Sunday, July 7, 2013

Story Sunday - what's erotic?

I read a review of The Virginity Mission (do you need the cover again, Lily? Here it is.) where the reviewer said she considered it a "normal" story and not erotic.

What is erotic (in the context of erotic romance as a subgenre of books)?

I don't really know! I thought it was explicit sex scenes where you don't use euphemisms but names of body parts, where sex is described fully, and where sex is a vital part of the story line. But maybe I'm wrong.

In my trusty dictionary, erotic is defined as: of or pertaining to sexual love; arousing or satisfying sexual desire.

The Virginity Mission is fairly tame with the sex - but she is a virgin. I don't know about you but I didn't take to sex like a duck to water. It took me a while to get the hang of being wild. There's so much to learn first up.


Maybe in the post-50 Shades world, we've moved the goalposts for erotic and it needs to be kinky sex, which I still call BDSM which is a subgenre of erotic.

In my mind there are a lot of different subgenres in the erotic category - BDSM, fetishes, oral sex, anal sex, menages or more, multiple partners, bestiality, golden showers, scat play - and those are just off the top of my head. 

In a way, I'd like normal sex to be accepted in every novel, but I think people would be too shocked. For that reason, I believe it still needs a label as a warning. Too many of my family/friends struggle to read my sex scenes because they can't handle that I wrote them (or wrote about sex).

I don't know that many people are ready for normal sex to be fully described, let alone for kinky sex to become normalised as erotic!

I think we're still in a world where sex is strange, something behind closed doors, never to be talked about - and I'm talking missionary sex here!

What do you think? How do you define "erotic" in literature?

4 comments:

  1. I can always use another gawp at that cover!
    Here's a Sunday story that sounds like a Phallic Friday - which day are you on Cate?
    My two cents - when I read The Virginity Mission - I didn't think of it as erotica. I don't think I write 'erotica', I write contemporary romance... and I felt that your sex scenes weren't much different in terms of description & explicitness than mine. The only thing really was use of the 'c' word describing lady parts (lord even on your blog I can't type c***. Don't ask me why, but in my little mind, that feels like one of the boundary lines between contemporary & erotica? I'm probably so far off base!
    Maybe it's more of a boundary in the contemporary heat levels, like from 'hot' to 'sizzling'... rather than a change in genre?
    Ouch. Too much thinking for a Sunday morning!

    Cheerio
    Lily M
    xx

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    1. Heee here. Sorry to make you think hard on a Sunday morning and with a Friday topic. I'll have you all thought out!

      I hate that there isn't a good word to use instead of c@&t. Sometimes I'd like to write historical so I could use quim. It's a nice word. But without anything else, I decided I had to use the c- word and make it so it wasn't harsh and swearing or derogatory but 'normal'.

      Maybe we need to bring back quim :)

      Cate xo

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    2. I like quim too! The heroine in my current battling/struggling book is called Quin and I have ideas of a line in there about her name and how she used to get teased on the whole Quin/Quim thing...
      Maybe we need a FB banner and a slogan! You know:

      "What do we want? Quim"
      "When do we want it. Now."

      Or we could come up with something more original of course!

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    3. Quin is an unusual first name. You'll have Quin's quim!!

      Something more original... Hmmm... Nothing coming to me...

      Cate xo

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