Do you believe in demons and is pornography sinful?

[DSeid]

I heard this as a podcast and hearing her read it was fun, but still may be of interest.

Erotic writing is becoming more explicit

Start with the nipples. The lover does in “Mistress and Mother”, a steamy romantic novel from the 1990s. Though, since it was written three decades ago, they are not always called “nipples”. Instead, the author also discreetly describes them as “little buds”.

Other erotica from this era has a similarly hearty, horticultural air: in another novel, the paramour enjoys his lover’s “rosebuds”; in a third, he moves lower to her enfolding “petals”. In other books there is swelling, blooming and, of course, “seed”. …

… Hardy perennials are out. Words like “hard” are in—as too are words including “cock”, “fuck” and “straddle”. And people are buying it. Sales of erotica are booming: thanks to pre-orders, “Onyx Storm” had already been on Amazon’s bestseller list for 19 weeks by the time it was published in January. After release, it shifted almost 3m copies in a week. It sold faster than any novel in America in the past 20 years.

There is now a vast variety of erotica available, including cosy erotica (knitwear is torn off), Austen erotica (Mr Darcy has assets even more impressive than £10,000 a year) and fairy erotica. There is even erotica featuring—readers may wish to brace themselves—physicists. These titles contain such explicit lines as, “Your dissertation on liquid crystals’ static distortions in biaxial nematics was brilliant, Elsie.” …

… It is easy to smirk, but writing about sex is tricky—as a trawl through the back catalogue of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards shows. The now-defunct prize, which ended during the pandemic, was set up in 1993 by Britain’s Literary Review to “highlight and gently discourage redundant, poorly written or unnecessarily pornographic descriptions of sex in fiction”. Given that the contenders in its final years included such phrases as she “offer[ed] her moist parts to my triumphant phallus” and her vagina was “slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey”, perhaps the discouragement was too gentle. …

Anyway. If schlock sells then schlock it shall be. But I doubt schlong will ever be the featured thing to call it!