Big Box Bookstore Redux: Did I Bury the Lede?

[elfs]

Omaha pointed out to me that I may have missed the biggest point in that big box store section on "Human Sexuality."

When you go into a Barnes & Noble, or a Borders (when they were around), any independent bookstore, and most definitely any gay & lesbian independent bookstore, the sections on "Sexuality" and "Erotica" are most definitely in two different places.

The "Sexuality" section is near the self-help, psychology, and so forth. It contains how-to manuals for people trying to improve their sex lives. It's about dealing with dysfunction, or learning new positions, or bringing new things to the bedroom to try out. It sometimes features nudity, but is never meant to be arousing.

The "Erotica" section is just that: erotica. Sometimes blatantly pornographic (missing any plot at all), but always containing at least one sex scene that resolves the central conflict of the story.

Omaha pointed out that for these people, sex instruction is pornography. If there's sex instruction, it belongs with erotica: even the mention of sex, and caring for one's sexual capability, is titillating. The idea that one could think about one's sex life without getting a hard-on or suffering embarrassment just doesn't occur to the people stocking the shelves.

But even worse is the notion that pornography is sex instruction. These books are not fantasies to entertain, but examples to be emulated. If you're shameful enough to want self-help with your sex life, books about unsafe sex and ridiculous enslavement fantasies are sufficient to your needs.

It's attitudes like this that make me once say that bad porn is a public health problem. One to be dealt with by the introduction of good porn, but it somehow has to compete and communicate that it is, in fact, "good" examples of healthy sexuality, without somehow also being boring.

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Small correction - it's not the people stocking the shelves, it's those in the back (or more likely at corporate) that determine what goes where.

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

What keeps getting me is their need to specify that it is human sexuality section. Do they get much demand for any other kind, leastwise that doesn't just belong in the scifi/fantasy section?

[resonant.livejournal.com]

My university library had quite a large section on non-human sexuality.

Of course, my university was also noted for giving fourth-grade students on field trips a very thorough demonstration of the artifical insemination facility. When I was nine, it didn't seem too odd that a burly man with a shoulder-length rubber glove would be anally fisting a prize bull while it humped another bull, forcing it to ejaculate into a rubber sheath warmed by a microwave oven. Looking back, I now think WTF??!!

/Nova Scotia Agricultural College FTW

[amindofiron.livejournal.com]

I...haven't got words. I mean, ok farm life gives you a pretty major look at biology from a young age but that just...wow.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

I just got back from visiting my parents, who handed me a box full of my old school assignments. I was incorrect, the field trip was in Grade 3, when I was eight years old.

I am now looking at a very detailed crayon drawing of a young bull in full bondage gear, strapped down to a padded bench so that it could be mounted by a massive minotaur-like creature. A lab technician is pipetting freshly-extracted semen into glass straws with her mouth. Both bulls are wearing rubber bits that look disturbingly like ball gags.

My elementary-school teacher was either remarkably enlightened or remarkably negligent. I can't decide which.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

Nowadays you could probably load that onto Inkbunny...

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

o_O

[amindofiron.livejournal.com]

yah, pretty sure that should have resulted in a "sit down" with you, your parent and the teacher.

Well this goes miles to explain

[pakraticus.livejournal.com]

the local pridefully ignorant BDSM community.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I shelve my porn next to my sex-related non-fiction, too. But not intermixed.