As anyone who follows me on Twitter or regularly looks at my DeviantArt account will probably have noticed, I've been back on the beefcake kick the last couple of days. It's not anything new for me but it has got me thinking about the line between sexualised images (like beefcake or cheesecake or an awful lot of advertising), titilation in the form of soft core porn and full on hard core porn. 

What I have been pondering on, in a not actually really thinking about it in any kind of careful, coherent way, is the way that sexualised images are only 'art' (to any given value of what 'art' is) up to a certain point and then they become... well, porn. Why, for example, does a penis being erect take exactly the same image of a nude man from being art into being porn? Is it purely about the intent? Is it just about the aim of the image? Porn is meant to create sexual feelings and raise libido, an 'art' nude may also create those feelings but that's not the main aim of it so it doesn't count as porn? Although if that's true then it becomes even harder to define where the line is if you're dealing with the female form. This:


is 'obviously' art, but it is also a pretty sexual painting. Even if you don't know the underlying meaning of it then it's pretty clear that there's some sex going on here. If it were a modern photo of a woman in the same position what would make it art and what would make it porn?

None of this has anything to do with anything by the way. It's just as I've been doing the beefcake stuff it's occurred to me that there are very few comic artists who have succesfully done both regular comics and erotic comics. There are a few, but by doing erotic comics they suddenly become unworthy to do mainstream ones. To a certain extent I can understand that from a marketing point of view (if someone is well known for doing porn or erotica and you're main target audience is under the age of consent then you don't really want to run the risk of having a 'won't someone think of the children' fallout) but I do think there's still a bit of a hang up that anyone who draws comics that are deliberately sexual, be that beefcake/cheesecake, soft core or hard core porn isn't as good as those that don't. 

Now I'm not actually making any great claim that hard core porn comics are great art, partially because a lot of them are just rubbish, but I'm sort of just pondering on why sex being applied to something devalues it somehow. It's a much more... ahem... personal interaction with the comic than you might with, say, Batman (unless you have a particular fetish of course) but sex does not automatically make something less worthy to my mind. 

The odd thing though is that by adding in a joke as with a lot of the beefcake I've done in the last few days seems to make it a lot more acceptable. It's weird because you have the same amount of flesh on show in a deliberately sexual way but because there's a joke as well it's all fine. It's all a bit bizarre....