By M.Christian

YNOT – As erotica luminaries go, novelist, editor, non-fiction author and frequent speaker Laura Antoniou is one of the brightest. Adult performer Midori has called her a “Renaissance perv.” Others have called her “brilliant” and one of the foremost authorities in the world on social politics and gender roles. She calls herself “author, speaker, pundit, kvetch.”

Without a doubt she is an observer who attempts to shape and refine the public’s perception of marginalized groups through her writing and public speaking.

Winner of the National Leather Association: International’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, Antoniou has written about sexuality and power for nearly 30 years. During that time, she has worked with kink-focused adult entertainment companies including Kink.com. Her The Marketplace series, heralded for excellent prose as much as for the knowledge the author brings to the subject, is considered among the definitive works in its genre.

In addition, Antoniou has served as editor of the Leatherwomen anthologies since their inception 20 years ago. As a presenter, panelist and keynote speaker, she has appeared at dozens of conferences, both entertaining and delivering an occasional verbal indictment. She also has appeared at colleges and universities, including New York University, Rutgers, Columbia and the University of Washington.

YNOT sat down with Antoniou to talk about erotica, BDSM, adult entertainment and more.

YNOT: How has the world of erotica changed over the past decade or so? Or has it not changed?
Laura Antoniou: I see that the market has changed in three major ways over the past 10-15 years. Erotica has exploded online, of course. Porn fans are always early adapters of technology. There’s a reason why the busiest places, even in the earliest days of the internet, were the alt.sex newsgroups and FTP sites where you could download smutty pictures.

The convenience and privacy benefits of having your exciting stories on a computer — or now, on your freakin’ phone — are just astonishing. Plus, the ability to immediately get what you want appeals to the hedonist in us all. When I like an author, I can, in minutes, buy and download whatever they have available.

The second big change is who is reading the porn. Back when you had to make an effort to find the “good stuff,” erotica readers tended to be mostly men with some disposable income and a place to securely stash their collection. Now readers are younger, less affluent, more diverse, and my goodness, women are reading up a storm. Back when I was a young reader of titillating tales, I had to go into sleazy stores on 42nd Street [in New York] to find books and magazines that catered to my tastes. The ambiance was … special, let me tell you. But now, women can find what turns them on, not only in privacy and with convenience, but in a marketplace that is actually catering to their tastes.

And the third big change is the diversity in writer-reader mash-ups. Back in the day, when I wrote gay male fiction, I had to use pseudonyms. No one, I was told, would buy gay erotica written by a woman. And yet, as an editor as well as a writer, I knew that women were writing tons of gay male porn! Also, it was assumed that readers not only wanted their writers to be exactly like them, but their stories had to fit a rigid identity, too. Lesbians would only read smutty stories written about lesbians by other lesbians, or so it was thought.

Now, we know this is just plain bullshit. My gay male fiction sells quite well under my real name at Sizzler Editions. And what’s more, people are reading across gender, orientation, activity and perversion boundaries all the time — and happily! Different genres within erotica attract readers of all kinds, and the identity of the author and the reader are not nearly as important as the quality of the story.

Have you seen improvement in how people view what commonly is called “alternative sexuality”: power exchange as well as gay and lesbian sexuality?
There is a much greater acceptance now for queer and alt-sex porn. Entire e-publishing houses are devoted to SM, leather and kink works or same-sex romantic erotica, and there are even more places to find things that were just not common when I was starting out, like the whole “ménage” genre, featuring a woman who wants two men and gets them — at the same time. Many of these even show the men getting it on with each other, which would have gotten me laughed out of most editorial offices back in the day. I find that very queer and wonderful.

Also, I see more people demanding greater quality from their kinky porn. While there is a place for “gang-banged, tortured babysitter,” I can see hundreds of examples of real novels and films about people who have kinky sex. I can only hope that my Marketplace novels helped show that you can have plots, characters and long sagas without sacrificing the hot action.

With power exchange becoming more “out of the closet,” do you see the quality of information around it getting better — or do you see some need for improvement?
Oh, good lord, there’s always room for improvement. The more people out there putting out “information,” the greater chance you will run into information supplied by morons. Or, if not morons, well-meaning people who just don’t know any better. Of course, how one takes in and uses the information they find online or through a dodgy individual is all part of evolution in action, isn’t it?

The same goes for erotica and pornography: Do you think the “biz” is getting better — or have things been slipping?
Both. The business is better because OMG, it’s so huge and so easy to find stuff now. And OMG it’s so much worse because there is so much crap out there as well as the good stuff, and you can spend the rest of your life sorting through it all to find what you really like.

The erotica business is still suffering from the same curses of the past: bad writing, awful editing, little or no marketing, few places to find reviews. It’s just that it’s easier to find all these poorly written, edited and designed books and movies. Also, it’s worse because 20 years after I started writing, I am still not making a living at this. Writers in this field are not well paid at all. There’s money in this, and it needs to do more than trickle down.

Any last thoughts you’d like to share about the adult entertainment industry?
Just that the phrase is so perfect for what it is we do and how we should be doing it. Yes, this is for adults, but just because it’s porn doesn’t mean it should be shoddy. And it’s for entertainment — sometimes leading to the best entertainment possible: an orgasm or two. If we produced porn the same way we produce mainstream entertainment for adults — say, a nice juicy novel on the [New York] Times best-seller list or an R-rated movie — the market for such material is out there and will support it. And remembering that it’s all for fun will allow us to continue to crunch genres and create for audiences who will demand the best we can produce and inspire us to make even more.

For more information, find Antoniou online at LAntoniou.com.