In a culture built for speed, presence has become rare. Erotic attention—the slow, attuned awareness that once made intimacy sacred—has been replaced by friction, performance, and endless consumption. This essay is for those who still long for depth, and who suspect that what they’re missing was never about sex at all.
Eroticism was once worshipped, painted, sung, and prayed through.
Now it’s swiped, ghosted, and forgotten.
And in a world that numbs instead of feels, what happens to those of us who still long for depth?
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When I first opened The Perfumed Garden, I didn’t expect to cry.
I’m only halfway through—and already it feels like a sacred text has been placed in my hands.
It reads like a love letter to the erotic, written in a time before shame. Before sex was stripped of its mystery and compressed into utility. Intimacy is treated like prayer. Erotic connection is something to revere—a devotional act where presence becomes the altar and the body becomes living scripture.
Reading it didn’t just move me. It validated me.
Because I have known that kind of holiness before. And in those moments, I have seen God.
Not metaphorically—literally.
I’ve seen the mandorla: that dark, oval threshold painted behind saints and deities, symbolizing the meeting point between worlds. I’ve watched it appear in moments of real erotic surrender. Not because someone “turned me on,” but because I turned inward. Because I finally understood what it meant to meet another human being—not just with my body, but with my full interiority.
Once you’ve touched that space—once you’ve experienced intimacy as presence rather than performance—you can never go back to pretending friction is enough.
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Somewhere along the way, we began treating erotic and sexual as synonyms.
But they are not the same.
Sexuality is rooted in drive, release, orientation. It’s instinctual.
Eroticism, as Audre Lorde wrote, is a source of deep feminine power—a wellspring of knowing that exists far beyond the bedroom.
Eroticism is not the act.
It’s the awareness.
It’s the way a bead of sweat forms on the bridge of someone’s nose, trembling before it slides past the curve of their lip.
It’s the way someone reaches to tuck your hair behind your ear and lingers—like that small gesture might contain a universe.
It’s standing outside, a breeze lifting strands of hair across her face as she speaks. You notice the intensity in her gaze—not performative, just present. The subtle flush of her lips. The way her neck shifts as she talks. How her entire body responds like a wave to the conversation itself.
You’re not thinking about kissing her.
You’re feeling her.
Soul meeting soul—without ever touching.
That’s eroticism.
Sexuality can be performative.
Eroticism is felt.
And we are starving for it.
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I’ve spent my entire adult life searching for connection.
Long-term relationships. Short-term ones. One-night stands. Two-night stands. Brief flings that lasted too long, and long flings that ended too fast.
At the time, I didn’t know what I was searching for. I only knew I wanted to feel. To kiss someone’s mind like static down the spine. To remember them in the body long after they’d left the room—like the lingering sillage of perfume.
Now, some part of me has learned the quiet ache of resignation.
Not hopelessness—but grief.
The grief of recognizing how rare slow-burn intimacy has become.
The kind where presence builds like heat in a room.
Where eye contact stretches past politeness.
Where intention lingers between words.
Most interactions now feel scripted—rushed, flattened, transactional. Especially with men, there is often no trace of the erotic. Not seduction. Not sex.
Eroticism.
That sacred tension. That delicious restraint.
The way curiosity can kiss your skin before hands ever do.
I’ve had to accept that what I once assumed would be common now requires intention. Literacy. Choice.
And I grieve that—not only for myself, but for all of us.
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Eroticism once belonged to the poets, the mystics, the healers.
Over time, it was erased.
Religion taught us to fear the body—to see desire as sin and pleasure as punishment.
Consumerism taught us to commodify it—to strip intimacy of spirit and sell it back to us as apps, categories, and content.
Misogyny taught us that a woman’s pleasure was irrelevant. That her erotic power was dangerous. That it should be controlled, consumed, or dismissed—but never honored.
In The Will to Change, bell hooks warned that patriarchy disconnects men from their emotional lives—from tenderness, vulnerability, and their capacity to love. In doing so, it disconnects all of us from the language intimacy requires.
What remains is a culture that treats eroticism like a transaction. Performance without presence. Stimulation without attunement.
Eroticism has been processed. Stripped of nutrients. Pumped full of fillers.
What once nourished now overstimulates.
It keeps us hungry by design.
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Why Sex Work Was Never the Problem—Power Was
Here’s my theory:
Sex work became taboo the moment it created autonomy that could not be easily controlled.
In ancient civilizations—Egypt, Mesopotamia, India—erotic labor was not shamed. Courtesans, temple workers, erotic companions were not seen as broken or immoral. They were educators. Healers. Cultural intermediaries. They held economic independence and erotic authority.
That combination has always terrified patriarchal systems.
Yes—there are differences within sex work.
Not of worth or dignity, but of form and intention.
Some labor is rooted in survival. Some in ritual.
Both deserve safety, protection, and respect.
But they are not interchangeable experiences.
Some of us bring years of study into what we do—trauma education, somatic practice, spiritual discipline, erotic arts. We are not simply providing a service. We are creating an experience. An energetic container. A temporary temple.
Sex, in its truest form, is a portal.
A regulator of the nervous system.
A tool for grief, manifestation, and transformation.
When approached with reverence, sex is not a transaction.
It’s a transmission.
Sex work wasn’t outlawed because it was dangerous.
It was outlawed because it offered something capitalism cannot replicate: healing through pleasure without ownership.
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Even If Most People Don’t Return—I’ll Still Be Here
Sometimes I imagine a world that still knows how to touch with reverence.
Where eroticism is not rushed. Where presence is practiced.
And then I look around—and I ache.
We live in an attention-fractured culture. Dopamine cycles shorten our capacity for sustained focus. Trauma teaches bodies to dissociate rather than feel. Speed is rewarded. Stillness is suspect.
Real eroticism—the kind that requires patience, curiosity, tolerance for intensity—now feels almost subversive.
And yet—I’m still here.
Even if most people choose friction over depth.
Even if swiping replaces sacredness.
Even if desire is outsourced to machines.
I will still romanticize the mundane.
I will still kiss someone’s mind like it matters.
I will still move through the world as though my body is holy.
This isn’t fluff.
It isn’t fantasy.
It’s somatic truth.
Trauma-informed intimacy.
A way of knowing.
And if you know—you know.
I don’t expect everyone to understand what I do.
But I hope something I write reminds someone else that it’s possible to feel more.
To feel deeply.
To feel on purpose.
Because even if eroticism feels like a lost art—
some of us are still painting.