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Moreover, some critics contend, the artist's license to show and do all creates an audience of voyeurs passively feeding on their fantasies. In the visual arts, as in literature, "the cult of utterness," in one critic's phrase, tends to devalue and depersonalize human sexuality. In an essay in the book Language and Silence, an eloquent condemnation of pornography, Literary Critic George Steiner objected: "Sexual relations are, or should be, one of the citadels of privacy, the nightplace where we must be allowed to gather the splintered, harried elements of our consciousness to some kind of inviolate order and repose." The totally explicit love scene, he suggests, is an intrusion upon the imagination and a synthetic substitute for reality.
Words also tend to be devalued by the new erotica. Three centuries or so ago, William Shakespeare or John Donne could convey passion, poetry, disgust and concupiscence in words with artful undermeanings that shocked none. Nowadays, a few greatly gifted writers can effectively employ the familiar quad-riliterals for dramatic or comic effect, but they tend to lose their value through overuse. As George Orwell observed 22 years ago, "If only our half-dozen 'bad' words could be got off the lavatory wall and onto the printed page, they would soon lose their magical quality." That process is well under way. The four-letter pudendicities are now dropped casually into cocktail conversation. But not everyone applauds the fading of the magic.
Many readers miss the florid circumlocutions of such erotic classics as Fanny Hill or My Secret Life. Today's pornographer handles a love scene as if he were dictating an engine-repair manual for high school dropouts. Not so the oldtimers, whose swooning maidens entered the amatorial bout with timorous displays of budded rotundities, swelling hillocks, portals of ecstasy and other geographical purlieus quite foreign to Gray's Anatomy. When it comes to a seduction scenario, few contemporary eroticists could match the subtlety of an anonymous 17th-century poet in reciting a pastoral love-in between a fair lad and a group of fair ladies (all of whom become pregnant). Even the title of the poem, Narcissus, Come Kiss Us! (And Love Us Beside), would assure a rock recording of the lyrics a top ten rating in Billboard.