It really is preposterous just how much violence an artist is allowed to work with when it comes to a film or a book, and still be considered a good artist, versus how much sex he or especially she cannot work with. It's almost unfathomable to me , the more and more I think about it.
Films that are unusually gruesome are often hailed as masterpieces and books like All Quiet on the Western Front , which features an incredibly grim and depressing but "oh so real" view of war, are considered the same. The artists who create these violent real to life depictions and write of them can often expect and hope to be considered "serious artists". Critics will write of them.
Fans will hail them as "auteurs". But take an artis who likes to write about sex in great detail and suddenly the person is , more often than not, swept off the face of all known existence ...immediately submerged as something we ought not even glance at. If you don't believe this is true, because you think you've seen some pretty "graphic" depictions of sex on film, then just take a moment to think about how widely known the horror or war genre is when it comes to film --- as an actual solidified genre --- in comparison to "erotica". I have watched many, many films, and read many books of all sorts. I've never heard of any that could be described as classics of any kind which could also double as erotica. There are romance stories that are very popular which feature sex, yes , Titanic and so forth, various Ryan Gosling films; but those are not erotica films. Those are romance films. There is , to me, a big difference.
An erotica story is one that features loads of wild sex in the same sense that those classic horror films feature lots of gore. The story perhaps -- well no, not perhaps , it should---focus its plot around the goal of getting and seeing sex. Why cannot sex be a plot point ? Even a major one? In the recent Christian Bale story Out of the Furnace the entire plot revolves around the main character seeking to murder someone for revenge. Very well. So why can a plot not focus around, say, a woman, who is desperately seekin sex? Not romance. Not marriage. Not even a hint of relationship. Just hard, wild, risque, erotica, mad Sex .
And remember : wild sex does not necessarily have to be "demented" like some would argue that BDSM story 50 Shades of Grey is. Wild sex can be perfectly safe , it doesn't have to involve chains or whips ...doesn't have to involve any of that. Yet still where is it when we look at our big stories or our big writers? Our classics? It is seriously no where. It's almost ridiculus but it's honestly very much a frontier that has yet to be totally traveled ....
Again, we have books that are now considered roundabout must read classics like the aforementioned All quiet on the western front (which is from the 1920s) that feature seriously horrific depictions of violence . At the time it was printed, just like at the time Hemingway's war novels were printed in that Same decade an after, many people were rather "aghast" with just how Frank the writers and their depiction of war was. Instead of being some glorified account of war -- which was ofte the case through the 19tg century novels-- these books have us find something terrifying, and in some ways you could even say that, combined with Edgar Allan Poes gimmick (who was not at all mainstream during his life) it was these gruesome war novels that contributed to the horror film genre that would pop up mostly in the late 50s and early 60s, et cetera. Of course these days these novels now seem almost quaint. I have watched totally mainstream movies (as a teenager!) where people are murdered in unusually horrific and gruesome and disgusting ways. Reading All quiet on the western front wasn't that strange to me. Harsh yes. Strange? Bewildering ? No.
Hence I want to say that the same thing should be happening with sex right now yet it seems that it isn't , virtually at all in some respect, especially in the female
Realm. And I find this very very sad. I think it's a great loss. So open to violence but so closed to sex. We are truly living in an American nightmare----
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