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| Rising Eroticism: The Blueing of Literature |
Rising Eroticism: The Blueing of Literature
There's an undeniable trend on the rise in literature: more and more, books and stories are leaning toward the bluer side: eroticism. If you haven't seen it, how about this: Harlequin Romance has started two undeniably erotic lines of books which are being carried in bookstores. Avon has started an erotica line, as have several mainstream publishers, and some of the online strictly-erotica publishers like Ellora's Cave have been doing so well that their former strictly-ebook publication model is crossing into print books carried in large bookstore chains.
Why is erotic literature suddenly on the rise? And how mainstream is it going to get?
Hollywood and Art
Part of the upswing of erotic literature is probably the outside influences coming from Hollywood and Europe. The television show Sex and the City, with its theme of the single city girl's sex life and very overt treatment of sex (like the many episodes discussing vibrators) ushered in a whole new way of looking at sex from the entertainment standpoint.
Prior to Sex, women in sexual roles were the Other Woman, the teenager having sex for the first time, or the frustrated wife. Sex was the first major television show to seriously talk about the awakened, confident woman of the 90s and her sex life.
And it was an incredible hit. A whole new genre of women's literature – chick lit – came out of the Sex and the City movement, and though the genre has since died out somewhat due to a dearth of talented and funny writers to produce novels for it, it has still had an impact.
The logical successor of Sex and the City is Desperate Housewives, a show that thinks nothing of locking its stars outside in the garden naked. Like Sex, it's gathered a large and faithful following.
That's just America, of course. But American culture is dropping in popularity worldwide, and new influences from Japan, from China, from Europe, and even from South America are starting to bring new perspectives to the world. With greater influence from rising cultures and other creative sources like Bollywood, erotica and its related art forms are on the rise.
The Political Situation and Freedom Movements
Another influence on the growing eroticism of literature may be the spread of freedom and democracy in the world. With freedom of the mind and the spirit and the body, comes freedom of sexual expression. A totalitarian government, a fascist government, and even a strict communist government tend to repress the free expression of sexuality, while democracy gives it somewhere to go.
The world has seen this cycle over and over. The Bohemians of the mid-19th century, for instance, declared themselves free of the confines of society in France at about the same time France was experiencing an upheaval in its government between monarchy and republic. Earlier, the same thing was experienced just as Napoleon was rising to power.
From France, the bohemian lifestyle spread throughout Europe and, eventually, the United States, breaking the pattern of the Victorians by the time World War I broke out; after the war, a combination of post-war relief and an increase in real freedom came together in the 1920s.
During the 1960s, the same thing happened in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Britain. The hippie culture borrowed heavily from the Bohemians of a century before, with their belief in free love, equality for all, and truth; they also borrowed from the Spiritualists earlier in the century, creating the New Age movement in a rebellion against traditional religion.
Every time freedom is expanded, conventional sexuality is relaxed, and there is generally a revolution in erotic art, sometimes in visual art but often in written art.
One has to ask whether the tail is wagging the dog today, for we see a huge upswing in the acceptance and popularity of written erotica and, to a lesser extent, visual erotica. Perhaps the revolution toward freedom today is the Internet, or perhaps it's something I just don't see.
Open Erotica: Its Effects on Culture
Once eroticism has been released, it's like the genie – it doesn't go back into the bottle easily, if at all. This has some profound effects on the society around it.
One effect is in the way people interact with one another. When erotica is flowering, people tend to lose some of their formality – not to the point of rudeness, but it's a little harder to look at people without seeing them in the undignified act of sex. It loosens up the fabric of culture in spots, and when a few spots come untucked, the whole thing tends to do the same.
Another is in the ways men and women interact. Every time erotica blooms, women feel a little freer in society; over the last two centuries, each rise in erotica has been accompanied by a corresponding women's movement (think about that, anti-pornography feminism!). This may be due to a common cause for erotica and feminism, but I suspect the two are more closely related than that. We seem to be seeing a new feminist movement today, but this one's a little different from the last; women seem to be reclaiming their right to be wives and mothers as well as their right to be equals in the world at large.
Women also become bolder in the sexual realm. With the loosening of formality, and with an openness in sexuality, women feel more free to stake sexual claims. You're more likely to see women in these times taking charge, asking for what they want, and even demanding sex without strings attached.
But the most interesting effect is the backlash. In every human culture, there has been at least one person, one group, one entity that does not like "the way things are going." In Greece, it was the Ascetics. In Christian Rome, it was the Church. In Bohemian France, it was the Establishment. Today, it seems to be primarily the fundamentalists of every stripe.
That makes sense. Fundamentalism is, at its core, a way of compacting power. A fundamentalist church tends toward homogeneity of belief; it tends to have a single leader, or multiple leaders who teach very much the same things. The openness of a culture in love with its erotica, on the other hand, is a direct threat to that compact power. Freedom tends to dissipate power, to spread it among the people, sometimes to the point of anarchy (which is why it's possible to be too free, and why that overabundance of freedom tends to self-correct in some nasty ways).
Right now, today, eroticism is very much on the rise. Pornography has been the great economic engine behind the Internet, and due to the Internet's diffuse, non-central structure, it's going to be harder than ever to put this genie back in the bottle. Women's literature is growing more sexual daily. The television shows and movies airing worldwide are pushing the envelope a little more every year. It's going to be very interesting to see where this tide takes us, and what will happen to cause it to rush back in yet again in the endless cycle of history. |
| Average rating: 4 | Add 02 Apr 06 Zigmund F. |
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