The Erotic

The Erotic is a specialized term coined by writer and educator Audre Lorde in her essay "Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power". The Erotic is described as a source of personal power and political power. According to her it is often confused with the pornographic and often seen as suspicious in a patriarchal society. The word 'erotic' is derived from the Greek word eros. Eros personifies "love in all its aspects".

Beyond pornography

According to Lorde, the erotic has often been confused with the pornographic, resulting in the terms being used interchangeably within western societies. Lorde dismantles this idea and explains that the two are opposites of each other. According to Lorde, "pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling". The erotic is defined by our deepest feelings within ourselves while the pornographic "emphasizes sensation" and completely dismisses feelings.[1]

Catharine MacKinnon takes Lorde’s concept of pornography being used as a form of oppression and adds to it by asserting that pornography not only works to oppress the erotic power of women, but that it also suppresses women’s freedom of speech. Pornography eroticizes “the unspeakable abuse: the rape, the battery, the sexual harassment, the prostitution, and the sexual abuse of children. Only in the pornography it is called something else: sex, sex, sex, sex, and sex, respectively” which thus contributes to the perpetuation of inequality between men and women and leads to the normalization of these kinds of atrocities. The erotic power that Lorde claims “lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane” becomes twisted, perverted and used against women to maintain female subordination. MacKinnon connects these images and words to actual cases of rape and sexual assault in that it men take what they have seen in porn and then apply it to their own sexual interactions with women. She quotes a study that claims that men who watched pornography that depicted rape and sexual assault were more inclined towards aggressive behavior towards women and self-reported a greater likelihood that they would engage in acts of rape or sexual assault. These images desensitize men to this kind of aggressive behavior and therefore, when women claim to have been sexually assaulted or raped, they’re voices are not heard because being sexually assaulted or raped is an accepted part of culture represented in pornography. Pornography silences women because it steals their credibility and replaces it with mere “eroticism” which was originally a female ascribed power. [2]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Lorde, Audre. "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" (PDF). uk.sagepub. Retrieved December 3, 2015.
  2. ↑ MacKinnon, Catharine (2018). "Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech". Readings in Moral Philosophy: 268–278.
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