Let there be light

January 30, 2015 06:44 pm | Updated 06:44 pm IST

When I shifted house recently, I had to give away some of my books because of a lack of space. They mostly included books that were bought on impulse, or whose writers I once admired but not anymore. Finding deserving candidates who would take care of the books was easy: I only had to post a message on Facebook, and I received about two dozen responses within minutes — nearly all the respondents were women (does that indicate that women read more than men?)

I shortlisted two candidates and gave them my address. The first one to arrive — a woman in her early twenties — asked me as she examined the pile lying on the floor: “Do you have any erotica?”

“There it is,” I pointed to a brand new copy of Fifty Shades of Grey .

“I already have that, any other?”

“I don’t see any other book that may qualify as erotica.”

She then went about choosing — very carefully — books from other genres and so impressed was I with her taste that I couldn’t help reaching for my bookshelf and pulling out a copy of Under The Roofs of Paris — a collection of erotica that Henry Miller, as a struggling writer in Paris, wrote for an anonymous connoisseur for a dollar per page — and gifted it to her. She seemed more grateful for that single book than the dozen other books she got to take away.

She instantly reminded me of a fellow journalist — another young woman — who is so much into erotica, profiling books and writers specialising in the genre, that I call her the ‘erotica correspondent.’ She accepts that as a compliment.

That makes me wonder: erotica is nothing but a refined version of pornographic writing, then why is it considered perfectly normal (even fashionable) to say that you love reading erotica, whereas reading or watching porn is thought to be outright gross? I think I just gave the answer myself: refinement.

Many years ago, I read a line that still stays with me, even though I don’t remember who said it: “The difference between porn and erotica is the lighting.” In other words, it is the aesthetics that transforms the crude into classy. The same holds true for erotic writing, where wordsmithery camouflages/overshadows graphic details and makes the content more acceptable, even respectable. The intention, however, remains the same: to titillate.

Aesthetics even transform the public perception of professions. The poor potter, for example, has been around from the time of the beginning of human civilisation, but when a good-looking pony-tailed man, who is not poor but has a creative bent of mind, muddies his hand to shape clay figures, he is called an artist — and not a potter.

If you are a young woman, you would never dream of dating a barber, but it is not entirely impossible for you to fall for a hair-stylist at an upscale salon, even though they both do exactly the same job: put scissors to the hair. That reminds me, the salon is only for hair-stylists, whereas the humble barber still works out of the saloon: the difference that the extra ‘o’ makes to one’s social status!

Similarly, when one cooks in the grimy kitchen of a small eatery, no matter how popular the eatery is, he is known as just that: a cook. But someone doing exactly the same job in a five-star hotel is known as a chef. A celebrity chef is much sought-after — by women, by rival hotels, by food writers — but the cook remains a faceless man, toiling away hidden from public view.

And, therefore, while porn is taboo, erotica is considered a genre. It’s all about the lighting.

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