“He admired the cheap knit of her Primark cardigan, slumped lazily over      bulging hips. Her car had an almost infantile aroma of crisps and warm orange drink. Empty bottles of mineral water covered the backseat of her car, spilled over from the little pockets in the doors, rolled around on the dashboard, were everywhere. He imagined Kelly naked, in a great sea of empty mineral water bottles, floating amongst them and begging for him, as he threw her over the passenger seat and began to hump vigorously.”

- Pokorny Hardison, from Love In The Oriental Foods Aisle (2008)

Erotic fiction is, if we trace the tradition, essentially escapist in nature. Whether it is the crude wish-fulfilment of the slash author, the patriarchy-reinforcing fantasies of the ‘Mills and Boon’, the bawdy smut of a Fanny Hill or similar, or the obvious sensuality of an Anais Nin, what we are given in erotica is an idea of sex that somehow transcends its ordinary reality. But a new movement of contemporary erotic authors is hoping to change that: to move erotica towards ‘cruel purpose’, in the Artaudian sense, to awake its readers to the deep power structures that underly and restrict their existence whilst also simultaneously turning them on.

This is ‘Erotic Realism’, and after some years of flourishing in online communities, with the publishing of Pokorny Hardison’s new novel, The Girls of the Tote, on major erotica imprint BonerFlower, it is a movement that looks as if it is finally ready to ascend to the erotic mainstream. The movement’s undoubted leader is Hardison, who as well as authoring what are arguably its two greatest works to date, 2008’s Love In The Oriental Foods Aisle and last year’s A Lidl Bit of Loving (both self-published), also drew up the ‘Erotic Realist Manifesto’, marking the moment of the movement’s true birth in 2005. But Hardison’s disciples are many, and other prominent exponents of Erotic Realism include Davinia Sacks (Love In Oxfam, Butcher Boy), O’Farrell Terry (Keighley Flowers), Stuart Lam (Cost-Cutting Love) and Ashleigh Madrilenean (House of Incest and Frasier).

The typical erotic realist story takes place in a poor, culturally barren town (usually in Britain, since that is where most of the authors are from, but there have been examples of Erotic Realist novels set in Canada, Australia, the USA, and even Sweden). Characters meet, and fuck, in supermarket car parks, failing local butcher’s shops, Weatherspoon’s pubs, featureless office buildings, furniture warehouses, and so on and so forth. They typically wear clothes from Primark, or supermarket own-brand lines like Asda’s George. They eat Subway sandwiches and cook with Uncle Ben’s sauce. The women are all lumpy and overweight; the men are either raging steroid giants, or else spend half their time coughing up giant gobs of phlegm and trying to keep their man-boobs under control. All of these depressing scenes are presented sensually in the manner of The House of Love or something like that: but the audience knows that it is a charade.

The sex and sexuality that is presented in erotica is excessive: the men are excessively dashing and priapic, the women excessively aroused, everyone excessively open to having alien objects shoved into them. The sex and sexuality in erotic realism is no different; it is just that it is set in the sort of grinding milieu that we read erotic writers to escape. The sense of boredom, of degradation, of the grotesqueness of the human body and the hollowness of everything we do to transcend that grotesqueness, is, in the purest examples of erotic realism, ever-present. Even when we are aroused by the characters’ liasons, it is never less than clear to the critical reader that this a mere distraction, that rubbing our bacon together does not constitute revolutionary, or even interesting, action.

I meet Hardison at his home in Bolton… [article continues in theory but I can’t be bothered to write it]