Erotica
Erotica (from the
Greek language Eros - "love") â€" are
works of art, including literature, photography, film, sculpture and painting, that deal substantively with
erotically stimulating or
arousing descriptions.
Erotica is rather a modern word used to describe the
portrayal of human sensuality and sexuality with high-art aspirations, differentiating such work from commercial
pornography. Erotica portraying homosexual people is referred to as
homoeroticism.
While pornography popularly focuses on unadorned and unemotional lusts and the explicit depiction of
sexual acts, erotica tends to define material with a higher emotional content, the development of place, character and story line, or of an overall artistic theme. However, such distinctions are necessarily subjective and may say more about the critic's own tastes on erotic material than the artistic and other attributes of the material itself. In the
motion picture sense,
softcore pornography (
soft porn) is a similar kind of
commercial art form that resides in the area between erotica and
hardcore pornography, although erotica, as a type of
fine art, may also be highly
sexually explicit. The division between erotica and pornography is an aesthetic division, usually dependent on moral philosophy, religious dogma, or personal outlook. At present, many legal jurisdictions maintain laws regulating the availability of expressions deemed pornographic (although that term almost never appears in legal texts), arguably to maintain a level of comfort or safety for a majority of citizens.
It is a notable trait of the strength of the human reproductive drive relative to the psyche as a whole, that unambiguous reference to sexuality, framed in a manner which the perceiver thereof finds acceptable, tends to initiate an involuntary reaction of
sexual arousal, possibly building increased
sexual desire, which may lead to creating or taking advantage of opportunity to engage in
sexual activity. This can be true of erotica just as well as other, both more and less refined references to sex. Depictions of the human body which merely fail to conceal or disguise the secondary sexual characteristics of its particular gender may be all that is necessary to trigger arousal in a person who is attracted to that gender. For this reason, erotica is too broadly described merely in terms of the effect that it engenders in its audience, as all sexually related matter has the potential to create such an effect. For example, in the absence of the availability of pornography, some men have used clothing catalogs as a form of erotica.
Gloria Leonard is famously quoted as saying "The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting."
