Some of the discussion around Amazon’s venture into the censorship business has reminded me that there are still people in the world who don’t understand erotica.

It’s simple really: Erotica is sexual fantasy. And in this context, the word “fantasy” does not necessarily equate to “something that is desired in real life.”

But before I continue with that line of thought, I’ll back up a bit.

Lots of people are squicked out by various “extreme” topics that appear in the erotica titles that Amazon has recently banned (and in hundreds, perhaps thousands of other titles that they continue to carry, but don’t get me started on that). There’s nothing wrong with being repelled by certain subject matter. There are certainly lots of topics that cause me to put on an “Ew!” face. There’s no rule in my book that says that in order to be a healthy and rational person you should be able to gaze at everything short of real-world harm to real-world creatures without wanting to look at something else.

The problem is that many people feel a need to rationalize their squicked-out reaction. For them, it’s not enough to say, “I don’t enjoy this stuff.” They have to say: “this stuff is bad. Only bad people would want it, and it does harm to society by encouraging those bad people to do bad things.” The first clause of the latter sentence is obviously false, and the second has been refuted by scientific research.

“Only bad people want this stuff.” Obviously  false. Nancy Friday’s books on sexual fantasies (dating back to the 1970s), along with a great deal of other research, has debunked this myth. A lot of healthy, fully functional, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly people get sexually excited by some pretty “out there” sexual fantasies. The point that I made above bears repeating: These fantasies are not fantasies in the sense of “something I wish would happen in real life.” Lots of women get off on fantasies of being raped; these women do not want to be raped. Lots of people’s sexual fantasies involve giving or receiving various forms of pain and/or degradation; these people don’t want to give or receive real pain and degradation. And lots of people enjoy sexual fantasies (and scenes in erotica) that, if they were to participate in or observe in real life, they would find horrific, or objectionable, or a turn-off, or embarrassing, or just uninteresting. It’s a simple fact of life that for many people, sexual fantasies are just like that.

(As a side note, yes, some people enjoy role-playing games where pain, degradation, rape, etc. are “acted out.” But the word “acted” is key. The “victim” has control. The “pain and degradation” are sought out and desired and welcomed and enjoyed, and therefore a very, very different animal from what those things are when they’re inflicted in the non-role-playing real world. But this is an aside; it’s by no means the case that people with outré fantasies also enjoy role-playing sexual play.)

“It does harm in the world by encouraging people to do bad things.” This would be a valid argument, except for the fact that it isn’t. Many, many studies have been done on this issue, and no link between enjoyment of erotica/pornography* and harmful behavior has been found. There is a considerable body of scientific literature on this subject, and I encourage interested readers to study it for themselves.

* Some people like to make a distinction between “pornography” (evil) and  “erotica” (not evil, maybe even good). Dr. Alfred Kinsey once defined a nymphomaniac as “someone who has more sex than you do.” I offer you Esmeralda Greene’s corresponding definition of pornography: “Pornography is erotica that you disapprove of.”