like I think it is good and important to be able to criticise porn and erotica for the relationship to the political environment/context of creation etc, but I think that’s not too different from criticising any other art on these grounds. how is the erotica speaking to conventions of the genre? what is the author trying to tell you in what they hold up as attractive? what might the author be saying that they’re not necessarily aware that they’re saying? how does the narrative relate to other dominant cultural narratives? these are all valuable questions to ask and can be answered in nuanced ways that do not involve kink-shaming & do not involve calling people degenerate perverts. yknow.
something I read the other day had a storyline that involved a woman being kidnapped by foreign “disgusting perverts” (<- not supposed to be sexy) so that she could then be rescued by an army general (<- sexy) who had to fuck her as part of the rescue. now it’s no bother to me if someone else gets their rocks off to that, power to them. that said, we can criticise the framing of Woman Ending Up In Sex Trafficking Requires An Army Man To Fuck Her To Safety in the same way we would criticise similar framing in non-erotic contexts. how is this serving the image of the benevolent military? how is it feeding into the white woman’s fear of the other? what is being held up as ‘perverted’ in its juxtaposition to ‘sexy’? etc etc. this was bad erotica but it was also pro-military propaganda and that does mean something
