Reconsiderations

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In the spring of 2001, on the final night of an unsettling German book tour during which I had become convinced that evening after evening I was reading to different groups of catatonics bused in from the local mental hospital, I was staying at an appropriately eccentric hotel on a hilltop high above Zurich. The hotel—founded (or so I was told) in the previous century by group of Swiss women’s-temperance health nuts who had arranged matters so that twenty-first-centuryguests still couldn’t get a drink—seemed like the perfect culmination of a Kafkaesque travel experience. It was late. My husband and I were flying home the next morning, and we couldn’t sleep. We flipped through the TV channels, past the badly dubbed Steven Seagal action films and the ultraboring French talk shows, until at last we found an adult station broadcasting from Bavaria that seemed to offer some promise.

First came a slide show of blonde women, built like Wagnerian heroines, with escort-service phone numbers bannered across their prodigious breasts. Then a film clip began in which two go-go girls danced in a bar with zombielike affect, both blonde, shirtless, and wearing tiny leather miniskirts that they kept lifting up as they danced, and under which they were naked. This went on for quite a while—skirts up, skirts down—until it became as tedious as the French talk shows, only seedier and more depressing.
Except that there was one interesting detail, one element of the program that riveted our insomniac attention. In the background, behind the dancing girls, was a looped recording of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Was the film erotic or pornographic? I would have to say: neither. It certainly didn’t reflect some sexy, sensual welling-up of the life force, and quite frankly, after seeing the film the last thing in the world that anyone (excepting, I suppose, a few Bavarian maniacs) would want to do is have sex.

Like many distinctions, the border separating the erotic from the pornographic has been blurred and redefined not by some natural evolution of culture and language, but by capitalism’s imperative to help the consumer readily locate the product he wants to buy. Beyond any meaning they once possessed, and beyond the connotations that still reward consideration, the words erotic and pornographic have by now become niche-marketing tags. They are designations like those in the film-rating system, employed to answer the logical questions any potential customer might sensibly ask: How naked? How deep? Which orifices? How much does it cost? Most important is the unspoken inquiry beneath every purchase decision: What do my desires reveal about who I am?

Erotic now connotes R-rated, edging toward the NC-17, while pornographic suggests the X. The harried office worker stopping by the bookstore for something to enliven a solitary weekend might be drawn to a volume entitled Best Erotic Fiction of 2008 but might shy away from an anthology of the year’s Best Pornographic Fiction, just as the business traveler, returning to the hotel after a day of stressful meetings, may hope to order some straight-up porn—as opposed to merely erotic cinema—on pay-per-view. Meanwhile, the nuances distinguishing the erotic from the pornographic have been reduced so that both locutions suggest nothing more than varying degrees and intensities of sexual content and arousal, much as those tiny chili peppers on the Sichuan menu promise or warn of heat and spice.

What’s been lost in the process is the broader meaning of the Greek word eros, and erotic, which have always included the sexual but have also suggested the mysterious, even metaphysical, connection between sex and life, sex and pleasure, the origin of life and the celebration of life.

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