Is Writing Erotica Worth It? Part 2

Do authors want to keep dodging the bullets of AI censors?

In my Part 1 I looked at the themes in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the 1960 obscenity trial that followed its publication. The case was won by Penguin Books largely due to Lawrence’s work being regarded as having literary merit.

As the book sold two million copies in the weeks after the trial various newspapers and M.P.s voiced their outrage at the court’s verdict on the publication. Sales rose rapidly to three million so these ‘guardians of public morals’ were obliviously somewhat out of step with the public they claimed to serve.

The ‘Worth It’, in these articles is not about the financial gain; you’ll find millions of articles telling you the sure fire, secret, only for you, method of achieving that. Part 1 discussed what writers might want to say and is it worth saying it in an erotic story. This part looks at who or what is going to stop you saying it or at least publishing it.

It would appear that now many distributors and hosts of writers’ work and the payment providers connected with them have become the self-appointed guardians of public morals.

In addition to this, increasingly AI is becoming the arbiter of what can and cannot be published or at least distributed. Machines are now determining what we are allowed to read.

Lawrence believed that there was a disconnect between people and machines that affected the relationship between people. As AI not only increasingly produces content but is also used to regulate the supply of human created content our relationship with machines is drifting back to Lawrence’s Edwardian time.