Essay: On Sexuality

Many young people today are developing a mechanical relationship to sexuality. Not necessarily because they lack freedom, but because sexuality is increasingly mediated through pornography, algorithms, and a culture that rewards immediate exposure over sensitivity. Erotic experience therefore risks becoming detached from relationship, rhythm, and emotional maturity.

Across digital platforms, sexualised expressions flourish, where young people quickly learn that attention is obtained through visibility. What once belonged to the slowness and subtlety of eroticism is now often made explicit from the very beginning. The result is not necessarily liberation, but a form of exhaustion: a desire that loses its tension because everything has already been revealed.

At the same time, newspapers continue to report on the growing prevalence of rape, abuse, and boundaryless sexuality among the young. The concern lies not only in the acts themselves, but in the cultural climate surrounding them. How are young people’s understanding of intimacy, the body, and closeness shaped when pornography becomes their first teacher in erotic life?

Perhaps we still lack a clear and shame-free language around sexuality, even in an age where sexuality is no longer taboo in the way it once was. Openness has increased, but not necessarily understanding. Sex education can at times become technical and mechanical, as though sexuality were primarily a matter of anatomy, contraception, and function. Yet eroticism is also psychology, rhythm, atmosphere, and emotional intelligence.

I am not calling for vulgar lessons or an over-pedagogical culture of intimacy, but for a careful and intelligent dialogue about sensuality, tactility, boundaries, and presence. Young people ought to encounter a language for eroticism before they encounter pornography. A language that teaches them the difference between dominance and tenderness, between exposure and intimacy, between impulse and love.

This is where art becomes important. Film, theatre, literature, philosophy, and music can open a richer emotional register than the mechanical repetition of pornography. Erotic films marked by slowness, tension, and emotional intelligence may teach young people something about atmosphere, rhythm, and reciprocity. Not eroticism as performance, but eroticism as attentiveness.

Particularly in a time when choking during sex and other forms of boundary-testing have received increasing attention, young people need representations of intimacy without violence and without shame. Not moralistic warnings, but images of eroticism in which both people remain fully alive within themselves.

There are countless ways to speak about sexuality without reducing it to anatomy or technique. Historical figures, literary works, and psychological perspectives can open more nuanced conversations about desire, love, and identity.

Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Shinoda Bolen, for example, approaches the Aphrodite archetype as something far more expansive than erotic attraction alone. In Bolen’s work, Aphrodite represents an intense orientation towards life: the capacity to be fully present, emotionally receptive, and creatively engaged with the world. Sensuality is therefore not merely physical, but also psychological and aesthetic.

What is commonly referred to today as “sex appeal” is understood by Bolen less as strategic seduction than as a form of vitality. Aphroditic individuals are described as people who make others feel seen, alive, or significant. Their magnetism lies not necessarily in physical beauty, but in the intensity of their attention and their capacity to create emotional resonance.

At the same time, this archetype also contains a creative dimension. Aphrodite is associated not only with eroticism, but with art, transformation, and the birth of something new: ideas, relationships, aesthetic forms, and forms of self-understanding. Where other archetypes seek control and stability, Aphrodite seeks the intensity of experience and the living connection between human beings.

In modern culture, eroticism is often reduced to sexual capital and pornographic visibility. Yet perhaps the true language of eroticism lies elsewhere: in the ability to remain present without consuming the other person.

This is where Roland Barthes becomes especially interesting. In A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, he describes love as a state of waiting, interpretation, and emotional tension. The lover endures uncertainty without dissolving it too quickly. Desire lives precisely in distance, in suggestion, and in the slow construction of intimacy.

Perhaps this is what many young people today are deprived of: the right to slowness. Everything must be defined immediately, displayed immediately, and consumed immediately. Yet eroticism cannot always survive under full illumination. It often lives in the atmosphere surrounding the body, in the gaze, the voice, the waiting, and the mutual attentiveness between two people.

We cannot place walls around human erotic life, nor around the erotic lives of the young. But we can offer them a richer language for it. A language in which sexuality is not merely about exposure and performance, but about sensitivity, boundaries, rhythm, and living presence.

For eroticism without tenderness impoverishes the human being.
Whereas eroticism shaped by attentiveness can still make a person feel alive.

Where feelings are still able to vibrate, and love is given time to bloom.