Can you think of other stories or novels you’ve read that are erotic in that way? Ones that don’t try so hard they rub a blister?"

A lot of Jim Harrison’s fiction smacks of this. His works always contain sex, and one or more characters vigorously pursuing it – men AND women. The sexual content in his stories richens both the characters pursuing the sex, and their relationships with each other. And there is always a good amount of build up, no jumping right to the act, although the act is always neatly described. Often, by the time it’s “gotten around to,” the reader is just as relieved – or revolted – as the characters. In my opinion, it accurately reflects the way men and women actually pursue each other sexually. The women have a fair – and generally more than fair, position – and it (the sex) doesn’t always work out. It’s funny, it’s tragic, it’s touching, and sometimes it’s downright ugly. What’s more real than that?

Maybe the reason the romantic entanglements of Harrison’s characters are so effective is because they are so much like what really happens. There are no smoldering glances, no bedroom window curtains dancing in the cool night breeze – there is, however, angst, frustration, rejection, reception, and release. And sometimes a bottle of Butterscotch schnapps to grease the wheels. This is reality, but reality that becomes a level of voyeurism because of how closely we can identify with it. And that’s erotic … but maybe not Erotica by definition.

It strikes me that the best sex I've read in literature (confining my considerations right now to that) comes embedded (if you will) in good stories in which the point of the stories was something else and sex was a sudden surprise along the way. There is a novella by John Fowles entitled The Ebony Tower that I read years ago and that replays in my mind a lot when I'm writing. It would never be called Erotica. The story wasn't about sex — it was about some people Fowles made very real, their dilemmas and their loves and their tortured destinies — not Erotica at all but I think somehow all the more erotic because of that.

Can you think of other stories or novels you’ve read that are erotic in that way? Ones that don’t try so hard they rub a blister?

I think that's an interest of mine in this topic. Not how to write Erotica but how to write the huge sexual moment in the context of stories that are about something else, without botching either the moment or the story. My other interest in this topic is to read Erotica and about Erotica, stuff written by women we seem to agree, to see how men are faring in the minds of women, at least in their rhetoric. Not good, not good at all, is my working conclusion. I can't get the image out of my mind of the fat refrigerator repairman with his crack showing above the butt of his blue jeans as squats into his work — that seems to be the annoyingly persistent male who, ugly as he is, is forever wanting sex. In the Erotica conversation, only women seem to know what women want and how to get down to brass tacks. And then there's the monthly Cosmopolitan covers, bold in female beauty, cleavage and skin, glaring at us from the magazine rack, beckoning who? Women!

It's okay, because we are talking about writing, philosophy, entertainment and sexual politics, not about actual sex. Eventually, not totally but still for the most part or at least mercifully on occasion, men and women still come off their separate islands and get together for sex, sometimes even because they actually want each other specifically, sex being (luckily) almost as hard-wired into women as their sense of superiority over, annoyance for, and disappointment in, us.

I think that a lot of Erotica is being written by women because it’s for women, not men. It’s like that joke “men don’t buy Playboy for the articles”……I say women have an advantage because they know what women want and actually experience during an orgasm, plus they have firsthand experience with the range of emotions during the whole encounter.

Josh says men are writing about sex, whereas women are writing about the sexual dynamic in the human connection. He thinks men can totally be trusted to write about sex, but it has to be an empathetic male; someone who can see beyond the barriers created by overgeneralizations and misconceptions that leave most men with a distorted view on what women want–so it would have to be the kind of guy that really gets to the core of it and doesn’t just scratch the surface….

BUT, and here’s an interesting twist—word on the grapevine is that Erotica editors are avoiding women writers because they say women are too good at getting to the ‘core’ of it and readers don’t want that—they want the surface story for a successful form of escapism….Here's the link to a hilarious and interesting article that’s a MUST read (and spin) on this issue….

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6535949.ece

If Ann comes to town, perhaps she'd like to do something for MAD.