Eroticism is a quality that causes sexual feelings, as well as a philosophical contemplation concerning the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality and romantic love.
That quality may be found in any form of artwork, including painting, sculpture, photography, drama, film, music or literature. It may also be found in advertising. The term may also refer to a state of sexual arousal or anticipation of such – an insistent sexual impulse, desire, or pattern of thoughts.
As French novelist Honoré de Balzac stated, eroticism is dependent not just upon an individual's sexual morality, but also the culture and time in which an individual resides.
Because the nature of what is erotic is fluid, early definitions of the term attempted to conceive eroticism as some form of sensual or romantic love or as the human sex drive (libido); for example, the Encyclopédie of 1755 states that the erotic "is an epithet which is applied to everything with a connection to the love of the sexes; one employs it particularly to characterize...a dissoluteness, an excess".
However, because eroticism is wholly dependent on the viewer's culture and personal tastes pertaining to what, exactly, defines the erotic,critics have often confused eroticism with pornography, Andrea Dworkin going so far as to say: "[Eroticism] is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer."
This confusion, as Lynn Hunt writes, "demonstrate the difficulty of drawing...a clear generic demarcation between the erotic and the pornographic": indeed arguably "the history of the separation of pornography from eroticism...remains to be written".
Whereas traditionally eroticism has been dealt with in relation to culture and its pornographic outcomes, current evolutionary psychology shows how eroticism has shaped the evolution of human nature.
Eroticism is defined as the way humans transform sexuality into a mental activity that results in pleasure for its own sake.
The ability to envision sexual arousal as a medium of introspection about feelings and thoughts that transcends mere procreative animal sexuality seems unique to humans. It is thus that the transformation of the sexual impulse into erotic creativity can be considered a central factor in the process of human mental evolution.
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