Words are one of the most powerful tools we wield as humanity. We use them to express feelings, hopes, thoughts, and most importantly desires. And those words, as a whole, remind us that we are never alone in our passionate thoughts or needs. The expression and experience of sexual acts, alone or with partner(s), are a part of the human experience and erotic literature is just another enjoyable facet.
Erotic literature is one of the best examples of our human desire to share, cause, and experience pleasure as we understand it. Storytelling is as essential to the human race as breathing and erotic storytelling is no exception. Erotic literature or poetry are among some of the oldest written works and very often the tension they were known for creating has lasted decades, if not centuries. It’s a lot more fun to go through the erotic side of history than the one written by the winners.
A Brief History
We’ll find erotica in almost every well-known society though its form and distribution reflects their common social beliefs. Ancient Romans have erotica written right into their religion with stories like Zeus and Leda or Venus’ son, Priapus, who maintained an eternal erection with the use of herbs and human women. Shakespeare writes The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis.
You’ll find 17th century England home to the “Restoration Rakes”, a group of upper-class, titled men notorious for being ridiculously wealthy and writing pornographic poetry of a masochistic persuasion. The Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot is famous for his literature and is known through history as “The Libertine”. Fanny Hill comes about at this point, an erotic novel that featured mutual masturbation, sex for pleasure, and orgies. This written from the point of view of an exploratory, though incredibly and incurably stupid, young woman. It was enjoyed by both sexes, though later banned as England entered the Victorian era.
The 19th century brought us Venus in Furs, a lightly BDSM novel written by Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch from whose life the term “Masochism” was coined in 1886. The time of Freudian exploration, the discussion of men and women with certain fetishes became more and more common knowledge, though it isn’t something you talked about with polite company. Many of the works of the 20th century are what avid erotica readers are most familiar with and closely resembles many of today’s popular erotic fiction writers.
It brought us the era of women writing freely as themselves and not under male pseudonyms to protect themselves. Many of these authors are famous for their alternate lifestyles and their refusal of societal restraints. Maudie, Lolita, The Story of O, Tropic of Capricorn, and At Fault are just some of the most notable published erotic fiction. This kind of literature is written to describe pleasure and to make the reader feel from a place that sometimes our daily lives bury so deeply, we need to rediscover it within ourselves. If you noticed throughout my timeline, erotic writing increases, even if it’s repressed during certain periods. As a basic introduction to many of these classics, you’ll find them as irrevocably products of their time.
Words and Art
To me, an erotic novel is sexual tension written out and amplified in a way that stimulates and excites. The characters are made likable and more interesting because you’re inside their heads during their personal and intimate moments with another. You gasp as she’s punished or become tense and anticipate what her partner will do to punish her for disobedience. The novel you’re reading is about the private lives and desires of these characters that are sometimes unknown even to other characters, allowing you to escape into a world where these desires that may be a smaller part of your life is currently everything to them.
Erotic fiction is often to 3DX art what I find that reading the book before or while you watch a movie can be. You’re reading the words and you have in your own mind what these characters look like and what their bodies move like and if you’ve enjoyed the story, the art can bring to the words a gratification of actually seeing what you’d previously only imagined. In a comic, it can heighten the sense of pleasure you already feel looking at the comic by letting you inside the minds of the characters or adding dirty talk you might not have added in your own mind, but find that it really adds to the scene.
Words and art don’t always go together. Sometimes you’re better off just appreciating a piece of beautiful and enticing artwork or imagining the world a story creates.
I find that they go much better together, especially in the comic format where they easily work intertwined and you use both the visual and verbal surrounding to suspend and excite the senses. Either way, erotic fiction is an important staple to the 3DX community and I hope to be able to provide exciting and opinionated commentary and some fun recommendations with my monthly column, here on Affect3D!
Read and Recommend!
My personal recommendations for this month are the two series of Sierra Simone. The London Lovers and The Markham Hall Trilogy cover themes like menage, orgy, voyeurism, romance, and enough plot to carry one interlude into the next. It’s almost like a survey novel for the new and curious, offering a bit of everything so you can then explore more of what you liked. You can read them in either order, though The Markham Hall Trilogy is first in chronological order. Simone is a great new author on the erotic scene and I hope you enjoy her work as much as I have. If you’re interested in other books or new genres, I’ll be back next month with some genre details!
Image Sources:
Cover Image: “britishmuseum.org” in reference to Fanny Hill
1st Image: “femdom-mistress.info”
2nd Image: “hentai-foundry.com”