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

[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!