Why I love Erotica

There are few subjects more commonly dismissed with either sneers or sniggers than that of erotica. In the eyes of self-appointed moral guardians of society, erotica belongs in the trashcan along with pornography, idle fantasy, and moral decay. It is either shameful or juvenile, depending on who ya ask. But this judgment is both shallow and false. Erotica, when written with sincerity and craft, is essential to the human spirit. In fact, it might be one of the last places where the private self still resists conformity.

I wanna be clear: by erotica, I do not mean the crass, mass-produced material designed only to shock or arouse without thought, which I don't judge at all and depending on the story and situation I am not immune to indulging in it but that also reflects on a culture that prefers sensation over meaning. But proper erotica is the kind that engages not only the senses but the imagination, it belongs to a tradition, as old as literature itself.

Why is this so? Because human beings are creatures of desire, and to write honestly about desire, ya gotta write honestly about power, about vulnerability, about the complexities of being alive. Sex ain't just a physical act. It's an arena where the self is revealed, tested, changed. Erotica at its best shows us this, not in the mechanical terms of anatomy, but in the psychological and emotional reality of longing. My domain is my fascination with monogamy, infidelity, longing, frustration and that is what I will primarily focus on.

erotica makes all societal guardians of decency uncomfortable, because they wanna live in a world accounted for everything, regulated, named and filed. Desire resists that. Desire is unpredictable, ungovernable. It makes people irrational and imaginative. It makes them question rules. Erotica, by putting desire on a page, exposes the fiction that our lives are neatly ordered and under control, In doing so, it offers a kinda freedom.

This freedom ain't just personal. It's sure as shit political.

In authoritarian societies, as well as supposedly democratic ones that still run on conformity(wink wink lol), the first thing to be policed is the body. What you must wear, who you may love, and ofc when ya can or cant have kids-this one applies especially to women, how you might express yourself in private: these are all monitored, regulated, punished. Erotica speaks directly against that control. It says, the private self matters, imagination matters. The inner world can never be legislated.

It is no accident that repressive regimes ban not only political speech but sexual literature as well, as we see from all the discussion about porn in Congress, which will be used to target not just porn, but others as well. The reason is simple. Both encourage people to think for themselves, to question authority, to imagine different lives. The church bans it to preserve obedience, the state bans it to preserve control. Even in supposedly liberal societies, erotica is still ghettoised, not because it is harmful, but because it is dangerous in another way. It refuses to be tamed.

But erotica is not only subversive. It is also, at its best, deeply humane. It asks us to look at one another, not through the lens of function, duty, or utility, but through the lens of desire and intimacy. It asks us to imagine what it is like to be inside another person's skin, to feel what they feel, to want what they want. This is the beginning of empathy.

In a world increasingly numbed by propaganda and spectacle, that kinda intimate understanding is rare. Modern media teaches us to consume images passively, to follow scripts. Erotica demands something harder, that we inhabit ambiguity. That we face our contradictions. That we admit, perhaps quietly, what we long for.

For women especially, erotica has offered something literature long denied them: agency. Not just as objects of desire, but as subjects of it. To read or write erotica is to assert the right to pleasure, not just physical, but intellectual and emotional. This is not trivial. It is a way of resisting the old structures that defined women's virtue through silence and submission.

And what of men? They, too, suffer under narrow definitions of masculinity. Good erotica does not reinforce clichés. It challenges them. It allows for tenderness, for insecurity, for slowness. It invites men to be more than conquerors, to be human. Although I have a feeling, I will fail this point, repeatedly as a newbie erotica writer LMFAO.

To write excellent erotica is difficult. To write it well requires more than a knowledge of bodies. It requires truthfulness, restraint, imagination. It requires language that can evoke sensation without collapsing into cliché. In this way, erotica is not beneath literature, it is literature, sharpened and stripped of disguise.

We live in an age of surveillance, of performance, of noise. Everything is shared, branded, monetised. In such a world, the erotic, properly understood, is one of the last remaining vestiges of sincerity. It asks us to be vulnerable. It reminds us that behind the masks we wear for work, family, and country, we are still creatures of flesh, desire, and imagination.

To deny that truth is to live a smaller, duller life.

To affirm it, even privately, even in prose, is to keep something vital alive.