Eros Is Dead. Long Live Eros.

A Sunday letter.

Cupid and Psyche, by William Adolphe Bouguereau (detail).

Dear Friend,

Yesterday I was walking down the rue Bachaumont on my way to the public garden where I like to sit, when I noticed that someone had stuck some roses into the metal slats of a bike rack. I picked one up. It was dark pink and richly fragrant, sweet and peppery in that way that very fragrant roses can sometimes be. I took it and carried it with me, and because of that people smiled at me. People seem to like it when they see a person carrying a rose, especially when they are in a city and that rose looks like it was cut from a garden, rather than bought from a shop. I saw a woman carrying what looked like a fresh cut garden rose a few days ago, and it made me smile too.

In the garden where I like to sit, the rows of linden trees are starting to flower. The rose hedges are dense with big, showy roses. The fountain is turned on most days, and the benches and green metal chairs are often occupied by people I recognize from the reading rooms of the nearby Institute for Art History.

I read a very interesting essay by

Tamara

this week, about the concept of the “erotic decision,” and it got me thinking. In this essay’s more classical definition of Eros, the erotic is not just about sex (although it’s not not about sex ) but rather the act of reaching for someone or something “without being able to explain why.” It is that “moment of trembling recognition,” when desire disrupts duty, an impulse that stems not from logic, but from something elemental, something irrational. It might be about sex or love, but it might also be about art, or beauty, or independence, or some other form of yearning or fascination. It is the creative force making itself known, through us and within us. Eros leads to longing, leads to creation, leads to heartbreak, leads to transformation.

Reading this essay, I thought of many things, but especially two things in particular. The first was the number of articles I have read in recent memory that have decried the decline and fall of the Great Romantic Empire. According to these articles, essays, and think pieces, young people aren’t dating and falling in love anymore. They aren’t having sex. Like really, really not having it. They don’t even want to see sex depicted in fictional settings, like movies or on television. They allegedly find it icky, gross, embarrassing, uncomfortable, frightening, dangerous. When they do have sex, they often don’t like it, or else the experience is externalized, an empty pantomime performed but not really enjoyed, like the teenage girls who responded to questions about how they felt while having sex with reports of how they “felt they looked.” Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.

Are these the results of a sexual universe formed by the algorithmic tendencies of the Internet, bound to escalate, separate, enshittify, and sell? Are we witnessing the enshittification of sex itself? When the act of finding one another almost exclusively through real-life encounters is replaced with the capitalistic, manic drive of dating apps, the result is not only less genuine eroticism, but less connection, less pleasure, and ultimately less sex of any kind. The author Terry Pratchett once said of Eros that “it's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken,” and in our modern culture, it seems like it’s mostly just chicken after chicken, a proliferation of chickens, plucked, wriggling, and covered in goose flesh. Chickens all the way down.