Conference Report: Anthony Ehlers' talk on Erotica

Anthony Ehlers' talk, which closed the Saturday program of the conference, was titled From Taboo to Mainstream: The evolution of erotica.


Report by Annemarie Gaertner
TBA


Report by Erich Viedge

'Why should literature with the sex left in be outside the mainstream?' asked Anthony Ehlers as he started his entertaining and informative talk on the mainstreaming of erotica.

The thing about Ehlers is that he’s very well prepared, and he gives action steps mixed in with his academic understanding of the topic.

He took us through the evolution of erotica in five stages: social context; author’s gender; platforms; genre trends; and finally, pornography. There was plenty in his talk even for people well-informed about erotica and its evolution.

He took us from the earliest written erotica, recovered in Roman ruins over 2,000 years ago and discussed how erotica interacted with the time period in which it found itself.

After the first Gulf war, American Erotica series editor Susie Bright found suddenly there was a lot of homo-erotic writing about soldiers. Ehlers took us from the Marquis de Sade (whose name gave us the word Sadism) and John Clelland, through to Fifty Shades of Grey.

He helped the Romance writing audience understand how to approach erotic writing — and gave us a frame for it.
With Fifty Shades of Grey, erotica really has gone mainstream: one erotic author in the audience said her gynae asked where to find her erotic writing so that the gynae could recommend it to other patients.

As Ehlers points out, the 16m sales of 50 Shades helped keep bookshops open. By writing erotica, we’re helping all authors — especially in South Africa where a bestseller is considered a book that sells 500 copies!

And there’s a market for good erotic writing. Ehlers says in 2012, eight of the top 10 sellers in the UK were erotica titles.

His talk was full of facts like that, casually tossed in, like olives in a salad. Here’s another one: in the 1700s, there would be public readings of erotica to the poor, so that everybody could enjoy the stories.

Ehlers’ style is laid back which is just as well. If he were more formal his talks would be impossibly dense. But his easygoing attitude and his mastery of his subject make him pleasure to listen to — and learn from!

Elinor Glyn - the 'It' Girl of '20s romance writing

A handsome young Englishman enters his sedate Swiss hotel room only to find an exotic Balkan queen stretched out on a tiger skin with a lush red rose clamped between her teeth, just waiting to seduce him into a marriage of convenience.

The scene, from Elinor Glyn’s 1908 book Three Weeks, scandalised Edwardian readers and cemented her notorious legacy as a trash novelist. With titles like Glorious Flames and The Flirt and the Flapper, Glyn’s more than 40 novels exerted a huge influence on romantic and erotic fiction of the time and helped boost her career as screenwriter and director in silent era Hollywood.

She coined the popular expression ‘It’, that elusive and alluring quality of absolute sex appeal. ‘It can be a quality of the mind or a physical attraction,’ she said and these beguiling properties were bestowed on ‘20s actress Clara Bow, forever remembered as the ultimate It Girl in a movie of the same name. Hollywood gossip has Glyn reportedly teaching Rudolph Valentino how to kiss while he filmed Beyond the Rocks with Gloria Swanson, a movie based on her 1906 novel.

She was born Elinor Sutherland on 17 October 1864 in Jersey on the Channel Islands, but her family moved to Canada when she was a baby. She was brought up by her grandmother, of Anglo-Irish aristocracy, who instilled in her a sense of style and upper-class breeding. With her green eyes and flame-coloured hair, Glyn could easily have been a character in one of her own scandalous books.  After her marriage to wealthy but spendthrift landowner Clayton Glyn hit the rocks, she took to having affairs with various English aristocrats. In fact, Three Weeks was rumoured to be inspired by her affair with Lord Alastair Innes Ker.

She died in London on 23 September 1943. In 2002, Johanna Lumley played the novelist in the film The Cat’s Meow, as a guest on tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s yacht the night Thomas Ince died. Her career as a novelist is now largely forgotten and, reading her books out of historical context, her prose seems positively tame. However, Elinor Glyn pioneered mass-market women’s fiction in the early 20^th century and she was one of the first female directors in early Tinseltown. 

Elinor Glyn is just one iconic romance novelist of our times. Which author has most influenced your career as a writer?

Breathless Press seeks Sexy Shape Shifter Stories

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