what methods would you implement to distinguish between pornography and eroticism, and ban one but not the other
There’s a heuristic I use to distinguish between the two that works fairly well: in erotica, the participants are the focus of the scene. In pornography, the camera (and by implication the viewer) is the true focus of the scene.
That being said, I have a suspicion that trying to define the difference explicitly is a wrong question. People seem to use a form of fuzzy logic[1] when thinking about the two. What we’re really looking at is gradations; a better question might be “how far does something have to be along a pornographic axis before being banned, and what factors determine a position on that axis?”
This seems like a very high level solution—I don’t think “where is the real focus of the scene (in a very abstract sense)” is simpler than “is this pornography”.
There’s a heuristic I use to distinguish between the two that works fairly well: in erotica, the participants are the focus of the scene. In pornography, the camera (and by implication the viewer) is the true focus of the scene.
That being said, I have a suspicion that trying to define the difference explicitly is a wrong question. People seem to use a form of fuzzy logic[1] when thinking about the two. What we’re really looking at is gradations; a better question might be “how far does something have to be along a pornographic axis before being banned, and what factors determine a position on that axis?”
[1]: Damn I hope I’m using that term right....
This seems like a very high level solution—I don’t think “where is the real focus of the scene (in a very abstract sense)” is simpler than “is this pornography”.
Your heuristic is bound to be gamed for. But that is a problem of any definition that isn’t true to the underlying complex value function.
I agree. I wasn’t suggesting it for serious, literal use; that’s why I specified that it was a heuristic.