I probably watched too many movies with romantic love scenes where a couple is curled up together reading poetry (what movies were these–I don’t know, maybe just the ones in my own head?), because poetry figured largely in my imaginings about sex/marriage. The reason might be that poetry was where I’d first found expressions of the inexplicable sexual longings that I experienced. I was a high school sophomore when I found Walt Whitman’s words and discovered someone who knew what it was like to feel turned-on constantly and who wasn’t hesitant to admit that he saw sex in the crotch and vine of every tree. My favorite poem of his was the one below, because he was telling my story:

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly dres’t aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the
sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I can’t remember the last time that I read poetry with my husband–although we do often listen to music and connect via the lyrics, which is *almost* like poetry. Do you ever read poetry with your partner? Do you have a favorite erotic poem that you’d like to share?

All about the ’nacle and General Conference are stories and opinions and exhortations re pr0n, both pro and con and undecided. Recently, Letters From A Broad had a lively discussion concerning the feminist take on pr0n, which ranges as wide a gamut as the opinions amongst the various factions of LDSdom. However varied the opinions, all seem to agree that the overriding purpose of pr0n is to arouse.

Nowhere, however, have I seen a discussion of genre romance, erotic fiction, or erotica as agents provocateur of arousal. This is most likely because I’m the new kid on the ’nacle block and have just missed it, but even in the lengthy discussions of sex, masturbation, pr0n, and various and sundry other sub-topics of sex, I’ve not seen it mentioned. ’Tis a puzzlement.

Amongst other things, I write genre romance with an edge. The edge isn’t sex; the edge is previously unexplored themes in genre romance like, oh, the juxtaposition of spirituality and sexuality while still heavy on external conflict. This earns no brownie points with agents and acquisitions editors. (The cry, “But we don’t know where to shelve it!” is still ringing in my head, even after a year.)

I don’t write erotic fiction, which is different from romance in that its sole purpose is to arouse yet has emotional content, but very little plot and more often than not, I’ll choose a story that promises a weighty external conflict. It is also different from erotica in that the sex in erotic fiction serves a purpose within the story but isn’t the story. I do occasionally write straight erotica in small doses, but, quite frankly, disemboweled sex (i.e., without an emotional connection) doesn’t really do anything for me. Kinda like looking at pictures of nekkid peoples doesn’t really turn me on although I’m a visual learner.

While my husband teases me about my pr0n, I don’t really know how to draw any lines between genre romance where the sexual content is anything from kiss-and-fade-to-black to take-a-cold-shower-graphic, erotic fiction, and erotica—because it’s all meant to arouse. It may arouse me more easily simply because I’m 40 and therefore have the libido of a 17-year-old boy, but with regard to romance and some erotic fiction (occasionally dubbed Romantica™), the aim is to arouse through the conduit of emotional connection and love.

Regardless my comments on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight here and elsewhere, it’s an erotic tale. All the subtext is there, naturally, but without having to read in between any lines whatsoever, the scenes between Edward and Bella wherein he doesn’t kiss her, but sniffs at her neck, are hawt. It’s all in the execution. Eugene Woodbury’s upcoming novel, Angel Falling Softly had me catching my breath in a few places, too, though his sex scenes are simply elegant.

It did occur to me that perhaps the written word not otherwise slapped with the label “Penthouse Forum” is seen as literature, which is an art form. I mean, do you read a 350-plus-page novel for the sex? I think not. You read it for the story; it just takes too much work and a rather lot of brainpower to read one of these things and doing it for the sex is counterproductive. There is effort involved, the reader’s effort, the contract between author and reader—

—but it’s arousing and that’s one of its purposes.

So by that definition and within the context of the never-ending exhortations by Teh Brethren to avoid that which arouses the natural man, is it pr0n?

Discuss.