In this essay from all the way back in 1978, famed African American thinker and writer, Audre Lorde, discusses the power of eros for social and political change. These are ideas that are still being deployed in conscious sexuality spaces today. Maybe their persistence is an indication that we haven't properly integrated these ideas yet, or perhaps that we will always need reminding of eros's special power. As Lorde says, eros is often distorted or misunderstood (she gives pornography as an example of this distortion), so perhaps we have an equally persistence opportunity to invite eros through in a healthy way.
Some choice quotes: "The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling" (53).
"...pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the
suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling" (54).
"...it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical... In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feeling nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility. The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation" (56).
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