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may be frightening, offensive, or unimaginable—is to whisper a variation on this theme: “Let them who are without desire cast the first stone.”

    The Chart PORN
    boys hard illegal cheap
    underwear drawer grabbing you by the balls visceral
    pop culture baseball cap logos blatant gluttonous orgasmic
    politically incorrect Gen X and raincoaters

    EROTICA
    girls soft
    over the counter lavish
    museum
    tickling the finer sensibilities ethereal
    Victorian
    library shelf titles discreet
    modest titillating defensible
    boomers and dilettantes

    I once had a student who joined an erotica class I was teaching in spite of her apprehension that I would demand her to embrace my radical sexual philosophy. She was particularly appalled by the idea of sexual sadomasochism, which she identified as pornographic. She felt like the only explanation for it would be an abusive and unloving childhood. The idea that it could simply be a matter of erotic taste seemed unbelievable, and rather callous to her.
    We debated this a good deal in class, and I pointed out how this kind of judgment—the pathological explanation—has been used with other kinds of sexual preferences over the years, most notoriously with homosexuality. The kindest thing that was ever said about being queer, before the 1970s, was that homosexuals had faced tragic abuse and neglect in their families and that it had distorted them for life. It was impossible to believe that such sexual desire could be either healthy or sincere.
    Nowadays I meet plenty of gay people who feel the similar prejudices about heterosexuals; they find the idea of true heterosexuality to be preposterous, and believe that “straightness” could only be the product of a damaged mind. It just goes to show that everyone, whatever their erotic taste, is quick to deny that someone else’s attractions could be legitimate.
    That’s the other bogus quality to debates about porn or erotica—they are often settled by someone’s heightened and alarmed imagination about what people on the other side of the fence are doing. People who cringe at the idea of pornography have a much more inflamed and dangerous idea of it than the actual article could ever live up to. Then you have those who disdain erotica, and think it’s the weakest sort of slop for the chronically immature. They would be surprised to see how vivid and contentious things can get in the world of what gets labeled “erotica.” The

    conflicting glossary of what porn and erotica are supposed to stand for illustrates what keeps them in such polarized positions.
    Pornography is first and foremost associated with the male, and erotica with the female. It reminds me of those ridiculous deodorants that are advertised as one strong style for he-men and one delicate spray for the ladies. Look at the ingredients, and you’ll see they’re exactly the same stuff.
    The gender clues slip very neatly into class differences. Pornography is supposed to be coarser, ruder, the sort of thing you acquire under at least vaguely sleazy circumstances. Erotica is so respectable that it can easily appear in a Christmas mail-order catalog. The word leaps from the lips of that art historian nun on public television, Sister Wendy, who critiques the Great Masters on public television, and lavishes her praise on Renaissance portraits that display luxuri-ous pubic hair.
    Ironically, with the aging of the baby boomers, the polarized ice caps of porn and erotica have simply melted into tedium or been compromised by religious fundamentalists. The only people getting beat over the head with the debate anymore are the weak and powerless. In other words, grad students are no longer agonizing over pornography as a precursor to rape, but grade school kids are given a whole list of politically incorrect subjects that they can’t express themselves about.
    My lover, Jon, teaches art to twelve-year-old boys, and the list he was given by the program administrators of things the boys