‘While I resist drawing lines between pornography and art, if forced to offer a distinction I might say that pornography, like propaganda, wants us to feel a single thing. Art is made of contraries, of ambivalence and ambiguity; it never wants us to feel a single thing. If I want the reader to be aroused by a particular scene, I also want them to be troubled by that arousal, to question or investigate it, to be moved by a more complicated pleasure.’
So writes US author Gareth Greenwell in a piece for the Guardian. He highlights what he calls the ‘interlocked contradictions’ that make sex such a tempting prospect for the writer. (Stop sniggering at the back, we’re being serious now.)