u/grigori_grrrl - originally from r/GenZhou
i think erotica is fictionalized characters getting it on and porn is real life people

u/JDSweetBeat - originally from r/GenZhou
Erotica is a sexual story; you write a book with a lot of graphically described sex scenes, basically.

Porn is… Well… Porn… People making pics and videos of them doing sex shit, and trading them as a commodity.

Personally, I don’t care much if consenting adults, free of any economic incentives/coercion decide to post sexual content online, with the caveat here being that I’m not sure what kind of social impact such content has, if any.

u/darkcalling - originally from r/GenZhou
Erotica is written works of an erotic, sexually explicit nature.

It’s sexually stimulating and arousing and people do pleasure themselves to it.

What divides erotica from say trashy romance novels is typically how explicitly detailed the sexual acts are and the focus on sexually titillating acts sometimes but not always to the detriment of or overriding the actual story. The focus being on the sexual acts over say a long journey through a jungle.

It can involve fictional characters or real people or a mixture. I wrote some cringy stuff as a teen about some guys I had crushes on but most published stuff is about fictional characters. It can be real world or fictional.

It’s not video or pictures or sound.

It’s text. Short stories, long stories, even potentially book length.

Most of it by volume is written by amateurs for their own pleasure or as a favor (or romantic gesture) or an artistic endeavor. Some is sold but relatively little compared to the vast quantities that have been published freely online.

And I’ll distinguish that erotic role play between two or more persons isn’t traditionally thought of as erotica despite being text based though I suppose it could be.

I don’t see an issue with erotica under a DoTP as a form of expression. There may be something to be said about the actual contents and perpetuating this or that negative aspect or content that’s vile in some other ways but IMO it doesn’t share the problems of visual nudity and sex.

u/UndergradRelativist - originally from r/GenZhou
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Anti-pornography feminists, however, do not object to pornography’s sexually explicit content per se. They typically draw a more fine-grained distinction within the class of sexually explicit materials, between “pornography”, on the one hand, and “erotica”, on the other. “Erotica” is generally defined as sexually explicit material premised on equality, which depicts women as genuinely equal and consenting participants in sexual encounters. “Pornography”, in contrast, is typically defined as that subset of sexually explicit material that depicts women being coerced, abused, dominated or degraded in such a way as to endorse their subordination.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pornography-censorship/#FemArgAgaPor