View source for Eroticism

{{short description|Quality that causes sexual feelings}}
[[File:2_Erotic_Kama_statues_of_Khajuraho_Hindu_Temple_de_Lakshmana_Khajurâho_India_2013.jpg|thumb|Erotic ''[[Kama]]'' statues at the [[Khajuraho Group of Monuments|Khajuraho Temple]], [[India]]; the image portrays in the centre a female and male entwined in [[maithuna]], whilst at each side a gazing male and female [[masturbate]] ([[autoeroticism]]).]]

'''Eroticism''' ({{etymology|grc|''{{wikt-lang|grc|ἔρως}}'' ([[eros (concept)|{{grc-transl|ἔρως}}]])|love, desire||[[-ism]]}}) is a quality that causes [[human sexuality|sexual]] feelings,<ref name=merriam>{{cite Merriam-Webster|eroticism |access-date=7 August 2011}}</ref> as well as a philosophical contemplation concerning the [[aesthetic]]s of [[sexual desire]], sensuality, and [[romantic love]]. That quality may be found in any form of [[Erotic art|artwork]], including [[painting]], [[sculpture]], [[Erotic photography|photography]], [[drama]], [[erotic film|film]], [[music]], or [[erotic literature|literature]]. It may also be found in [[Sex in advertising|advertising]]. The term may also refer to a state of [[sexual arousal]]<ref name=merriam /> or anticipation of such – an insistent sexual [[impulse (psychology)|impulse]], [[libido|desire]], or pattern of thoughts.

As French novelist [[Honoré de Balzac]] stated, eroticism is dependent not just upon an individual's [[Sexual ethics|sexual morality]], but also the culture and time in which an individual resides.<ref>Balzac, "The Physiology of Marriage" (1826), trans. Sharon Marcus (1997), Aphorism XXVI, 65</ref><ref>Grande, L., "Laws and Attitudes towards Homosexuality from Antiquity to the Modern Era", Ponte 43:4-5 (1987), pp. 122-129</ref><ref>Gauthier, Albert, "La sodomie dans le droit canonique medieval" in L'Erotisme au Moyen Age: Etudes presentees au IIe Colloque de l'Institut d'Etudes Medievales, 3-4 Avril 1976, ed. Roy, Bruno (Montreal: Ed. Aurore, 1977), pp. 109-122</ref>

==Definitions==
Because the nature of what is erotic is fluid,<ref>Evans, David T., Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities, (New York: Routledge, 1993)</ref> early definitions of the term attempted to conceive eroticism as some form of sensual or romantic love or as the human sex drive ([[libido]]); for example, the ''Encyclopédie'' of 1755 states that the erotic "is an epithet which is applied to everything with a connection to the love of the sexes; one employs it particularly to characterize...a dissoluteness, an excess".<ref>''Encyclopédie'' (1755), quoted in Lynn Hunt ed., ''Eroticism and the Body Politic'' (London 1991) p. 90</ref> Libertine literature such as those by [[John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester]] evoked eroticism to the readers.{{How|date=November 2024}}<ref name="Mudge 2017 p. 8">{{cite book | last=Mudge | first=B.K. | title=The Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature | publisher=Cambridge University Press | series=Cambridge Companions to Literature | year=2017 | isbn=978-1-107-18407-7 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GB4xDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA8 | access-date=2023-05-11 | page=8}}</ref>

Because eroticism is wholly dependent on the viewer's culture and personal tastes pertaining to what, exactly, defines the erotic,<ref>Foster. Jeannette H., Sex Variant Women in Literature: A Historical and Quantitative Survey 2nd ed., (New York: Vantage Press, 1956) (repr. Baltimore: Diana Press, 1975)</ref><ref>Weinberg, M., & A. Bell, Homosexuality: An Annotated Bibliography, (New York: 1972)</ref> critics have often{{how often|date=June 2018}} confused eroticism with [[pornography]], with [[anti-pornography]] activist [[Andrea Dworkin]] saying, "Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer."<ref>{{cite book |title=Pornography: Men Possessing Women |last=Dworkin |first=Andrea |year=1981 |isbn=978-0-399-12619-2 |pages=39}}</ref> This confusion, as [[Lynn Hunt]] writes, "demonstrate[s] the difficulty of drawing... a clear generic demarcation between the erotic and the pornographic": "the history of the separation of pornography from eroticism... remains to be written".<ref>Hunt, "Introduction", in Hunt ed., ''Eroticism'' p. 4</ref>

[[Audre Lorde]] recognises eroticism and pornography as “two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual”, defining the erotic as “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Lorde |first=Audre |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1006460992 |title=Your silence will not protect you |date=2017 |publisher=Silver Press |isbn=0-9957162-2-6 |location=UK |pages=22-25 |oclc=1006460992}}</ref> In her 1978 essay, ''Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power'', Lorde identifies the erotic as a source of creative power that is deeply rooted in a spiritual plane of unrecognised or unexpressed feeling and sensation.

==Psychoanalytical approach==
[[File:Godward The Old Old Story 1903.jpg|thumb|Eroticism in literature. ''The Old, Old Story'', [[John William Godward]], 1903.]]
Influenced by [[Sigmund Freud]],<ref>Dollimore, Jonathan, [https://books.google.com/books?id=0tPsXaDicusC&pg=PA105 Sexual Dissidence: Augusutine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault] (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 105-8. Clarendon Press, 1991. {{ISBN|9780198112693}}</ref> [[Psychoanalysis|psychotherapists]] have turned to Greek philosophy for an understanding of eros' heightened [[aesthetic]].<ref>Hunt, "Introduction", in Hunt ed., Eroticism p. 13</ref> For [[Plato]], [[Eros (mythology)|Eros]] takes an almost [[transcendent (philosophy)|transcendent]] manifestation when the subject seeks to go beyond itself and form a communion with the object/other: "the true order of going...to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth as steps...to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty".<ref>''The Symposium'', in Benjamin Jowett trans., ''The Essential Plato'' (1871/1999), 746. However, Jowett's Victorian-era translation has asserted a reading of Plato that tends toward the physical-sex-less (e.g. the current sense of a ''platonic'' relationship), compared to later scholars from Walter Pater through Michel Foucault, to the present. See Adam Lee, ''The Platonism of Walter Pater: Embodied Equity'' (Oxford University Press, 2020). {{ISBN|9780192588135}}; and, again, Dollimore (1991).</ref>

==French philosophy==
Modern French conceptions of eroticism can be traced to the [[Age of Enlightenment]],<ref>Coward, D.A., "Attitudes to Homosexuality in Eighteenth Century France", Journal of European Studies 10, pp. 236 ff. {{doi|10.1177/004724418001004001}}</ref> when "in the eighteenth century, dictionaries defined the erotic as that which concerned love...eroticism was the intrusion into the public sphere of something that was at base private".<ref>Hunt, "Introduction", in Hunt ed., ''Eroticism'' p. 3 and p. 5</ref> This theme of intrusion or transgression was taken up in the twentieth century by the French philosopher [[Georges Bataille]], who argued that eroticism performs a function of dissolving boundaries between human subjectivity and humanity, a transgression that dissolves the rational world but is always temporary,<ref>L'érotisme, by Georges Bataille, Paris (1957: UK publication 1962) {{ISBN|978-2-7073-0253-3}}</ref> as well as that, "Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself".<ref>George Bataille, ''Eroticism'' (Penguin 2001) p. 256</ref> For Bataille, as well as many French theorists, "Eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest...eroticism is assenting to life even in death".<ref>Bataille, ''Eroticism'' p. 11</ref>

==Non-heterosexual==
[[File:Ciągliński Symbolic dance.jpg|thumb|''Symbolic dance'' by [[Jan Ciągliński]], late 19th-century [[Lesbianism in erotica|lesbian erotica]] ([[National Museum, Warsaw|National Museum]] in [[Warsaw]], Poland)]]{{Globalize section|date=February 2021}}
[[Queer theory]] and [[LGBTQ studies]] consider the concept from a [[non-heterosexual]] perspective, viewing psychoanalytical and modernist views of eroticism as both archaic<ref>Morton, Donald, ed., The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader, (Boulder CO: Westview, 1996)</ref> and [[Heterosexism|heterosexist]],<ref>Cohen, Ed, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities, (New York: Routledge, 1999)</ref> written primarily by and for a "handful of elite, heterosexual, bourgeois men"<ref>Flannigan-Saint-Aubin, Arthur. {{"'}}Black Gay Male' Discourse: Reading Race and Sexuality Between the Lines". Journal of the History of Sexuality 3:3 (1993): 468-90.</ref> who "mistook their own repressed sexual proclivities"<ref>Aries, Philippe & Andre Bejin, eds., Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985; orig. pub. as Sexualities Occidentales, Paris: Editions du Seuil/Communications, 1982)</ref> as the norm.<ref>Bullough, Vern L., "Homosexuality and the Medical Model", Journal of Homosexuality 1:6 (1975), pp. 99-110 {{doi|10.1300/J082v01n01_08}}</ref>

Theorists like [[Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick]],<ref>from Abelove, Henry, Michele Aina Barale, and David Halperin, eds., [https://books.google.com/books?id=PaNdHqo-9wIC&pg=PA45 The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader], (New York: Routledge: 1993) Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick: Epistemology of the closet, 45</ref> [[Gayle S. Rubin]]<ref>from Abelove, Henry, Michele Aina Barale, and David Halperin, eds., [https://books.google.com/books?id=PaNdHqo-9wIC&pg=PA3 The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader], (New York: Routledge: 1993) Gayle S. Rubin: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality, 3</ref> and [[Marilyn Frye]]<ref>from Abelove, Henry, Michele Aina Barale, and David Halperin, eds., [https://books.google.com/books?id=PaNdHqo-9wIC&pg=PA91 The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader], (New York: Routledge: 1993) Marilyn Frye: Some reflections on separatism and power, 91</ref> all write extensively about eroticism from a heterosexual, [[lesbian]] and [[separatist]] point of view, respectively, seeing eroticism as both a political force<ref>Marshall, John, "Pansies, Perverts and Macho Men: Changing Conceptions of Male Homosexuality", in Kenneth Plummer, ed., The Making of the Modern Homosexual, (London: Hutchinson, 1981), 133-54</ref> and cultural critique<ref>Fone, Byrne R.S., "Some Notes Toward a History of Gay People", The Advocate no. 259 (Jan 25, 1979), pp. 17-19 & no. 260 (Feb 28, 1979), pp. 11-13</ref> for marginalized groups, or as [[Mario Vargas Llosa]] summarized: "Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty".<ref>Mangan, J. A. "Men, Masculinity, and Sexuality: Some Recent Literature". Journal of the History of Sexuality 3:2 (1992): 303-13</ref>

[[Audre Lorde]], a lesbian Caribbean-American writer and outspoken [[Feminism|feminist]], called [[The Erotic|the erotic]] a source of power specifically identified with the female, often corrupted or distorted by oppression, since it poses the challenge of change. "For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Lorde |first1=Audre |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OixDJLFjycsC&pg=PA53 |title=Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches |last2=Clarke |first2=Cheryl |publisher=Ten Speed Press |year=2007 |isbn=978-1-58091-186-3 |location=New York |pages=53 |orig-date=1984}}</ref> In "The Uses of the Erotic" within ''[[Sister Outsider]]'', she discusses how the erotic comes from the sharing of joy, "whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual" and provides the basis on which understanding provides a foundation for acknowledging difference.<ref name=":0" /> Lorde suggests that if we suppress the erotic rather than recognize its presence, it takes on a different form. Rather than enjoying and sharing with one another, it becomes objectifying, which she says translates into abuse as we attempt to hide and suppress our experiences.<ref>{{Cite book|title = Sister Outsider|last = Lorde|first = Audre|publisher = Ten Speed Press|year = 2007|location = NY|pages = 53–58|chapter = Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power (1984)}}</ref>

==See also==
{{div col}}
* [[Beauty]]
* [[Erogenous zone]]
* [[Eros (love)|Eros]]
* [[Erotic art]]
* [[Erotica]]
* [[History of erotic depictions]]
* [[History of nude art]]
* [[Homoeroticism]]
* [[Limit-experience]]
* [[Nudity]]
* [[Pin-up girl]]
* [[Pornography]]
* [[Romantic love|Romance]]
* [[Sexual intercourse]]
* [[Sex-positive movement]]
{{div col end}}
{{-}}

==References==
{{Reflist}}

{{Aesthetics}}

{{Authority control}}

[[Category:Human sexuality]]
[[Category:Concepts in aesthetics]]
[[Category:Pornography]]
[[Category:Video]]