More than you needed to know. This could be...well, it's about writing, but it's also about sex. You decide.

Let's start with the premise that not all porn is the same. There are as many different types of porn as there are different types of sex. Of course, most people gravitate to a few certain types of both sex and porn, so you can generalize.

Which is exactly what I'm going to do.

Now, generalizing, men and women have different tastes in sex. Different senses are important; different details are essential; different types of stories are titilating. You know what? I don't want to say "men" and "women" here. I want to say "guys" and "chicks." We're not going to discus the difference between Henry Miller porn and Anais Nin porn; we're discussing what the cast of Friends keeps in their bottom drawers to read late at night.

Stereotypical Porn is guy porn. The storylines are deliberatly fake ("Was it coincedence that my girlfriend's lesbian (but not butch) friend walked in us while we were having a quickie behind the bleachers? I think not"), the actions of the characters are direct (and indirect actions are comically transparent), the details are focused on sight and sound (and they're presented as descriptive details, such as "She was a natural redhead; I could tell without taking her clothes off.") You go straight to the sex.

Stereotypical Romance Novel is chick porn. (You can call it erotica, but erotica is porn with a valid plot. Not the same thing.) The storylines of chick porn are deliberately fantastic ("And then we moved to Paris and had many delightful adventures. He loved me as no other man could ever love me.") The actions of the characters are indirect (and melodramatic), the details are focused on smell, taste, and touch (and they're presented as implicit details, such as "He was the kind of man your mother warned her about, a man with a twinkle in his eye and a twitch in his fingers. Especially when he looked at her.") You don't go straight to the sex; you build up to the sex -- you build up anticipation.

Lee and I got in a discussion over this. (Remember I warned you.) We write each other porn. He wants to be able to push my buttons on paper as well as he does in bed, so I have to come up with the reason that the porn that he's writing isn't what I like. He's writing me guy porn; that's what he knows, that's what he's read; that's what he likes. The problem is that chicks aren't guys, and when it comes to sex (and porn), I'm not a guy.

It's not that I think that chick porn is essentially deeper and more meaningful than guy porn. Guy porn is direct and to the point because that's the way guys are built. They are, again generalizing, physiologically easy. Easy to arouse, easy to get off -- it's dealing with the complications that's the problem. Women, on the other hand, are built to be indirect. The organs generally involved in orgasm are harder to train, harder to get off. More foreplay is necessary, and oftimes the anticipation is better (sad to say, gents) than the sex itself. Neither is essentially better, just different.

Hm...writing this out makes me wonder if it wouldn't help to have him read a couple of romance novels, to give him some kind of idea. The problem is that I don't write porn for chicks, I write porn for Lee, who is, in fact, a guy. I have the hang of that; I just put myself in my most dog-person frame of mind, set up a completely unbelievable sex situation, and let her rip. Her shorts, that is.

So I don't have much experience writing chick porn. And it's hard to give advice. I do know that any detail for chick porn, no matter how realistic, had better not even look like it's going to turn the situation into guy porn. That's just...well, it feels like an insult. Yes, it is realistic for a chick to wander around the house naked when the UPS guy shows up, and she may just throw on a robe. But that, my friends, is a guy detail, because it looks like an artificial coincedence.

Ok. That's enough now.