Who Decided Art Couldn’t Be Depraved?

For the longest time, the social and legal acceptability of the depiction of desire and sex has hinged on whether something qualifies as art or pornography, but as an (Indian) erotic writer and fetish artist, most of what I do is qualified as pornography for being depraved, prurient, obscene and filthy, and I wonder how they decided art couldn’t be depraved, anyway? Can something be designed to evoke a sexual response and still deign to call itself art? Are our laws designed to protect or to enforce an arbitrary morality? I discuss all of this and more, in this piece.

Written by Ancilla L.

If you are alive right now, chances are, you have seen an advertisement of a motorcycle or body-spray that features a man (of chiselled Adonis form or your average Joe) using the product and when he does, dozens of gorgeous women come flocking to him, often abandoning some clothes, a husband and all inhibition on the way. If you’ve ever questioned that advertisement, you’ve likely heard the most common adage associated with desire in society – Sex Sells. It’s ubiquitous and we all agree, repackaging desire is probably the easiest sale you will make in your life, right? Well, as someone who has, in many forms, sold sex, I would have to disagree.

First of all, it’s the covert and unspoken suggestion of desire that is easy to sell because in all of these advertisements, no lines are ever crossed, right? You never see a boob, a penis or a butt, nor an act that can be qualified as gratuitous, just the suggestion of them, quite like the cut-to-flowers conjugating scenes in Bollywood films. You can sell suggestion, you can sell the idea that you could get sex this way, you can even commodify that desire and project it onto objects (luxurious chocolate, soaps, fragrances and even mango juice for some reason), but if you want the truth on selling sex then you needn’t look any further than the exploitation, censorship and control over the industries of sex-work, eroticism, sex-toys and pornography. However, this is not a piece exploring the (genuinely prevalent) exploitation that exists within these fields, but one focused on sexuality and its depiction, and how that intersects with social and legal ideas of art and pornography.

A few years ago, I attended and taught at Erotic Edge, which is a film festival for queer, fetishistic and erotic cinema, and while I am loathe to actually watch a film, I did spend a lot of time talking to people about what they were watching and whether they considered it pornographic. In one of my classes, I taught a section about a pornographic view of sexuality versus an erotic view of it, and by my delineation, which is not the most popular one, there are a few differences. The pornographic tends to objectify and package identity to the goal of arousal of the viewer (think of tags on porn-sites like MILF, Lesbian and shudders Teen) whereas the erotic focuses on an individual and their exploration in a more holistic way, inclusive of their humanity and their view of their identity (think, self-exploratory erotic journals, for instance). The viewer is often specific as well, and most pornography (and imagery that borrows from a pornographic view, like those body-spray advertisements) is designed with the male-gaze in mind, but even when it is not, it’s for a specific audience, maybe it’s a queer audience, a kinky audience or women, it is created with a specific idea of the arousal of a particular demographic (ie: this is what women like, this is what men like etc) and as such that does, frequently, make it very hetero-and-gender-normative in nature. The erotic tends towards an exploration of sexual-self and the pornographic tends towards a depiction of sex as a product that is not very individualized, but despite those differences, and perhaps despite myself, I am actually arguing that both can absolutely be designed to evoke a sexual response and still qualify as art.

The people who attended Erotic Edge, considered what they were watching erotic or pornographic with about a 50-50 split, but almost unanimously, they considered the content as designed (in part) to arouse and most of them were, at some point, aroused. Despite that, all of them, considered what they watched to be art. I bring this up because in my research on what is legally considered pornography (in India) there is a very broad application of certain terms, and there is no real definition of pornography. The dissemination and production of “obscene” material is prohibited, in particular to anyone under twenty, and any obscene material is defined as something lascivious (ie: feeling or revealing an overt sexual interest or desire), something that appeals to prurient (ie: having or encouraging an excessive or inappropriate interest in sexual matters, especially the sexual activities and intimate affairs of others) interests or something that tends to “deprave” or “corrupt” and in other circumstances, the courts have also interpreted the term to mean things that are offensive to modesty or decency or things that are lewd, filthy or repulsive. To me, it is unbelievable that a dozen perfectly-sculpted women flocking to a man simply because he sprays a scent called alpha dick on his chest is not considered repulsive but that view doesn’t matter. The truth is I can teach as many classes as I like distinguishing erotica and pornography but as far as general society and the law are considered, what I consider erotic is the same as what they consider pornographic, and what they consider art is, well, debatable. The entire audience of Erotic Edge was basically watching porn, not art, as far as these laws and views go.

In practice, these “pornography” laws, determine whether something is art or porn by a few different measures. One question that it almost always boils down to is whether something was designed to evoke a sexual response (and if it was, it is porn). Another is a “Standard Community Test” which assesses whether there is any social value (literary, political, artistic, scientific) to the depiction of the content. Functionally, it has so far only applied to questions of nudity (and where said nudity took place), because, you know, sexual art cannot be fathomed outside of the realm of nudity, so the most recognizable way in which people (especially in India) will have accessed this debate is by trying to figure out whether the sculptures in Konark are art or porn, and if they are art, then what kind of nudity can also be considered art by that precedent? So far it seems like any nudity that requires a degree of skill to generate, like painting or sculpture, may pass the test, especially if it is depicted in a gallery or temple, but photography and film is a different question altogether, and if it is electronically disseminated (especially by artists of questionable standing, so basically any artist who has the audacity to still be alive) without being subject to a censor board (outside of OTT and cable), then it’s almost always deemed pornography. It starts to get even more complicated when one person’s nudity starts to interact with another person’s nudity (and almost any nudity that has two men engaging with one another is destined for the pornographic label).

And all of this is just about nudity!

It’s time for this to get a little bit personal. I am an erotic, fetish artist, that’s what I call myself anyway, my neighbours might prefer to call me shameless and the law may want me to be Intimate No. 1313. However, I don’t deal in nudity at all, for the most part. I am fetish artist and I write erotica that is almost entirely BDSM-centered, and most visual art I create is hinged on the exploration of pain, often in ways that “Standard Community” would consider well outside the realm of sanity or value. I make a lot of my money as a kink-educator, but I also sell books that are erotic in nature, none of which I can distribute in India via channels I use in the rest of the world because they issue outright bans on the content and while I have a vast readership outside my country, it’s almost impossible for me to develop one inside it and it’s extremely hard even to use mainstream global platforms (ie: Instagram, patreon, onlyfans etc) to do it because of the puritanical leanings of credit-card processors and it has only gotten harder over the years.

I write erotic autobiography (which is definitely prurient), erotic fiction (which is definitely lascivious) and depict, both visually and in written form, sexuality (that is possibly repulsive and definitely filthy) in ways that are not designed for the arousal of a specific audience, nor does it package my identity, but when I create it, I am fully-aware (and I want) people to be gratified and sexually-evoked when they consume it, and because I am good at what I do, I do know how to use my desire and exploration to connect with the desire of other people to the end of gratifying them. This makes what I create pornography, I suppose (even when I am fully-clothed and possibly bruised from head to toe) and I am willing to live with that, but what I do, is art and as an artist, I cannot understand why art cannot by definition be sexually-evocative, anyway? Why can’t something be art and pornography? To me there is a difference between pornographic art and erotic art, similar to the difference between the entertainment-focused art of broad-appeal Bollywood films like Dabangg and niche-appeal thinkers like Masaan, but they are both art, no? This is a secondary discussion, though, because as erotic artists and pornographers go, we’re all having to make the same justification anyway.

I can, very easily, make the case for the social, political and artistic value of what I do (and whether that case is convincing is on you, I suppose). My sole goal as an erotic writer is to create a literary environment where this genre of writing can be considered *as serious as* other forms of writing (like political fiction), partly because erotica and romance are generally consumed primarily by women and queer people so they tend to be considered *soft* as genres (because of discrimination, since serious literature is really only men writing about war). Besides that, I will argue that sexuality, especially its most realistic and explicit form can be a means for people to connect, feel normalized in their desire and, after all, the personal is political, right? The sexual is personal and so the sexual is political and BDSM in particular has many, many roots that are indicative and depictive of the impact and varied nature of power disparity, social imagery of that association, development of sexual association and the relationship of human sexuality with a spectrum of emotions. There is artistic, social and political value to my tale of an older woman returning to her small, wealthy town where she isn’t a member of the dominant caste and fucking the recreationally prostituted young wife of the golf-club president in the bathroom of the establishment where she wasn’t welcome when she was poor and still isn’t welcome despite being rich, because she is a woman, single and of the wrong caste, and how that has caused her to fetishize the power to treat women like those men do. I promise you, despite that very socio-political description of that story, it is actually filthy, lascivious, obscene, depraved and definitely appeals to prurient interests. I can make the case for its artistic value, but I don’t want to, nor do I see how a thing cannot be artistic as well as sexually evocative (ie: pornographic) and I would love to visually depict it, as well.

I understand that most arguments against pornography tend to hinge upon the protection of people from exploitation and the safeguarding of children and to that end, I fully agree that regulation that focuses on those actual goals should exist but let’s be honest, the way we regulate and control what we consider pornography as of now has way more to do with morality and a socially-sanctioned idea of values than protection, anyway. We are okay with it when sexuality is where it belongs, in the underground, with its creators and sellers retaining proper shame in what we do, and when we approach it using workarounds instead of being open and explicit about what we do. Think about it, right? There is much ado about nudity and other explicit form of sexual and fetishistic art, but so much horny music just exists, right? In fact, I would argue that a lot of the music that I would consider pornographic is far more derogatory to women and young women in particular than anything filthy that I write, but that tends to be more acceptable because it’s not explicit, nor visually naked, and we’re even comfortable with the romanticization of non-consensual intimate partner violence or stalking as a form of love, but if I were to bring my own whip to my own photo-shoot, and own everything I do with it as voluntarily depraved, I couldn’t possibly call it art and would almost definitely be considered to be disseminating pornography when I share it with others or sell it.

But, really, so what if I am?

Why is depravity so unwelcome anyway? Why is depravity so hard to see as a form of expression? Most fetish and sexual artists whom I know put a very high premium on consent, autonomy and agency, but that doesn’t mean anything to the censor. Why is sex only art if you take the depravity out of it? That’s like saying food is only culinary art if you take the spice out of it, it’s integral to it, and if you consider arousal, or the intent to cause arousal, to be obscene, then don’t you just consider all sex to be obscene? Sex, in all its forms (including my pain-forward version of it) is storytelling, it’s the story of humanity and connection, it is vital and beautiful, and sometimes it is whimsical and funny, sometimes it is jarring and ugly, it is vast and hued and it is microcosmic of our social, political, emotional and psychological identities. Sometimes, it is meant to repulse you, and sometimes it takes things like trauma and turns them into works that make you question yourself, the world in which you live and society altogether, and for me, fetish is a means to doing all of that. It is traumatic, obscene, depraved, conflicting, horrifying, cloying, tempting, evocative and everything in between. It is life and love and desire. If that isn’t art, pray, what the fuck is?