The Erotic as an Aesthetic Category

Dawn [Prabhâsa], the daughter of Prajâpati, took the form of a celestial nymph and appeared before them [Fire, Wind, Sun, & Moon, her brothers]. Their hearts were moved by her and they poured out their seed. Then they went to Prajâpati, their father, and they said, 'We have poured out our seed. Let it not be lost.' Prajâpati made a golden bowl, an arrow's breadth in height and in width, and he poured the seed into it. Then the thousand-eyed god with a thousand feet and a thousand fitted arrows arose.

From the Kausîtaki Brâhmana, translated with an Introduction by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty,
Penguin Books, 1975, p.31, cf. Hindu gods

The erotic, both as representation and as response, can be classified as a separate aesthetic category, or axiomatic category of value in the polynomic theory of value, if it varies independently from other domains and if it contains specific characteristics to distingish it from other domains. The erotic qualifies in each of these respects.

The purpose of the erotic is sexual arousal. This is the response, ranging from mild titilation to full arousal and to sexual relations of various sorts. As representation, the erotic can involve images or descriptions of the human body, of sexual attributes in particular, or descriptions of sexual activities, in isolation or as parts of larger stories. As a response, the erotic, leading to sexual intercourse and conception, is essential to the continuation of life. As representation, in art and literature, let alone in more vulgar presentations, sexual arousal is a purpose that is often condemned as inappropriate, represensible, or immoral. While nudes have been a classic art form, even in periods when public nudity was non-existent and the public display of any flesh (particularly female) was strongly restricted, what the nudes were never supposed to be was actually erotic. Yet there is no doubting the appeal and popularity of the erotic, whatever is allowed, despite its rarity at different times and places. It is well known in advertising that "sex sells"; and after the dotcom crash, it looked like the only real profitable on-line businesses were those selling pornography. The condemnations of erotic art and of pornography in particular as cases of anhedonic moralism are considered separately. Here the erotic is considered in its own right.

As response and as representation the erotic has a dual existence as (1) "intuitive value," i.e. pleasure, the result of sexual response, arousal, and consumation, and (2) as an aesthetic feature of objects. The erotic is a natural feature of objects in that human bodies display physical sex differences, principally the secondary sex differences developed at puberty (including the maturation of primary sex organs, which have differentiated in the womb), whose display tends to effect an erotic response and which are the source of all erotic representations, even if sexual organs are not explicitly shown or described as such. Where anhedonia suppresses sexual representation, the original presentation of physical sex differences may be suppressed also, with clothing that conceals or disguises the attributes, with the extreme of the veil or chador for women that even prevents display of the female face, let alone any recognizable characteristic of the female form. The male form can also be concealed in various ways, as in the ruling by some Islâmic jurists that trousers on men were immodest because they failed to sufficiently "gird the loins."

The fundamental form of aesthetic value is beauty, which is how the domain of value is defined in the polynomic theory (whose degree of obligation is the optative). However, Edmund Burke and Kant provided classic studies of the difference between beauty and the sublime. Also, Rudolf Otto identified the ways in which religious value, numinosity or the holy, differed from other aesthetic value. It is sometimes said that the sublime already provided for the characteristics that Otto identified in numinosity. This is not true. The sublime may be frightening, but it is not uncanny. The sublime may be dangerous, but it is not inauspicious or a portent of good or evil. Holy things may be beautiful, or sublime, or neither. The fetish objects of ancient or autochthonous religions can be quite unprepossessing, or positively ugly. If the holy can occur without being either beautiful or sublime, with its own characteristic valences, like the uncanny or Otto's mysterium, then the numinous must be identified as a polynomicly independent category of value.

We see the same thing with the erotic. It is common to think of the erotic as necessarily associated with beauty, and certainly the most conspicuously successful and esteemed vehicles of erotic appeal are accompanied by beauty, but there is no doubt that vast amounts of erotic stimulation, and sexual activity, occur without what anyone would think of as out-of-the-ordinary beauty. Indeed, it is not clear that anyone has ever thought of rock star Mick Jagger as particularly handsome -- he comes in for identification as an example of the interesting category "sexy ugly" in the movie Kissing Jessica Stein. Another noteworthy example is the contrast between a men's magazine like Playboy, whose eroticism is tasteful, elegant, and restrained, with the most beautiful women possible (to Hugh Hefner's taste, anyway), and another magazine like Larry Flynt's Hustler, which is crude, vulgar, and tends, in short, towards the ugly. Perhaps more to the point, the less expensive prostitutes do not tend to be very good looking, but their ability to draw business is a continuing problem for locations where this is regarded as a nuisance, a crime, or a public health danger. This can also be seen in early, or even now in low budget, pornographic movies, where the willingness of actors and actresses to have sex on film, or their ability to maintain a performance, has little to do with their looks. One thinks of the legendary but very ordinary looking Ron Jeremy, while in the 1972 movie Behind the Green Door, Marilyn Chambers was billed as the most (perhaps even the first) beautiful porn star.

The erotic thus appears to vary rather freely across the spectrum of the beautiful and the ugly, though which is preferred seems to be a matter of individual taste. Indeed, for some people, their conscious and reasoned preference for the beautiful, and for good taste, often seems to war with a desire for a much cruder and uglier eroticism -- one may think of the diffident English actor Hugh Grant, who strayed from his stunning girlfriend, lovely actress Elizabeth Hurley, for the backseat ministrations of a street walker, Divine Brown (who then definitely got her fifteen minutes of fame). The coolness of the merely beautiful, however, can be supercharged by the sublime or even the numinous. If beauty is great and charismatic enough, it begins to take on attributes of the sublime -- the nobility, the majesty, and awesomeness. Where the knees tremble and the breath becomes short, this may be an ordinary social awkwardness, or it can be a fear as in the presence of an overpowering natural phenomenon -- as when Ed Bundy met Jessica Hahn on the television series Married with Children. A divine and numinous eroticism is no longer familiar in religions without goddesses, but it is still perfectly identifiable in religions that have had, not only goddesses, but goddesses particularly of love and beauty, like Aphrodite, Ishtar, or Hathor. The uncanny or magical aspect of this is remembered in the word glamour, which now is trivialized into an aspiration for all beauty but tends to be applied particularly to those celebrities whose charisma seems to rise to superordinary levels, where glamour returns to its original meaning of a spell.

Not only the nature of the physical response but the valence of erotic representations differs by sex. Most of the vast industry of popular sexual images caters to men, whether they are heterosexual men seeking images of women or homosexual mean seeking images of men. Women seem to appreciate a bit more social context and consequently patronize the publishing empires of romance fiction. These sex differences are considered in more detail elsewhere.

An important feature of the erotic is how it varies across good and evil and even across pleasure and pain. The bondage and rape fantasies examined elsewhere represent practices that in the real world would cross over into crimes. Where crimes involve pain we get an overlap with the vast area of sadomasochism, where countless ways of inflicting or enduring sexual pain have been explored ever since the Marquis de Sade. Why pain should be sexually desirable may be explained by the circumstance that with sufficient sexual arousal, all stimulation, even pain, may be experienced as sexual pleasure. Tickling or spanking are mild versions of this that may be relatively common. However, sadomasochistic fantasies involve no actual contact or stimulation, and these often seem to possess an independent power, an action-at-a-distance, to effect arousal. This is not only puzzling but also the kind of thing that provokes the strongest moral and ideological backlash. That rape fantasies should please, either for women or for men, often seems improper, dangerous, or vicious.

What this shows, for one thing, is that the erotic as an aesthetic category does indeed vary independently from the other forms of value. Why it should, however, is then the question. Rape fantasies may be understandable in that they imagine away the barriers that ordinarily interfere with the consumation of sexual desires in the real world. Feminists, of course, claim that this shortens the distance between rape in fantasy and rape in fact. The awkward thing in that respect is that rape fantasies are not beyond the imagination of women also, as in Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty triology of sexual bondage and slavery novels. For those, Feminists can only fall back on Marxist accusations of "false consciousness" -- where the oppressed identify with the ideology of the oppressors. The erotic imagination, however, has never responded well to ideology. Most rape fantasies, on the other hand, with both men and women, tend to involve the feature that the union is desired prior to the "rape" anyway, even if unconsciously. Again, this allows for a loss of the barriers that in ordinary life impede or even derail courtship and consumation.

If the loss of barriers, however, is what eros desires, this renders perplexing the literature in which bondage and other practices inhibit consumation. Where a victim of a rape fantasy is bound and helpless in order to be unable to resist sex, this is one thing. Where the bound and helpless victim, however, is denied sex, and perhaps bound even to prevent masturbation, is something else. There is a genre of pornographic literature for men, "femdom," where "female domination" is frequently a matter of denying consumation to males. At its extremes, the fantasy may even be of permanent denial of consumation, where we get into the "forced feminization" variety of femdom, where men are unmanned with feminine clothing and discipline, hormones that inhibit erections, and even castration and sex changes. There is actually such a story in the Thousand and One Nights (not the kind that is excerpted for children or made into a Disney movie! but just the kind of thing that attracted Richard Burton to the Nights), where a young man is pulled into a marriage by a forceful and independent young woman. Out on an errand one day, the young man is forcefully seduced by another woman. When, on his return, his wife finds out, she amputates his genitals, sealing the wound with, of all things, hot cheese, and expels him from her house. As in many such stories, little details of importance in the real world, like how he urinates while the wound heals, are glossed over.

Stories of sexual frustration may involve another aspect of the erotic response: Orgasm is more intense as arousal is more prolonged. The purpose of stories of sexual frustration is not indeed sexual frustration, but greater sensation in the consumation. The bondage or discipline fantasy thus may be the other side of the coin from rape fantasies -- the prolonged arousal rendered unnecessary in the latter returns in the former. Together they reveal desires and dynamics that in real life are sometimes contradictory. Thus, the married couple whose sex may become routine, dull, and infrequent, may need to construct a bit of play acting (or sample a bit of erotica) to revive something like the levels of arousal that for young lovers happen all but spontaneously. With the extremes of "femdom" fantasies, however, something more may be happening.

The experience of the erotic in art or literature (of whatever level of quality or taste) tends to the auto-erotic and narcissistic. This is because a partner is not necessary to achieve arousal from viewing pictures or reading, and consumation can be achieved through masturbation without ever having a partner present. With no real partner, the unconscious is free to play. If the unconscious, as Jung believes, contains templates or archetypes of the opposite sex, this affects the kind of fantasies that are prefered and even makes it possible to imagine the responses and preferences of the opposite sex -- or to confuse everything together. Thus, Deirdre McClosky, in her story of becoming a transsexual, Crossing, a Memoir, relates how as a young boy she(/he) began to enjoy cross-dressing as a means of erotic arousal. For many years the pleasure of women's clothes was simply a private secret. The narcissism of this is obvious. Nor do I mean that as a condemnation, moral or otherwise. It was auto-erotic, and there is no particular reason, outside of a very conserative religious morality, why the auto-erotic should not be as enjoyable as other-directed eroticism. Eventually, however, McClosky began to imperceptibly drift towards the idea that it would be rather nice to actually be a woman. The fantasy began to take over. He acted on this, which resulted in a great deal of trouble, since his family (he was married, with children, and other relatives) thought he had become mentally ill. I tend to think that McClosky can do what he/she likes, as long as others are not wronged, and I hope that her life has been improved by the transformation. I also think there is a reality involved: short of great advances in genetic engineering (possible and likely but not coming soon), true sex changes are not possible. Men becoming women do not have wombs, menstruation, conception, or childbirth. Although plastic surgery now can do wonders to feminize a masculine face, some things are harder to deal with: large hands and feet, height, broad shoulders, and a deep rib cage. Women becoming men do not have semen or ejaculation, let alone a penis that is likely to function like a natural one. In time, the limitations probably will be overcome, but meanwhile some women's groups are actually rather hostile to the idea that male-to-female transsexuals, born without wombs or ovaries, are really to be considered women [note].

While it is common now to say that transsexuals suffer from "gender-dysphoria," and psychologically are truly the mind of one sex in the body of another, which seems to me to be quite possible, given the variability of hormones acting on the brain in utero (where the fetal brain is sexualized, as is the fetal body), my interest here is in more general, ambiguous, and mixed cases. If Jung is right and the mind contains arechetypes of both sexes (even as the brain could be variably sexualized), which the imagination, dreams, and fantasy can energize and project, then the occurrence of more than simple gender-dysphoria is what I might expect. I would call such mixed cases the "Teiresias Syndrome," after the Greek seer who was turned into a woman (after encountering copulating snakes) and then, after eight years, was turned back into a male (after encoutering such snakes again).

The Teiresias Syndrome would cover cases like deliberate she-males (who carry physical feminization up to but not including genital surgery) or simple cross-dressers, like the 2003 winner of the Turner Prize for contemporary British art, Grayson Perry, who appeared to accept the award dressed as his little girl persona "Claire" -- seen at right with his (presumably understanding) wife and son. Cross-dressers themselves can be relatively normal heterosexuals, like Perry, or homosexuals. A wide variety of preferences, practices, and purposes emerges in all this. In the Teiresias Syndrome, someone, without feeling alienated or unhappy with their own sex (unlike the dysphoriacs), may just like the other sex, its aesthetic and its experience, enough to feel rather deprived that life doesn't much allow for crossing back and forth and living, alternatively or in mixtures, both. This complexity seems to me to bespeak the psychological complexity of sexual archetypes and gender identity; and where we can never be in a body other than our own, the imagination strains against this limitation. Imagination can make us anything, and, even if a Teiresias Syndrome leads to no overt acts, literature can make us anything and put us anywhere. Whether Deirdre McClosky was born a true gender-dysphoriac or just acted out a strong Teiresias Syndrome seems to me irrelevant. Although physicians may only consider it ethical to treat the former, I don't think that morally there is a problem with sane and competent adults doing with their bodies what they like. They just better be sure, since Teiresias's own experience cannot (yet) be duplicated, that they know what they are doing.

Erotic literature is thus bound to explore every possibility, even those possibilities that someone might regard as appalling, morally, socially, or psychologically, but that curiously contain the power to arouse. If this reveals something about the unconscious and about the natural terms of the erotic response, it would be wise to be aware of it and deal with it. Or, as Jung might say, the unconscious can become too energized with it, and acting out an irrational response becomes more possible.

Whether or not this is a real danger, it still behooves human curiosity to see what is going on and represent truths, however disturbing. The erotic as an aesthetic category does mean that, like other aesthetic categories, the requirements of morality, although independent, are not otherwise suspended. Art, literature, and fantasy are one thing, action is another. Some people confuse them, both that fantasy spills over into action, and that the limitations of action are thought to require the suppression of fantasy. A good recent example of a fantasy that one really does not want to correspond to any reality is the 2000 movie The Cell, with Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D'Onofrio. This movie was reasonably well received critically but did not do very well at the box office. It contains dream images of stunning beauty, but it is also about a particularly sadistic necrophiliac, played by D'Onofrio. The images of his practices are stunning too, but also disturbing beyond what most audiences may have wanted to deal with (some stronger images and sequences were cut from the theatrical version). And the ending may be a little bit silly. The director, however, Tarsem Singh, clearly has a powerful aesthetic vision. That the movie was about a serial killer Singh says was perhaps an artifact of the 1990's. In the 70's it would have been about a burning building. A burning building, however, would not have had the erotic connection -- or provided a striking image of a nude, staring dead girl bleached white like a doll.

Singh's reference to serial killers in the 90's is supremely to Hannibal Lecter of the novel (by Thomas Harris, 1988) and Oscar winning movie Silence of the Lambs (1991). Hannibal himself does not seem very interested in sex, but the principal killers of Red Dragon (1981) and Silence of the Lambs, when Hannibal is mostly in jail, both were sex killers. What is noteworthy about the series is less the erotic dimension, though it is there, but the triumph of a moral aestheticism in the third book, Hannibal (1999). Hannibal goes from being the anti-hero of the first two books, contrasted with the goodness of the agents who had to deal with him, to being the out and out hero of the third, to the extent of converting agent Clarice Starling to his way of life. The makers of the movie Hannibal (2001, directed by Ridley Scott) recoiled from this development and released an ending in which Hannibal simply gets away again (selflessly sacrificing his hand for Clarice!). This was absurd. Harris has obviously lost it and been won over by his fictional villain; but if this is what has happened, it is ridiculous to try and patch it up in Hollywood -- though such cosmetics are not without precedent.

The danger of moral aestheticism when dealing with representations of wrong is well appreciated by Camille Paglia, who even celebrates the Marquis de Sade, but not without an understanding that right and wrong are not thereby suspended or superseded. But dispute over erotic representations is not at root about the extremes of representing sadomasochism or other paraphilia, but about erotic representation at all. In her book Sexual Personae, Paglia addresses this issue with a detailed argument that all Western art, from the prehistoric to the present, is pornographic, even devotionalistic Catholic art (as, at right, in Bernini's St. Teresa of Avila, who seems to be having an orgasm). This may overstate the case, but there is no doubt that erotic themes turn up in unexpected places. More to the point, the ancients, and particularly the Greeks and the Romans, were more comfortable with explicitly erotic images than most moderns are. When phallic objects and paintings of sexual intercourse were discovered at Pompei, the judgment tended to be that there really were a lot of houses of prostitution, or that these were the obscene expressions of a decadent civilization, or both. Most of the pornographic art found in Pompei, however, was in private homes, often displayed in places of honor. Nor did this sort of thing, stretching back to the Gold Age of Greece, have much to do with where the civilization was on some sort of arc from dawn to decadence. The truth is that Greeks and Romans found human bodies and sexual intercourse beautiful, interesting, and wonderful -- and funny. And if its representation effects an erotic response, so much the better -- a divine gift. This may not be agreeable to religions that mandate tightly circumscribed sexual expression, but, for better or worse, modern life has broken through such restrictions. Promiscuity and disease are not good effects of this, but then one discovers that the Greeks and Romans thought no better of promiscuity than we might. Their sexual explicitness did not imply sexual license, an accommodation and a balance that has not yet been struck anew in popular or elite culture. Mere disapproval or alarm at erotic representations will not do this job. An anhedonic moralism that would suppress them instead would contribute nothing to the richness of human life.

Where a curious balance was struck in another historic culture was in India, where naked ascetics, Jains and Hindus (men only), have wandered the country, and Jain and Hindu temples have often been decorated with explicitly erotic sculpture, displaying sexual positions that are sometimes puzzling to the uninitiated. Prior to the advent of Islâm, traditional Indian dress, as seen at left, did not even involve concealing female breasts. Nevertheless, other kinds of public eroticism are not allowed, and it was not long ago that romantic kissing wasn't even permitted in the movies. The balance, indeed, is between extremes, the erotic sculptures on one side and very serious asceticism on the other. The latter, although part of traditional Christian practices (with celibacy surviving in Catholic and Orthodox Churches), nevertheless tends to now be regarded as peculiar and unnatural in the West. The idea that there is a place for everything is what it takes to strike a balance. The modern West might be more comfortable with the erotic if its place were more settled, and perhaps if there were more respect for its opposite -- instead, celibate priests are now often expected to be child-molesters.

Finally, there is the question, which might have been addressed first, why the erotic would be in particular an aesthetic category. In the polynomic theory of value one might expect that the erotic would belong to euergetic or hortative value rather than the aesthetic or optative. Indeed. The aesthetic is usually characterized by disinterestedness, the hortative by interest. The horative, as part of ethics, is what is good-for human life. The erotic definitely qualifies there, as its interested character is conspicuous. Perhaps it is just that I am getting too old, so that for me the erotic is more of a spectator sport than a matter of participation, or even arousal. Very possibly. The point would then be, however, that it does indeed appear valuable to the spectator. This is an aesthetic quality. More importantly, the essence of the aesthetic is that it is good in itself. If the erotic is a matter of the beautiful and the sublime, as well as the good life, this earns it aesthetic status. Except for those frightened or moralisticly disapproving of the erotic, I think this is beyond doubt. There is, as it happens, a broad overlap between the hortative and the aesthetic. The most humble utilitarian object, whose aesthetic value might be nil, can be made a thing of beauty as well. In subsequent years, when its instrumental value may vanish, it can qualify for an art museum as well as an archaeological or technological museum. The erotic tint of the aesthetic, however, involves an irreducible interest: the erotic is only really going to be erotic to those whose eros can be moved by it. Thus, human eros is only for humans. What apes or octupi or salmon find sexually attractive to each other doubtlessly is a powerful matter to them, but (perhaps fortunately) it is entirely lost on us. The idea that extraterrestrials, for instance, would want to mate with humans is all but an impossibility. As Carl Sagan used to say, a human being has a better chance of mating with a petunia than with an extraterrestrial. On the other hand, we do find petunias, and most flowers, attractive, even though they are the sexual organs of plants. Well, aesthetically attractive, not erotically attractive. There may be sexual fetishes involving flowers, but I haven't heard of them. The erotic as an aesthetic category, therefore, does have an essential connection to the hortative.