When the internet suddenly appeared in my consciousness I remember the sudden use of the word visit.

When we arrived in Vancouver in1975 my idea of visit was as a verb – “I am going to visit my niece.” Or it was also a noun, “It was a nice visit that we had.” Visit was a word that indicated personal intimacy.

The internet brought us with its web pages stuff like, “Visit us at vancouver.garbage.com.” To me this was ludicrous.  

Now in 2019 a word that has been also transformed is the verb “to share”.

Christ parted a loaf of bread and shared it with his apostles. In the best of any world to share brings in the idea that you have something and that by sharing it you will be diminished inI quantity of that which you share but that you will be rewarded by your generosity.

Now I believe that in that huge crowd in the sky there are sites that have stuff for those who argue for things right wing or for those who promote things left wing. Obviously there are places for cats doing funny things and places that have seamless illustrations or photographs such as one of President Clinton reclining on a sofa wearing Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress.

So you click on that which you want to share and place it on your social media wall. You might “share” a link (or not share the link) to a film and simply say, “It was really good.”

My immediate response to that would be to ask, “Why was it good?”

But in this new age of sharing we are too busy doing it to then place some sort of qualifying opinion. Time is at a premium; we have to go.

This blog is illustrated by the magnificent Jillian McGinnis. I wrote about her here and here.

I took the photograph in 1989. There are a few people (I don’t know them) who like some of my Medium entries. There is one in particular who writes short erotic fiction. I don’t understand it in the least. If I read it with regularity I would add 10% more to my now 77 year-old almost 90% impotence.

What I want to share here (and this involves in parting with something inside me that is personal) the idea that eroticism, at is best is elegant and never violent. It is subtle and never obvious. It is gentle and understated.

I have always defined pornography as something done in bad taste. In that blog about Jillian McGinnis I wrote this:

I had been working on a gallery show featuring women in tubs when my friend Kerry McPhedran told me she had a candidate. I had chosen all my other ones personally so I wondered how I was supposed to "inspect" this one. Kerry told me that Gillian was a swimmer and was perfect as she was very comfortable with her body. The day of the shoot came (sight unseen, I had accepted Kerry's offer) and Gillian appeared at my house. She lay a set of Channel No 5 cosmetics on a little table, took her clothes off in one swoop and neatly placed her Calvin Klein underwear by the cosmetics. She slipped into the tub and I took my photographs.

My memory of it has not changed with the passing of all those years. If anything it is rosier in eroticism and I consider myself so lucky and privileged to have had that experience.