Lighting is a very important characteristic of photography when considered an art form.

Erotica is a subtle treatment of sexual love. Pornography removes the subtle and replaces it with the blatant and explicit. Hence, the only difference, as she sees it, is lighting.

Sex is porn for poor folks, with the less light the better since the object is not to see and remember, but to forget reality and live, if only for a moment.

"The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting." The writer wanted to know why Gloria Leonard used the word 'lighting'.

You're saying that poor people can't afford porn, so sex is porn for them?
Have you ever been poor?

Have you ever found supper in a garbage can? I don't want to get into an argument about what's poor and who was poorer. I was poor enough, but wealthy in youth, and like a lot of people I traded my youth for income and retirement. The fact is that through hard times I could always see people worse off, and for most of those, food was a more essential concern than sex. The question you must ask is who needs porns. There are poor people all over the world who never learn to read and never watch tv who have sex everytime they can afford it or talk some one out of it. If they have fantasies do you think they are sexual, or are they perhaps for wealth and security; in other words, that which turn sex into a luxury rather than a necessity?

That depends on how poor they are, and what gender they are. But this is all way off the original topic, which by the way, was posted a year old.

I doubt that it is too far off topic. Have you ever heard of Thorston Veblin. He was an oddball sort of economist, andone of his books was The Theory of the Leisure Class. One of the things he pointed out was the difference between a poor person at their meal compared to the rich at theirs. The poor person surrounds his food with his arms, knife in one hand and fork in the other, while the rich use their table manors as an expression of aesthetics, because whether they will eat or not, or whether they need more food or not, is not at issue. When sex can be turned into an article of commerce it is because a person's need for it for reproduction have been met. Who cares then if the better part of you being hits the trash? What sex is to one when upon sex procreation depends, and what it is to another whose needs are assured may be totally different. If for the first, pleasure and intimacy bond two people to the death as if by contract, for the second the interest is rather to debased the whole issue, to rob meaning out of sex with a price. Now, how does one put a price on the priceless without hurting its value?

No, I've never heard of Thorston Veblin. Sounds interesting.

How can you put a price on the priceless? Of course you can not, it has no price, it remains priceless.