Eroticism

The word comes from Eros, the Greek god of amorous desire. We call erotic anything that recalls physical love or comes to tease the senses without necessarily showing everything: a novel, a photo, a sculpture, a song, a situation, a piece of clothing, an accessory.

Eroticism runs through culture and imagination far more than through anatomy. It feeds on what is hidden, delayed, suggested: a strap sliding down, a low raking light, a word slipped into an ear, a wait drawn out on purpose. That is why it is so personal, what electrifies one person leaves another cold.

In a couple, eroticism is cultivated like a garden, with very concrete gestures. A message sent in the middle of the day that announces without detailing, a text read aloud in the evening, a brush of the nape while passing behind the other, a game of glances over dinner, a pair of hands you forbid yourself to use for ten minutes.

The gesture matters less than the staging: slowing down, naming what you want, letting it build. A detour via skin that is not "sexual" (wrists, small of the back, inner elbows) often has more effect than a direct caress. And talking about your fantasies before, or after, stretches the arousal well beyond the moment itself.

Eroticism has fed the entire history of art: the fin'amor of the medieval troubadours, the gallant tales that very serious authors wrote in secret, libertine literature from Sade to Apollinaire, the nudes of Degas, Bonnard or Picasso, and the scandal of Courbet's L'Origine du monde.

It is usually distinguished from pornography, which shows the act explicitly and head on to provoke immediate arousal. The border remains a matter of personal judgement, eroticism generally keeping more distance, more staging and more of a gaze on desire. Not to be confused either with sensuality (the pleasure of the senses, not necessarily sexual) or with libertinism, which refers to practices and a philosophy of sexual freedom.

Synonyms : erotic, eros, suggested sexuality