Is It Pornography, Or Is It Erotica?

pornography ⋅ noun
obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, especially those having little or no artistic merit.

erotica ⋅ noun
literature or art dealing with sexual love.

So which would you categorize the stories that you read here on my site under?

It’s funny because the distinction doesn’t really matter to me. Both terms are highly subjective when we start talking about artistic merit, and I’ve never been one to consider what I do to be particularly highbrow, anyways. Words are my beat, but I still enjoy photos and videos and everything else just the same – they’re all just different mediums to express these crazy, erotic tendencies that we all seem to enjoy.

And yet over the last week I’ve been forced to make such a distinction because apparently it’s very important for a number of the companies that I need to do business with here in the near future…

You may have seen me tweet that I’m working on a new book. It’s going to feature a few of my all-time favorites from this site along with a whole slew of new stories, too, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you all in just a couple of weeks, but recently I’ve found myself working through a lot of struggles centered around the term “pornography.”

Mainstream companies don’t like it, and their Terms of Service often times call it out as something that they don’t want to be associated with. And yet it’s clear that the definition of pornography is subjective because they’re already selling books like Fifty Shades of Grey and Filthy Smut – Volume 5: Over 400 Pages of Hot Sex (that’s an actual book title!) … so eventually it started to beg the question – if those don’t count as “pornography” and are allowed on certain services, then maybe what I write doesn’t count as pornography, either.

To me it seems silly because what I write at times is certainly graphic…

I laugh as I see your face covered with his cum, grinding it in with my hips because ironically, mine looked a bit like that earlier today, too. Feeling your tongue rush up inside me to clean up the last of his remains brings flashbacks of how it all got there barely hours ago, making me squirm with delight as I imagine his arms wrapped around me while his thick cock pounded into me with all that he had…

– an excerpt from Perspectives: Alessia’s Throne

And yet somehow my writing is deemed artistically more acceptable than, say, a photo shoot featuring a pair of models explicitly doing those very same things in front of a camera just because I’m using words instead of pictures to tell my story??? I guess it’s the same way I always found it weird that you can buy “romance” novels at any grocery store in America, but you have to travel to some seedy gas station on the other side of town if you want the graphic novel, so to speak, of that same erotic adventure!

I love my words, but I don’t necessarily think that they’re any more artistic than what comes out of a camera, or an artist’s pencil, or a video camera or whatever…

It’s honestly been a little bit frustrating for me because as I read through the licensing agreements and terms of service required to do things like purchase cover art and setup ebook distribution for my book, I feel like I’m being deceptive when their rules state that “pornography is prohibited” and I come to the understanding that it somehow doesn’t include my work … even though I wouldn’t really argue with someone if they wanted to call it exactly that. The word doesn’t bother me or offend me, even if I do have my own preferences of what I personally like and don’t like throughout the adult industry.

In terms of trying to run a business, for better or for worse, I guess I would almost rather they just come out and say, “No adult material is allowed – period.” if it’s some kind of moral high ground that they’re after because otherwise I’m just guessing whether my work would be considered too risque for some random employee who stumbles across it with the power to arbitrarily ruin my day by kicking my book out of their system on a random Thursday afternoon.

Of course, the reason why they don’t want to be that cut and dry is because quite frankly, there’s a shit-ton of money in the adult entertainment industry and no sane business executive wants to completely turn their back on that. It’s why you can pick up a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey at Target, for god’s sake! Funny how a trilogy selling 70 million copies worldwide can make a company twist that normally “family-friendly” motif of theirs for a piece of that sweet, kinky pie!

Unfortunately for the rest of us who don’t fall into that extreme fortune of being extraordinarily successful beyond our wildest dreams, though, that indecisiveness makes it tough to do what we need to do. Writing is hard enough as it is without me having to worry about my book distribution suddenly getting pulled because one day some random employee decides that a pair of handcuffs is suddenly “obscene.”

 

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Exploring the world of kink through the written word, KinkyWriter writes erotic fiction about bondage and fetishes, domination, chastity, cuckolding, and more!
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