Erotica? Pornography? Smut!

Every subject on the interwebz has as least one discussion that’s as worn out as the brush you use to scrub the cat box and twice as smelly. Hands-down the most tired of all is “what kind of music do you listen to when you do <subject of discussion group>,” but there is room for a couple more stinkers.  In the world of erotica, it’s the erotica vs. porn debate.

I’m astonished how much effort otherwise sensible people will put into manufacturing a distinction between erotica and pornography. Here are some examples, complete with stale cat pee smells:

• Erotica is quality writing; pornography isn’t.
• Erotica is literature.  Pornography has a purpose, namely to arouse and satisfy.  Anything with a purpose can’t be literature.
• Erotica privileges plot and character development over sex scenes.  Pornography is a series of sex scenes with a nod to plot and character development.
• In the past readers and publishers took erotica seriously, but matters have decayed and publishers stick the “erotica” label on anything with sex in it, presumably in an attempt to make money.

Over at Circlet, we put the “erotica” label on our books for marketing reasons, but amongst ourselves we call it “smut” as often as not.  Our readers expect to read something that arouses them and, better yet, gets them off.  If it doesn’t turn us on, we don’t try to sell it to our readers (and we do have the occasional day where no work gets done because we’re handing around something really hot that landed in the slush pile).  We also expect our smut to have character development and plot, which is why we take submissions longer than the typical 4-5k word short story (plot, character development, sf/fantasy content, and explicit sex will need plenty of space).  And we’ll be generous and not assume outright that “literary” is a code word for “boring.”