Today's work/fandom collision

[rivkat]

So I am at this intellectual property conference, and the first panelist (who I like a lot) started with two provocative questions: How many in the audience thought of themselves as authors? (All of us.) How many had had positive experiences producing or performing in pornography? (Nobody raised a hand.) And here I am, sitting in the audience with the fic nicknamed “Kryptonian Sex Secrets” open on my desktop. How am I supposed to react? Would I have been more honest to raise my hand? I do think of some of my fiction as pornographic, even though it’s not a great term and even though it causes me some discomfort.

The panelist was talking about porn made with real bodies, not porn made with words based on imaginative conceptions of real (actors’) bodies. So she didn’t mean me, not exactly. But should she have?

Comments

[chalciope.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting question. I have always thought of NC-17 fanfiction as not "real" porn, but on the few occasions when I have shared it with friends, they are always quick to point out the erotic aspects. This has happened even with fairly tame fanfiction and novels, so I am not sure whether it is something to do with our societal standards and I am just an anomaly (this is most likely it) or people just don't feel comfortable reading anything with erotic overtones in front of other people without pointing out those overtones. I've never thought of it before as the words being based on real actors' bodies, but then I never have been very imaginative (I usually picture blobs). So no, personally I don't think of fanfiction as belonging to the category of "pornography" but maybe that is just because of the negative connotations that word often has?

Anyway, "real" porn or porn made with real bodies is not very appealing to me, and to paraphrase an author's note I once read, made me very uncomfortable about eating sashimi for a while after I saw it for the first time.

BTW I added you as a friend, hope you don't mind. I love your fanfiction (pornographic or not)!

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

The negative connotations are a big deal, but for myself I have tried to take fannish references to "porn" seriously as part of dealing with my own anxieties about writing sex. "Erotica" has always seemed wrongly distancing, and "smut" occasionally too jokey. When you write stuff that makes other people (women) say they were sexually aroused (and bracketing for the moment the extent to which that's also a performance, since I have no way of knowing how true that is, or even what it means to say it's true), "pornography" is at least an available term.

My imaginations are based on actors' bodies, but not really -- I don't want to see them naked. I'm not even sure I want to see the characters naked. There's some relationship between the actors and the characters, though, which is why I start there.

Welcome, and I'm glad you enjoy the stories!