Framing Erotica

If women are heartless, mindless features of the landscape, men are unfeeling, unthinking contraptions which farm or excavate or manufacture the natural resources of femininity and womanhood. Only by creating fresh metaphors, analogies, and other rhetorical and poetic figures can writers and readers begin to think of men and women anew, in new terms. Gay fiction sometimes attempts to portray some men as feminine, just as lesbian literature occasionally depicts some women as masculine, and a few writers (those, perhaps, with a bisexual or pansexual leaning) seek to represent both men and women alike as more-or-less androgynous figures who are willing to have sex with anyone, anywhere.

Sex and gender need not be represented as polarized opposites or in the natural and technological terms in which we have come to depict women and men, respectively, but framing depends upon the cultural, social, historical, environmental, and political milieu in which writers write and readers read. Not until we transcend ourselves--which may be an impossibility--can we transcend the limitations that result from framing subjects. Just to be aware of these limitations, however, is to something. At least with the knowledge that these limitations exist, we can use them to our best advantage as writers of erotica.

Perhaps, as climate change develops as a consequence of global warming, we can use the consequences of these (probably sometimes catastrophic) changes as a basis for developing a new paradigm of human sex and gender that allows us to move beyond the male-female dichotomy to a spectrum or continuum of sex-and-gender that includes continuous and inevitable change, transformation, and metamorphosis in which sex and gender become as fluid as nature itself has had to be, in times both past and present, simply to survive.

Maybe there is hope for men and women, after all; maybe we can evolve beyond mere masculinity and femininity and beyond even maleness and femaleness. Maybe we can all become chicks with dicks or dudes with boobs, both is a social and an emotional, as well as a sexual, sense. Even better, maybe transsexuals will be only the start of a new and endless evolution of human sex and gender, the forms of which are, today, unimaginable.