The Art of Seduction: Is the loss of intimacy killing sexuality?
“Grow five thousand roses in one garden yet they don't find what they're looking for.” The Little Prince of Saint Exupéry
We live in a homo psychologicus society, where people are self captivated and losing the ability to conduct social interaction outside of the self and outside the scene of social media, they experience life and human relationships through avatars they create on a digital platforms.
More and more, we tend to inwardness and lose touch with the sense of the community, the importance of relating and supporting one another in order to experience oneself with and through the joy of human relationships. But most of all we are losing our ability to play, not with our phones but with one another. Preferring the seriousness of work and productivity, feeding our thirsty narcissistic minds with self representation of the life that we are not really part of anymore.
We also have this new habit punishing ourselves constantly for not reaching the standards that the media, public market and commercials are implying we should reach. We are busier taking pictures to nourish our Instagram feeds instead of feeding our souls with the nourishment She needs. We end up becoming the witness of our own sequential life experiences, but missing out on life itself.
Life is not supposed to be only a visual experience. By nature, on a daily basis, we can engage in hundreds of multisensory experiences but instead we are stuck in an image focused era that narrows our ability to feel with our senses. We have become self obsessed with people following and liking us instead of direct human embodied experience in real life.
We now prefer to hide behind images of our deep internal fear of intimacy. And this preference takes us far away from the possibility of holding sacred spaces where vulnerability and a level of trust is needed to open up space for deep intimacy with ourselves and others.
The end of intimacy is also killing sexuality emphasizes the professor of philosophy Byung Chul Han in his book The disappearance of Rituals. The over exposure of genitals and the mechanical act of copulation that comes with porn are preferred to the grace and beauty of seduction. Seduction is ritualistic by nature, there is a duel a subtle and healthy power game played between the people involved. It could be compared to a theater play, the dance of bodies smelling, backing off and coming forward. The dialogue that initiates a romance inviting the mystery of not yet knowing and stimulating the imagination before genitalia.
Today genitals have become personified and used as instant gratifictation tools. We even sell fake genitals as human sized dolls that also speak for self pleasuring purposes, not that there is anything wrong with these kind of sexual practices but in a way it also shows how disconnected we have become from one another, our bodies, sexuality and ultimately intimacy.
Do not get me wrong, there is also nothing wrong with watching porn and buying dildos. But we shall not forget that, to be whole and healthy, sexuality shall be experienced with a wider range of experiences on the pleasure spectrum and not narrowed to a certain representation of sexuality that the industry of porn is imposing on us. And in this sense pornography is overpowering the art of seduction and human intimacy that is quite different from sexuality as we commonly understand it.
Wildly,
Agnes
