Delta of Venus Little Birds Author:Anais Nin Genre: Erotica. "At the time we were all writing erotica at a dollar a page (1941), I realized that for centuries we had had only one model for this literary genre - the writing of men. I was already conscious of a difference between the masculine and feminine treatment of sexual experience. I knew that there was a great disparity between Henry... more » Miller's explicitness and my ambiguities - between his humorous, Rabelaisian view of sex and my poetic descriptions of sexual relationships in the unpublished portions of the diary. As I wrote in Volume Three of the Diary, I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man'sand for which man's language was inadequate. Women, i thought, were more apt to fuse sex with emotion, with love, and to single out one man rather than be promiscuous. This became apparent to me as I wrote the novels and the Diary and I saw it even more clearly when I began to teach. But although womens attitude toward sex was quite distinct from that of men, we had not yet learned how to write about it.
Here, in the erotica I was writing to entertain, under pressure from a client who wanted me to "leave out the poetry." I believed that my style was derived from a reading of men's wroks. For this reason I long felt that I had compromised my feminine self. I put the erotica aside. Rereading it these many years later, I see that my own voice was not completely suppressed. In numerous passages I was intuitively using a woman's language, seeing sexual experience from a woman's point of view. I finally decided to release the erotica for publication because it shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men. ---Anais Nin 1976« less