The Sex Is Hot
All too often, books brush over, allude to or completely ignore the sex that characters have with each other. This could not be more different from erotic literature. Erotica is all about the topics that are found to be sexually stimulating. In most cases, erotica aims to hit that sweet spot between explicit and artistic: It has just enough sensual detail to get your pulse racing, with plenty of room left for your imagination to roam. (For a great list of hot erotica classics, check out 5 Books That Will Make You Forget About "Fifty Shades.")
You Get to Learn About Relationships
If there is one moment in which a relationship is at its most exposed, it’s during a sex scene. This is when a relationship’s dynamics, expectations, assumptions and fantasies come out to play. Writing about the climax, plateau and aftermath of sexual scenes is like looking at people’s lives through a magnifying glass and seeing just what makes them tick. From seeing what your own ideal relationship dynamic looks like to reading about other couplings, getting an inside look at other relationships can be very enlightening.You Get to Live Vicariously
Erotica is literary fiction. Sometimes it's based on real life, but even then writers often paint it as fantasy. Many of these sexy tales would never - or could never - happen in real life. These are books about characters with specific personalities and sexualities that experience things in their literary lives that simply won’t happen outside of that book. That's the beauty of fiction; it allows us to experience these adventures vicariously rather than never experiencing them at all. Books have fewer restrictions and limits than real people do. And while you may not want a sex life that's as wild and wonderful as the characters you read about, fantasy is a great way to go there.
