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Notes -
Erotica is meant to arouse. It's meant to be erotic. Obviously porn is erotica. But not all naked pictures are porn, IMO.
With the caveat that literally everything is "erotica" to someone, I have a hard time imagining anyone finding the specific scene we're talking about in Gender Queer arousing or stimulating, and it seems pretty obvious to me that that was not its intent. You can take issue with all kinds of things (like its suitability for children), but I think a lot of people are performatively clutching pearls about kids reading about sex.
Well, if depictions of a sexual fantasy are not meant to be arousing (and the author is trying to show that for her it was arousing as a fantasy, whatever it was like in reality) then to quote Gilbert and Sullivan "Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!”
Have you read the page in question? Did it strike you as erotic? Did it strike you as something meant to be arousing? Did you look at that panel and think it's something a teen is likely to jerk off to, or that the author thought of it as something to jerk off to? Because to me, it looked more like teens trying out a "sex fantasy" that turns out to be weird and ridiculous and completely unarousing, which was the point of that sequence. But maybe it did something different for you. I'll take your word for it.
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