As comfortable as I've always been about sex, as much as I have enjoyed reading and writing erotic fiction, as cool as I am with activities like going topless at parties and watching "those movies" with my husband...okay well, maybe I'm a prude.

What instigated this "prude awakening"? As I do every year at this time, I'm helping with the judging in the Eppie Awards (aka the Oscars of ebooks). Due to a clerical error, I was initially assigned four books entered in the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transvestite category, aka GLBT, or in Eppie-speak, Category K. While I waited to hear if I might be excused to judge another category, I skimmed through the books. I am sworn to secrecy as an Eppie judge, and of course I wouldn't share details anyway, but this skimming experience was, for me personally, not a pleasant one.

Hence, I questioned my prudity. Prudishness. Prudativity. The books, well, irked me. And I honestly mean that not in any shape or form as a criticism of the books themselves or a reflection on the talent of their authors...it was just me.

This raised in my mind yet again the difficulty of judging erotic books, as compared to judging any other style of fiction. As I perused these novels and anthologies, I set aside personal taste as best I could, and tried to look at their objective merits. I found this quite impossible. Imagine my relief when I heard I had been reassigned to a different category! (Can't tell you which one...sworn to secrecy.)

Saved from Category K.

Whew. But the experience certainly was an eye-opener. Erotica--as opposed to erotic romance, erotic mystery, erotic paranormal, etc.--is by nature a different beast. It is designed to entertain not by the means any other fiction genre does: plot, characterization, suspense, theme, etc. No, erotica is meant to turn the reader on, plain and simple. And if it's not your bag, it will fail at that no matter how well written it is.

I wrote to a friend of mine expressing these same sentiments (again, sworn to secrecy so sharing no details or specifics of any kind). She asked me, can't you just judge them on the basis of whether or not they are good books? You might think that, but all four were written well, syntactically and grammatically, and even, I guess I'd say, stylistically. The thing is, you judge a work of art largely on whether or not it accomplishes its goal successfully, and if an erotica book is read by a person who is not turned on by it, it fails no matter how talented the author. It would be unfair to penalize it for that.

But seeing as I'm an author of books about sex, you have to ask, am I such a prude I can't even read this stuff?

Well, there are degrees of prudishness, and just as every person has his or her turn-ons, we also have our turn-offs. I was married for fifteen years to a gay man, so gay stories, I'm afraid, do not sit with me well. I can deal with bi-curious stories okay, I actually enjoy lesbian stuff, but forgive me if my past has made some things just distasteful. Well, I'm an incurable romantic too, and there is little romance in most gay erotica. So I will fess up to being a prude when it comes to guy-on-guy sex; you'll get no argument from me.

And that's the complexity of writing about sex. One person loves bondage, the next is a bondage prude. But the bondage prude may be all about girl-on-girl, while the D/s person finds it repulsive. In the end, we are all prudes in some ways, and sex fiends in others, and in all those things we can do little if anything to change ourselves. And really, with the exception of some extreme or sociopathic interests, we are all just regular humans with perfectly healthy sex drives.

The important thing to keep in mind is that erotic books are tricky things. A gay-prude like me (and please distinguish that from a homophobe, which is something completely different and that I am not) should NOT be judging Category K. Happily, I'm sure I was replaced by someone genuinely capable of doing that properly.

So how goes the judging in my new category? Sorry, sworn to secrecy, can't tell you. (But it is a huge relief!)

Diana Laurence is the author of the Soulful Sex anthologies of erotic romance fiction, and released her newest book Bloodchained in September (www.bloodchained.com). Diana's works are published by Living Beyond Reality Press (www.livingbeyondreality.com.) Visit her at www.dianalaurence.com or enjoy her blog at www.eroticawithsoul.blogspot.com.