«SEX IS MORE EXCITING ON THE SCREEN AND BETWEEN THE PAGES THAN BETWEEN THE SHEETS»

As Allan Bloom put it in his 1993 book Love and Friendship, "Animals have sex and human beings have eros." Eroticism is what escalates human pleasure in sex. In the words of the cultural historian Denis de Rougement, author of the book Love in the Western World, eros is the "boundless" and "complete desire." Its conditions are psychological. As the scholar Camille Paglia, who wrote the book on eroticism, tells me in an interview, "Sex comes from the body, but eroticism comes from the mind." Eros is passion, longing, and yearning. It is magnified by mystery and intrigue. Cultural constraints and taboos intensify erotic sex: The less you can have something, the more you want it.

De Rougement called eros "divine delirium." The erotic lover is willing to give up everything, even his very self, in order to seek union with the beloved, which can be another person or, in some cases, even God. As one writer put it, "Eros seeks to escape from the flesh and flee into a world beyond." America's best-selling poet, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Rumi, may be the most erotic and celebrated writer in this vein. Many of his poems are about erotic and ecstatic love, and they take the crippled eroticism of contemporary culture to school.

-The Atlantic

 May 17 2013