My second Arisia panel was Orgasmatron : The Erotic & Not So Erotic in SF/F with JoSelle Vanderhoof (mod), Connie Wilkins (also known as Sacchi Green), and Victoria Janssen. Originally N. K. Jemisin was also scheduled to be on the panel with us, but since she was on something like 15 panels over the weekend a few of them had to go.
Going in, I was intimidated about this panel, I was the only panelist who was not a published author and/or a professional editor. But everyone was not only fantastic and friendly, but they valued the fact that I was there as a reader rather than writer/editor. My notes for this panel went wider than SF/F erotica, because to be honest, there's some seriously sexy science fiction and fantasy that is not written as romance (and in my opinion, often has better written sex than romance novels). Turns out, we focused largely on erotica/erotic romance, what makes for good erotic writing, and what makes for good SF/F.
One thing that I liked is we focused on what makes something good in our eyes, but avoided heavily bashing things that aren't our game. We did have some fun with the discussion, particularly of possibly questionable word choices, or maybe bizarre story concepts.. I brought up the phrase "throbbing man-root," someone else brought up the phrase "milking the clitoris," things may have gone down hill from there. There was a anecdote related by one of the panelists about a book they reviewed where they likened the story to John Norman's Gor novels with "daisy chains of anal sex." Bizarro-fiction was brought up (such as The Haunted Vagina) as well as the fact that dinosaur erotica exists. But we tried to remain respectful of the fact that not every story is for every reader. It's really easy to bash writing that you don't like, be you find it poorly written or object to the content of the story. It's important to remember that "Your squick may be someone else's squee." I wish I could properly attribute that quote, but it hit the point when I quoted it to the panel.
Overall, this panel was a blast, and one that we could have gone on in more depth outside of the allotted time frame. For those interested, I've compiled at partial list (ie. what I can remember) of titles and authors mentioned.
Read more (ie. the book lists) at http://libromancersapprentice.blogspot.com/2015/02/orgasmatron-erotic-not-so-erotic-in-sff.html
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