...I'm a realist... most of us don't have love lives like that...

Those folks down at The Guardian have been getting pretty frisky of late, with a recent in depth (!) article on Britain's oldest lap dancing club, a story about dateline love and a piece telling us that 100,000 condoms have been shipped into London 2012 to keep everyone safe and unfertilized between competition heats... 

My visits to The Guardian website are mainly confined to the Health, Children, Social Care and Voluntary sections - no  team is more dedicated to keeping the plight of the most disadvantaged in the spotlight.  Friends and associates must surely bore of me tweeting my praise for Polly Toynbee, Patrick Butler and their colleagues, but really, at times The Guardian's been more of an opposition than the official opposition!  (Actually I'd be quite content to have Polly and co moving into Downing Street in 2015!)

But I digress, back to the business in hand...

So today I stumbled across their Sexual Healing section, where you can get interesting advice from Pamela Stephenson Connolly (yes, her from "Not The Nine O'clock News" who married that comedian guy who goes on about prostate examinations).. You can share your concerns about wives who don't want sex, boyfriends who've never had sex and father-in-laws who are addicted to watching internet sex on your sofa!

She's pretty liberal.  I'm no Mary Whitehouse, I think human sexuality is something to relish and celebrate and explore and talk about and write about and generally feel great about.. sex is an intrinsic part of who we are, as adult humans... 

But it does concern me, as a feminist (with a little "f") the nonchalant attitude to pornography Pamela Stephenson along with many others, seem to convey these days.  I mean pornography, that's like the sex industry isn't it... that's using people..  women.. like pieces of meat... That's encouraging men to see women as sex objects.. I thought we tried to enlighten men about this sort of thing back in the 90s...

Erotica on the other hand is incredibly sexy I would argue.. and doesn't involve the exploitation of women or anyone else...

So now you might be thinking.. Hang on... pornography.. erotica... what's the difference?  Isn't one just a more acceptable word?  Aren't they exactly the same thing??

And I would argue no, they're different in an important way but it's never easy clarifying that difference...

The Oxford dictionary defines pornography as:

printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate sexual excitement

 

and erotica as:

erotic literature or art

 

That seems to be saying that pornographic material involves actual people having actual sex for the purpose of sexually arousing other actual people...  And it appears to be saying erotica is more of a portrayal of sex.. Characters are not physically engaging in sex, they're acting out a role, as if they were and the sex in fact happens in the audience's imagination...

 

So a medical textbook containing photographs of the naked human body is not pornography because its purpose is not to sexually arouse the reader...

 

A passage of text describing a sex scene, even quite a graphic sex scene, is not pornography because the sex act doesn't ever happen in reality...

 

A homemade video of two people making love, distributed around for others to watch is pornography because they really did have sex and they really meant for others to get turned on watching them have sex, as gentle and loving as that may have been...

 

Erotica should never involve itself with human trafficking, slavery, prostitution and the exploitation of children...

 

Pornography all too often does seem to be entrenched in that very murky world.

 

In an ideal scenario, none of us would ever think of using porn or erotica of course... we'd be so busy having mind blowing exploratory sex with our devoted lover, we couldn't imagine desiring something outside the relationship to turn us on...

 

But I'm a realist... most of us don't have love lives like that... or if we do, not for very long...

 

There is a strong argument perhaps for relationship therapists suggesting the use of material to spice things up if things have got a bit boring in the bedroom department...  I'd question how long a couple can really go on like that though... with him thinking of Billie Piper and her thinking of Mickey Rourke (OK.. a young Mickey Rourke!)  I think there's likely to come a point in time when they'd both just realise their love life was a bit of a sham.. and that wouldn't be any different whether our couple was watching "Lady Chatterley's Lover" or "Drink My Pee"...

 

All the same, for ethical reasons, I'd personally still prefer therapists to suggest fictional material and not porn but the debate will I'm sure continue to rage on because sex, as I said, is such a vital and healthy part of our lives........