Erotic Essays

  • The Erotics of the Technological Body

    877 Words  | 2 Pages

    sexual desire and invested of techno-erotic impulses. Engines and machines have been described through sexual metaphors and have been made an object of cult by artistic movements such as Italian Futurism. The passage from the industrial to the digital age has modified our relationship to technology and the awareness of our body through the use of technological objects –yet techno-eroticism still remains a central drive. Why is technology a source of erotic thrill? A central motivation is the relationship

  • Smut, Erotic Reality/obscene Ideology

    1712 Words  | 4 Pages

    Smut, Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology In the book Smut, Erotic Reality/ Obscene Ideology , by Murray Davis (1983), the author expresses the idea that the best source for studying human sexuality objectively is "soft core", rather than “hard core” pornography. (Davis p. xix). The purpose of this paper is to critique Davis's claim and to study what understanding of human sexuality someone might have if they used some other resource that is available today, in this case the Internet. Davis

  • Violence as Displacement: The Erotic Gaze in Gladiator and Fight Club

    2682 Words  | 6 Pages

    Violence as Displacement: The Erotic Gaze in Gladiator and Fight Club On the screen, two men writhe and grapple on the cold concrete floor. One man on top, holding the other from behind in a chokehold that causes the man on the bottom to succumb to the more powerful man. The dialogue by the narrator states that, “Sometimes all you could hear were the flap, hard packing sounds over the yelling, or the wet choke when someone caught their breath and sprayed” (Fight Club). The soundtrack consists

  • Sexuality in Shakespeare's As You Like It

    2612 Words  | 6 Pages

    Like It In a romantic forest setting, rich with the songs of birds, the fragrance of fresh spring flowers, and the leafy hum of trees whistling in the wind, one young man courts another. A lady clings to her childhood friend with a desperate and erotic passion, and a girl is instantly captivated by a youth whose physical features are uncannily feminine. Oddly enough, the object of desire in each of these instances is the same person. In As You Like It, William Shakespeare explores the homoerotic

  • Irwin Shaw's The Girls in Their Summer Dresses

    678 Words  | 2 Pages

    relationship with his husband. She is going to call the Stevensons because, she and her husband have nothing more to discuss about. Michael?s way of looking on women as mere bodies could suggest a kind of degradation?which is to define a woman only as an erotic or sexual figure. There is an irony in the relationship of the couple which is the bloodless horror from the truth expressed that somehow the things are not, and never have been, what they used to pretend about themselves. It is clear in the

  • Bleikasten’s Literary Analysis of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

    836 Words  | 2 Pages

    to admit that I am not too far off. He writes, “ … the aesthetic is made one with the erotic” (415). But then the essay takes an odd turn. This self-gratifying fulfillment becomes a replacement of either a missing sister or a dead daughter (the latter of which I don’t understand because Faulkner’s daughter did not die - was she perhaps very sick as an infant?) It seems that Bleikasten is now associating the erotic with the familial - not that incest is an inappropriate topic of conversation. However

  • Matrimony and Recompense in Measure for Measure

    7072 Words  | 15 Pages

    that they have sought ways to prepare it earlier in the play" ("Duke Vincentio and the Illusion of Comedy or All's Not Well that Ends Well," SQ, 22 [1971], 31). These attempts, based on a culturally specific conception of matrimony as prompted by erotic desire, disregard other textually prominent motivations for marriage grounded in Renaissance moral, social, and financial concerns. Ann Jennalie Cook, comparing contemporary notions of marriage to those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

  • Georgia OKeefe (includes annotated bibliography)

    2280 Words  | 5 Pages

    believed she was portraying sexual imagery. “O’Keefe’s depictions of flowers in strict frontality and enlarged to giant scale were entirely original in character . . . the view into the open blossoms evoked an image of the female psyche and invited erotic associations.” (Joachimides 47) O’Keefe denies these allegations and says that she “magnified the scale of the flower only to ensure people would notice them.” (Haskell 203) O’Keefe’s artwork was misinterpreted because of cultural prejudice, her non-traditional

  • Sex on the Internet

    1123 Words  | 3 Pages

    naked bodies. Pornography has always been a part of life and yet it has never been so readily available as what it is now. Erotic stories, explicit pictures, XXX- rated films and modern day magazines, are all part of the stimulus material which is known as "pornography" or as it is legally put, "obscenity." Is it ethically right for our children to be looking at this erotic material at such an early age? Do we have a twisted sense of morals if we support pornography? Or is it just a natural part

  • Elaine Showalter's Representing Ophelia

    1240 Words  | 3 Pages

    who "felt" too much and somehow allowed these feelings to overcome her. This type of action would drive a person to madness, just as Ophelia is driven into her madness. This conclusion would seem to suggest that her madness stemmed from some sort of erotic passion between herself and Hamlet. This is the type of interpretation that is given to the audience in many movie versioesult of erotomania. Elaine Showalter creates an argument that is predominantly based on the idea that Ophelia's madness is one

  • Shakespeare's Othello - Loving Desdemona

    2010 Words  | 5 Pages

    know what it means to be unfaithful; the word “whore” is not in her vocabulary. She is defenseless against the charges brought against her because she does not even comprehend them, cannot believe that anyone would imagine such things. Her love, both erotic and chaste, is of that transcendent wholesomeness common to several late Shakespearean heroines [. . .]. Her “preferring” Othello to her father, like Cordelia’s placing her duty to a husband before that to a father, is not ungrateful but natural and

  • Marriage as Slavery in Middlemarch

    2440 Words  | 5 Pages

    Bacchus, her next lover, has yet to arrive. "By invoking the silent visual rhetoric of ancient sculpture," writes Rischin, "George Eliot is able to represent the erotic female body far more explicitly than Victorian conventions of... language would permit... By juxtaposing the statue with Dorothea, Eliot displays Dorothea's erotic potential." Here, Eliot uses an allusion to another type of narrative to fully illustrate her own heroine, and empower her with emotions that Victorian women were

  • Gender in Shakespeare's As You Like It

    1128 Words  | 3 Pages

    play is the cross dressing and role playing. The central love interest between Rosalind and Orlando calls into question the conventional wisdom about men's and women's gender roles and challenges our preconceptions about these roles in courtship, erotic love, and beyond. At the heart of this courtship is a very complex ambiguity which it is difficult fully to appreciate without a production to refer to. But here we have a man (the actor) playing a woman (Rosalind), who has dressed herself up as

  • hinduism vs. jainism

    1114 Words  | 3 Pages

    times in the “cosmic cycles.” Vishnu is one of the main Hindu gods, worshiped as the protector and preserver of worlds. Vishnu is considered one of the main gods along with Brahman and Shiva. Shiva, known as the Destroyer, is at times compassionate, erotic and destructive. One of the principal Hindu deities, Shiva is worshiped as the destroyer and restorer of worlds and in many other forms. Whenever dharma is threatened, Vishnu travels from heaven to earth in one of ten incarnations. Shiva is considered

  • Lesbianism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

    6152 Words  | 13 Pages

    generic frameworks. However, fictional representations are still important sites where viewers negotiate personal and cultural concepts of sexuality and subjectivity. This queer reading of Buffy the Vampire Slayer investigates the disguised homo-erotic tensions between the out lesbian characters in the series. It avoids an elaborate search for homoerotic and non-normative sexual couplings between other characters in the series. If I were to do such a queer reading, I would probably concentrate on

  • The Leitmotif of Pursuit in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles

    629 Words  | 2 Pages

    withholds the crucial information that he is not her cousin, and they in fact have no familial relationship whatsoever. While under the impression he is her cousin, Alec uses this ignorance to get closer to her. Feeding her strawberries in an obviously erotic manner momentarily appeases his lustful hunger.  His longing for her never abates from contact with Tess - perhaps even the opposite might be said: the more contact he has with her, the more he seems to want her.  Alec, ... ... middle of paper

  • 1984 vs. Brave New World

    718 Words  | 2 Pages

    then sex is considered perfectly normal. It is even promoted with the children who are decanted, which means that the Utopian embryos are taken out of the bottles in which they've matured. The sexual activities the children participate in is called "erotic play", in which they run around naked exploring one another's bodies in which ever way they please. It is designed to forestall any adult feelings of guilt concerning sex when they are older. So that is one way in which the two stories differ. One

  • love

    796 Words  | 2 Pages

    Definitions of love go as far as Greek mythology. For example, the story of Cupid and His mortal Bride Psyche. There are many explanations on how love exactly came to mean what it does. According to John Lee there are 6 different types of love. 1. Erotic love: romantic, sexual irrational, and largely based on physical attraction. 2. Manic love: intense, all consuming, possessive, and fluctuating between joy and despair. 3. Ludic love: egoistic, self-serving, competitive, and based on an unequal relationship

  • SOCIETYS SLAVES

    1481 Words  | 3 Pages

    was not needed in the society. When the citizens Brave New World were young, they were involved in sexual games that would introduce them to sex and portray it as something casual. "….this little boy seems rather reluctant to join in the ordinary erotic play." (Brave New World, pg. 30) As they got older, they were not able to know love, or would not be able to distinguish it from sex, so it became the norm to 'have everyone'. In 1984, marriages were allowed, but on the grounds that the two people

  • Repressed Sexuality in Bram Stoker's Dracula

    1412 Words  | 3 Pages

    myth novel filled with terror, horror, and evil, the story is a thinly veiled disguise of the repressed sexual mores of the Victorian era.  If we look to critical interpretation and commentary to win support for such a thesis, we find it aplenty "For erotic Dracula certainly is.  'Quasi-pornography' one critic labels it.  Another describes it as a 'kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in-wrestling matching'.  A sexual search of the novel unearths the following:  seduction, rape,