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Book 5: Erotica Universalis by Gilles Néret (review)

As the title suggests, this is a collection of erotica - paintings and drawings to be precise.

The title is misleading - the imagery is nearly all of European or North American origin and almost exclusively pertains to heterosexual sexual acts by white people. Nothing universal about that.

I would also call the "erotica" in the title misleading, as a lot of the imagery is, to my mind, pornographic rather than erotic. I know the two terms are used interchangeably by some and that other's definitions of them differ, but I associate erotica with beauty and sensuality and often also playfulness, being more suggestive than directly, in-your-face sexual. Erotica arouses one's sense of beauty as well as being sexually arousing, while porn has a cruder aesthetic and more directly appeals to the sexual appetite and shows sexual acts directly, leaving little to the imagination instead of giving the viewer leeway to imagine things

Now, porn has its place just like erotica and, like I said earlier, people's definitions of the two are different, so I'm not going to quibble any further about that.

What I would complain about in this case is the choices of the compiler to include so many images from the same book/publication/artist with barely changing scenes, and continuing on that theme with more of the same, just by another artist. Such lack of variety is annoying when there is so much good erotic and pornographic art out there. After a while you just stop perusing the images and just keep turning the pages in search of something different.

There are a handful of fetish and non-hetero images in there just to spice things up (including a series by the ever delightful Tom of Finland), but I remember only one image (there may have been more, but, as I said, I skimmed over some parts of the book) including a non-white person. Neither of these things are enough to warrant the "universalis" in the title.

I think that in order to live better up to the "universal" part of the title, the material should have been less Eurocentric, less heterocentric and not so white, and there should have been more variety of artists - instead of 5 mediocre pieces by the same artist there could have been one good piece by each of 5 different artists. As it is, this looks less like a representative art book and more like the private wank-off collection of a middle-aged straight guy who's been lucky enough to get it published.

By the way, I don't think I have ever seen so many examples of bad women's anatomy gathered together in one place - especially front-facing vulvas.

Verdict: There is better erotica and better porn available, in better variety. If you're interested in either, I'm sure you know where to find them.
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