Erotica Exposed

New Zealands first erotica expo opens near month, complete with strippers, adult toys and a Miss Erotica competition, reports Jo McCarroll.

EROTICA, they say, is tickling your lover with a feather. Pornography is using the whale chicken. But in modern life, bombarded as we are with sexual images, references and nudity, can erotica exist? Or have we unleashed the chicken and for all? Erotica Expo 2000, New Zealand's first adult Concepts Lifestyle Expo is being held in Auckland next month. The expo-which will bestrictly RI8 promises a fun and uninhibited celebration of sex and sexuality, ripping the brown paper off information, products and services of an adult nature.

The expo is based on similar shows in Europe as well as the phenomenally successful Sexpo in Australia, where last year the 300 exhibitors attracted 70,000 visitors - a lot of couples and 40%, women - rivalling the annual bridal and homewear events. The slogan? "Sex is fun-lighten up". Erotica's organisers are also targeting middle New Zealand. Some exhibitors would not be out of place at an A&P Show, with spa pool manufacturers, a mineral "distiller distributor and cellphone accessory retailer alongside the more predictable top shelf magazines, lingerie manufacturers and adult stores.

The products might fail to titillate, but there will also be entertainment, including male and female strippers, every hour although organiser Fiona Gibb says the G-strings will stay on in deference to the mores of the crowd. Even with skin on show, it sounds more like a commercial trade fair than a garden of unearthly delights. Can erotica exist under the bright lights of the Greenlane Expo Centre? Or will the glare of public scrutiny strip the sexual paraphernalia of any power of suggestion, rendering it just so much plastic, skin and leather?

Gibb at least doesrft believe erotica withers when exposed to the light. Mystery and suggestion is an important part of erotica for many people but that doesn't equate to enforced ignorance, she says.

"We are not demystifying (erotica) in such a way as will ruin it. I actually think that we are putting the power back into people's hands to create erotica," she says.

"I'm hoping that people come away not shocked-but more educated in some way about what goes on."

Gibb, who runs an adult entertainment wholesale business, says the expo aims to illuminate the adult industry for those who still see it as the preserve of men in dirty macs, and give them the tools to create erotica for themselves.

The expo promises something for every adult who makes the decision to attend, she says.

"They know when they bought their ticket, they know when they hopped in their car to drive to this expo that it's RIB. Maybe some of them are going to be shocked at the nature of what some of the adult products are like but they'll find something in the aromatherapy centre or the health centre or the DVD shop that they didn't know about"

The point at which something ceases to be erotic and becomes offensive or obscene will always come down to the individual, Toni Lee, author of the soon-to-be released book Bare: Erotic Stories, says.

For her, erotica relies very much on the power of suggestion. "Erotica is subtle. It's about what happens in your mind and your heart and your soul, not just in your body," she says.

Where people draw that line also depends on their culture, context and period, clinical psychologist Ted Mason says. "I think the power of suggestion is in the eye of the beholder. It's like any art image. Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture is immensely suggestive to me but perhaps to other people, it isn't, perhaps other people just see a house."

The suggestion can be screamed rather than whispered but, the effect of erotica does come down to suggestion, he says. "The purpose of erotica is not only to arouse but to be enticing, to be somewhat magnetically seductive. I don't think explicitness will ever eradicate our need and desire to be enticed."

Certainly at the first Miss Erotica pageant, being held as part of the build up to the Erotica Expo, judges will awarding marks on what the contestants promise ather than what they deliver.

The 13 entrants include dancers, strippers and enthusiastic amateurs. But they will need to do more to wear (just) the coveted Miss Erotica crown than take off their clothes, Shaine, one of the judges and the owner of an Auckland strip club, says. Contestants decide for themselves whether to strip right down and it's not compulsory to take off any clothes at all.

"The most important part about erotica is the teasing part of it, the suggestion of it. Any girl can go up there in a bikini and just whip it off," she says.

One barometer of the public's perception of what's acceptably erotically suggestive and what's offensive, is mising Standards Authority executive director Glen Wiggs says in the 10 years he has been at the ASA he has seen those lines in the sand shift and there's been a basic "liberal trend".

"The bimbo ads, the blonde sitting on the bonnet of the car, that's too blatant and crass these days."

Some ads manage to be explicitly suggestive - as in one where a woman's body spray has a physical effect on the male model in her life drawing class or another where a woman's enjoyment in using a particular shampoo would normally be caused by a completely different activity. The ASA standards bar ads which use sex in ways completely unrelated to the product but ads that are "sexy and funny" are OK, Wiggs says. Erotic or sexually suggestive

ising simply reflects the world we live in, he says. "A day wouldn't go by without hearing a remark or being told a joke which is slightly off colour and you laugh. That's just part of the way we do business in life."

And it always has been. Take the jumble of erotic artefacts discovered in the ashes of Pompeii and other ancient Roman towns 250 years ago, a collection that had been kept locked away under royal order at the National Archeological Museum in Naples.

The more than 300 items included paintings of love and sex between nymphs, gods and satyrs, phalluses of all shapes and sizes which were given as gifts or used as votive offerings, and statues, including a second century marble of the mythological figure Pan in intimate congress with a goat. In April the collection went on public display at the museum for the first time, although with an X-rating. The move was damned by the Vatican which saw it as an affront to public decency and a mark of society's declining moral standards.

However, it also makes the point that the various avenues of human sexual behaviour are all well trodden by past generations. The products available and the behaviour depicted at New Zealand's first Erotica expo might be new to individuals but realistically they are unlikely to break new ground - it is only the manufacturing processes that have advanced.