Framing Erotica

The aim of erotic literature is to excite its reader sexually. Its goal is to cause male readers to attain and maintain a penile erection. Its intent is to cause female readers' vaginas to lubricate themselves and/or to cause women to attain and maintain a clitoral erection. More than most--perhaps all--other forms of literature, erotica demonstrates the physiological effects of fiction upon readers.

One--and perhaps the primary--way by which writers accomplish this feat is to frame their subjects. Framing draws attention to the subject. By including certain features while excluding others, framing isolates a subject, showcasing it. In the process, framing the subject can also provide it with a context according to which the subject should be interpreted, layer one's narrative (providing a literal foreground, as it were, that is set against a symbolic or figurative background), focus the reader upon the writer's intended theme, and enrich the depth of the composition itself, as a whole.

Framing a subject accomplishes more than these technical feats, however. Framing a subject also values its subject while devaluing those elements that it elects not to include. By collecting elements to be included in the narrative, the writer suggests that these features are preferred to those which he or she has, as it were, rejected by having chosen to exclude them. Selection is election; in nominating, the writer approves, imparting value to the items that are chosen for inclusion. Exclusion is dismissal; in opting not to nominate, the writer disapproves, devaluing the elements that he or she has chosen to ignore.

Alternatively, something or someone (a woman, for instance) can be rejected by being replaced with something or someone else (a man or a shemale, for example). By attributing to a man or a shemale the attributes that are normally associated with a woman, these characteristics are, as it were, transferred to the substitute woman, whether "she" is a male or a shemale.