Thoughts on Erotica

For the past several months I have been browsing my erotica library and rereading old favourites in search of spanking fiction to share with you. I've made some observations too, and here's what I found.

Much Victorian porn intertwines spanking with copulation to a greater or lesser extent. Sometimes, it's so intermixed that if I were to try to retain just the spanking and omit the rest, the result would be very disjointed and quite short. Not that there's anything wrong with sex. But this is a spanking blog, and I assume that people who come here want to read about spanking. I usually omit the steamy passages and cut to the chase.

The same Victorian porn also contains quite a few descriptions of children being spanked. That is outside the scope of this blog, and I will not post anything related to children.

The third strike against the Victorians is the frequent description of copious amounts of blood drawn during a punishment. That's too extreme for me. I find it a turn-off, not a turn-on. Fine if it happens accidentally, or is mentioned in passing. But the descriptions I have side-stepped talk about, well, let's say generous amounts of blood. The reason for this excess is to make the description more dramatic and exciting, because words are unable to match pictures for impact. Gerald and Caroline Greene, in their book S-M: The Last Taboo, explain it this way:

In the course of memory the actual pain gets buffered by the subconscious. In fantasy, in pornographic writings, it grows accordingly intense in order to compensate for the sheer physical loss involved. In fantasy pain has to be extreme to be brought forward again at all. Story of O is a case in point... A lot of what happened to O would have hospitalized a real woman for life... It is not the S-M story to read first, interesting as it is.

I don't agree with the need for excess; the right words can have plenty of impact. (And as I recall, Story of O was my first exposure to S-M literature.)

So, having said that, there's still quite a lot to be said for Victorian spanking erotica. I love the language, the society of the times, the clothing, the use of implements we don't commonly use today.

As for erotica in general, the language, choice of words and general writing styles vary greatly from author to author. Some writers are repetitive in their descriptions. What happens in one chapter happens again and again, with little variety. Some writers are more eloquent than others; this week's post is a good example of beautiful writing.

It's fun for me to reread long-forgotten passages and note the effect they have on me today. For the most part, they don't make much of one. Take 9 1/2 Weeks, for example. At one time I thought it was a revealing spanking novel. Upon rereading it, I could find very few actual spanking references. It was all innuendo. After having been exposed to so much other spanko writing on the internet, it seemed very tame by comparison.

Still, it's fun to reread and remember, and I will continue to do so until the top shelf is empty. That could take quite a while!