Fay's advice and enter into a proper dialogue with her.

(edit: is that 0 the missing one from her spelling of pr0n? I like to keep track of these things.)

edited again: I didn't mean that to sound bitchy. Just, you know, typo joke. And I seem to be in danger of wanking about my own posts.

In my tiny mind:

smut=bodice ripper;

erotica=literary porn, not always nice;

porn=unnaturally big breasted women or uncannily well-endowed, but otherwise boring-as-toast, men doing tacky and not at all arousing for the very tackiness things, all enhanced by an excess of gratuitious genitalia shots or description, topped with unbelieveable plot, settings,and characterization.

Deena's tiny mind and mine are alike, except that I'd add an additional category between smut and erotica labeled "sexy," that's basically, er, well-written smut. The distinction between sexy and erotica being that erotica is about The Sex, while sexy just includes a little or a lot of it while being about anything from The Love to The External Action Plot.

I'd give examples and stuff, but my child just woke up and demands food.

(Deena also speaks to me WRT my bizarre fascination with the Michael/Nikita badfic.)

nods.

Yes, these categories make sense. And the tacky element that makes something porn - yes. In written sex, it's the language that makes me wince and think 'porn' in this way - all those horrendous euphemisms like 'her luscious melons' and 'his enormous manhood' and 'her love-juice' and yada yada yada godawful nonsense.

The TFN badfic is every bit as weirdly compelling as Lydia's infamous Core story was.

Link?

t Disclaimer--I've never made any kind of categorical study of porn, so the comments below are based almost entirely on what I've happened to run across by accident on the internet

What disturbs me about visual porn, at least the kind that shows up in spam or sometimes ambushes you unawares when you think you're going to a perfectly innocent and inoffensive website, is that the women are so fake-looking and garishly costumed and made-up. To my eyes, they're caricatures or parodies of ideal beauty, not at all the real thing. And so, in a weird way I feel threatened by that type of porn in a way that I don't by, say, Natalie Portman or Miranda Otto, to name DH's current Secret Celebrity Girlfriends. It's like the porn fantasy woman is a whole different kind of being than what I am, while celebrity hotties are the same kind as me, just a whole lot prettier.

Does that even make any kind of sense?

So you'd say that one element of the category you call "sexy" is the fact that it's closer to reality? I can see that. A lot of times in the fic world there are complaints about idealized sex or idealized bodies. (There was recently a story on the Nikita board where during one chapter, the orgasm count was Nikita 5, Michael 4.) Reality is that simultaneous orgasms are not the default, or that sometimes sex is bad for any number of reasons.

Visual porn is its own weird entity. A great deal of what I have sampled (mostly recent, run-of-the-mill stuff, not much of the "classics") relies on a library of settings, events and styles that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with real-world pleasures.

(Like, anybody who tried to actually have sex on a motorcycle would probably tell you it is not very comfortable. Ditto, carpeted stairs. Same again, trying to have sex with someone who has inch-long plastic fingernails -- one wrong move, and owie!)

I think the library of visual porn events is as developed and specialized as, say, the library of written porn events among slashers. Try explaining to someone who is not into that scene about Sentinel slashers' fixation on teddy bears, or why M/K people have such a thing for turning their heroes into thrill killers and/or fetishists. It is like, a small population locked itself into a room and came up with its own "language" of erotics, that bears a passing similarity to our common language of erotics, but has gone so long out of dialogue with the common language that it is very difficult to communicate.

In a way, though the distinction I'm making is more of ideal vs. a parody of an ideal. I understand why a man would find Natalie Portman hot--hell, I'm as heterosexual as they come, and I can't help staring at her. But the porno pictures that occasionally pop up in my spam faster than I can hit the delete key are repulsive to me, and, judgmental and politically incorrect as this probably sounds, I'm disturbed and a bit frightened by the idea of it appealing to anyone.

(Off to shower and work. Back at some point.)