Aspects of Sexuality

What is erotica? It's all about good taste

A taste of things to come - AI image by NightCafé

Years ago, when I first became an editor on Medium, one of my fellow volunteers let slip on our private chat channel that he wrote erotic stories under a pen name. As I knew certain things about them and I had a very good map of Amazon’s erotica maze, I soon found their pen-name and had a private read of their work.

I was a little confused. On our editor workspace, they presented as a man but here they wrote from a woman’s point of view.

It’s hard difficult to get a good grip on what divides erotica from pornography, but this writer was firmly on the porn side. Still a bit of literary merit but I felt that they were sketching out the story for the sake of the sex - which they described in full detail - rather than the feelings about it.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s one story about a woman craving a burger delivery boy that builds the anticipation up very nicely but if you are getting down to it, it’s about sex rather than sensuality.

So “Rav…