Egon Schiele, The Embrace (1917)

In Hinduism, the sanatam dharma1, there is a complex concept of karma that goes beyond what the standard Westerner knows of it. An eye for eye, cosmic justice for actions just and unjust. For every action, there is a reaction. The Hindu definition expands this with the idea that life is a balance of highs and lows, happiness and sadness. For people who live lives of ease, their small sadness are more sharply felt. For those whose lives are difficult, their appreciation for small moments of joy is deeper.

We’ve forgotten that the same is true for romantic love.

The ancient Greeks believed love was “pleasure, pain, fear, memory of the past, apprehension of the future,” wrote Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet. To love was also to exist, to get to know oneself. No wonder then, as a friend of mine once said, the chance to find lasting love is the only risk we are willing to take, foolishly and repeatedly, despite the high chances of disaster.

The great Russian writers described how their culture saw love: as overwhelming, debilitating, a fatal force that intertwined joy with suffering, moral crisis, with the potential for tragedy. Think Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which ends in tragedy after the titular character is consumed by love, or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (one of the greatest novels ever written), in which the lovers find peace and themselves through the transcendence of death.

Love is not merely pleasant feelings, gentle affirmation, and building toward a future of middle class ease and the prestige of professional success. A spare bedroom and a two-week trip to Japan or a European or American capital once a year, twice for the very fortunate. Sex twice a week, often following a meal prepared by hands that aren’t loved ones. Secure attachment and capacity. We expect our lovers to cure any and all loneliness, meet every unfulfilled need. We want love that avoids all negativity, all tragedy, and every disaster.

As Byung-Chul Han wrote in The Agony of Eros, we have “positivized into a formula for enjoyment.” Take note of that: the complexity of love has been reduced to a formula, romance became prescriptive. We talk about it in the language of therapy. When love fails, it is not the nature of love that is faulted. In our modern times, it is we who have failed to make it work. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of self-help books, classes, and courses on consent, communication, attachment styles and love languages, and the like, aimed at reducing love to a near-mathematical formula to ensure its success, to ensure the avoidance of the pain that love brings.

Byung Chul-Han builds on the work of Eva Illouz to tell us that love has gone awry not only because rationalization of love combining the expansion of technology (consider that the users of dating apps are more likely to leave a romantic relationship2 and higher social media usage correlates negativity with face-to-face interaction, increase petty jealousies, and decrease emotional closeness in marriage3).

He wrote of that eros is “gravely ill” through the effort to determine the market value of everything, the set of monetary interests that govern all, and how those have created a sort of hyper-consumerist contemporary individualism that goes against the very spirit of love. That the Other, what Ronald Barthes called the Object in A Lover’s Discourse — if you, lover, are the subject, the Object or Other is that whom you desire — is being eroded through “mounting narcissification of Self”.

The increasing focus and obsession with the Self distracts from the possibility of the unknowable Other. As Søren Kierkegaard wrote in The Sickness Onto Death so Byung-Chul Han agrees: it is false, it is conformity to the idea of normalcy, and the increasing narcissism of our times makes the desire for conformity and valuing ourselves through external validation — increase, like a negative feedback loop that is never satisfied. This results in ultimately results in vanishing of the Self, the loss of one’s true identity. We’re told achievement is freedom, when all too often, it is a set of golden handcuffs.

In this paradigm, the passion of romance is reduced to another achievement, another box checked.

In this process, the Self is not curious about the Other. The lover is never truly seen or valued for themselves. Instead, they’ve become an object, something to be possessed, a dispenser of needs and wants. As we are seeing today, this dispenser can be easily replaced by a simulacra, a technologized fake that soothes and flatters the user’s ego.

What is essential to love is the sense of longing, of what gen Z lesbians loving valorizes as yearning. It is waiting and wanting.

And even when the lover, the Other declares themselves to be yours, it is what is incomprehensible, the eternal elusive mystery of that other human being, it is that which sparks the erotic. It is the negative space and energy between the lovers, that unknowable thing.

But why have we as a society have taken away such a force? In her The Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde tells us that in modern times, we have been taught to distrust anything that isn’t rational, to fear the emotional because emotions were tied to the feminine and weak, rationality to the masculine and strong. This in return ties back to Byung-Chul Han’s theories of hyper-consumerism drives us away from the depths of romantic, sexual love, from true selves.

In her The Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde wrote of the erotic as a resource and a power that lies within us. The erotic, then, is something that is expansive. It allows us to reach and share our creativity with others, it reminds us of our capacity to feel, joy but every other experience too. It is dangerous because it shows us what we are capable of, it compels us to pursue a life worth living (whatever that be).

The most crucial quote I have for this essay is this one, it’s the one that ties these ideas together —

Eroticism as artistic power and inspiration can be seen through the romantic loves of four artists: painter Frida Kahlo and muralist Diego Rivera, and children’s book author and painter Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, one of Finland’s most influential graphic artists.

When she was fifteen, an artist was commissioned to create a mural at Frida Kahlo’s elite preparatory school. The artist was Diego Rivera. It was the year he was between his first and second wife. Years later, they would reconnect when she asked him for his professional opinion on her burgeoning art. He was still married to his second wife at the time, but Frida and Diego began a passionate affair regardless. A year later, he would divorce his then-wife and marry Frida. She was twenty-two, he was forty-three.

Throughout their marriage, both Frida and Diego had numerous affairs. Her lovers included men and women. Diego’s masculine ego found it hard to bear hers with Leon Trotsky. He threatened her lover, artist and designer Isamu Noguchi, with a pistol. Noguchi fled and left behind one sock. Frida divorced Diego after he had an affair with her sister…only to remarry him in San Francisco the following year.

Diego Rivera encouraged Frida in her embracing of indigenous Mexican clothing, artifacts and artistic identity. He boosted her artistic confidence and urged her to keep going despite her ill-health. The intimacy and deeply personal nature of her art inspired him to add more human elements to his politically charged work. They both encouraged each other in their mutual interests in communist politics and theory.

He is remembered as one of our greatest muralists. She is remembered as one of our artists, a personal favorite of many, many people and a point of pride for her home country. Today, we might say their marriage was toxic. And yet — yet! — would they and their art be what it is/was without their passionate love?

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress…this is Frida Kahlo’s first (at least, first surviving) self portrait. She created this painting as a gift for her first love, Alejandro Gómez Arias. She met Arias at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, where she was one of only 35 female students, out of a student body of 2,000. Arias was a leader of the student group Cachuchas. Many people from this group would become leading Mexican intellectuals…Arias was educated as a lawyer, and became an orator and political essayist. This portrait, with the European style dress, and Modigliani-like lengthening of her neck and fingers to conform to Eurocentric elegance…whereas her later works and aesthetic were influenced by Mexico’s Indigenismo movement.

Frida Kahlo The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl (1949). Notice the change in theme and style, the growth in the depth of symbolism in this later work, how passionate this work is compared the coolness of her earlier one?

Labora et amare — work and love — begins the introduction to children’s book author and artist Tove Jansson’s excellent novel Fair Play (1989). It’s a personal motto that Jansson worked into her bookplate design, a motto that encapsulates the central theme of the book, which is about her life for Tuulikki Pietilä.

In 1955 (when Tove was forty-one), she met the love of her life, Tuulikki Pietilä (who was three years younger). For all those who might feel hope is lost if you did not fall in lasting love young: Tove and Tuulikki were together for over forty years. Their love reflected in Tove’s letters and Fair Play sounds passionate yet calm and stable, full of mutual understanding and forgiveness. Tove and Tuulikki (their names are so adorably alliterative) lived separately-together, with apartments on either side of a building in Helsinki, and smaller cottage on a rocky island by the sea. Homosexuality was illegal in Finland until the early 1970s, yet they were as openly together as they could be.

And no affairs, none of the torrid passion of Frida and Diego, but the love and longing is still there. Their challenges were different. Tove was close to her family, and fought her mother to travel and be with Tuulikki. In a letter, Tove wrote —

And she ends the letter with —

And so, when I write “erotic”, I don’t mean pornographic. Because we have cheapened the depth of eroticism for the cheapness of pornography.

And to return to Byung-Chul Han, pornography profanes the erotic. Audre Lord, Byung-Chul Han, Jean Baurillard, all different races, from different countries and different times, wrote about the same concept: that pornography is the opposite of the erotic. That pornography stifles emotion, drive, creativity, mystery, and replaces it with mechanical actions designed to produce (often false and faked) specific reactions. It is more consumerism and consumption disguised as something physical, something related to connection. Rather than fulfilling, pornography depletes us.

Céline Sciamma’s 2018 film Portrait of a Lady is the story of two women who were lovers for a week, and loved one another for a lifetime. One of the women, Marianne, is a painter who has been hired to paint a portrait of Héloïse, a young women of a high enough class that marriage is the only possible future for her in 18th century France. Through the process of painting her, the eroticism of creativity turns into sexuality, the relationship between painter and muse turns into a romantic one.

One night, they read the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Eurydice was killed by a snake shortly after her marriage to Orpheus. In his grief, lyre-player Orpheus’s music becomes so beautiful and powerful that it moves the gods themselves. Made brave by love, Orpheus descends to the underworld to reclaim Eurydice. He is granted his wish: he can bring back Eurydice to the world of the living, under one condition: that he cannot look back at her. He brings her back…all the way to near the entrance of the underworld…and at the last minute, he looks back, losing Eurydice forever (or until his own death).

In the film, the two lovers debate why Orpheus looked back. Did he, perhaps, lose his faith in love? Héloïse suggests that perhaps Eurydice asked him to. As Héloïse asks Marianne to look back at her, one last time, before they part. Here, again, is the idea of memory and the unknowable Other over possession. It is “the poet’s choice”, the artist’s choice.

There is a similar story that I grew up with: Savitri and Satyavan. In this Hindu myth, Savitri is foretold that if she marries Satyavan, the lost prince of her choice, she will be widowed young because her husband would die exactly a year from that date. She marries him anyway. He dies as foretold.

When Yama, the god of death, comes to collect Satyavan’s soul, she begins a series of homilies. Impressed, Yama grants her any wish except Satyavan’s life. They go through this a few times…until she asks to bear a hundred sons. Yama grants her the wish…and then Savitri tells him that she must have her husband back, for she cannot have sons without him. Defeated, Yama grants Savitri’s wish.

Orpheus needed to see the object of his desire, to make love tangible, so to speak. I interpreted the story as a lack of trust. His story teaches the listener/ reader the inevitable: that every love story ends in loss, because it ends in death.

But what about living and loving when we are still alive? There are the obvious reasons I loved the latter story more: that the protagonist is a young woman who continually fights for what she wants, that she uses her rhetorical skills and intelligence to outwit death himself, but most of all, that her faith and devotion, both in herself and her love, win out in the end. It’s the triumph of hope.

In the story of Savitri and Satyavan lies the answer to the rebirth of eroticism: faith in our true selves, trust, devotion, selflessness — not one-sided, not the empty pursuit of lovers and achievement — but the kind of selflessness that is restorative. Using our wits and creativity. For that story ties Eros, god of love, passionate desire, and physical affection, to Psyche, the personification of the soul, wisdom.

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Edvard Munch The Kiss

There is a frustration borne of the intimacy of love, romance, and partnership. It’s a frustration that comes of joy of hope and heightened expectations, followed by the crash of disappointment, rejection, and fear.

When I hear the mockery, scorn, and contempt in the voices of so many self-proclaimed feminists speaking of men, I also hear what’s beneath it. It’s the disappointment in life and love curtailed. Women’s fear borne of the horrific stories of sexual and physical assault, the looming and very real threat of male violence that every little girl is taught to fear to reign in her defiance, limit her freedom. There is the collective fury and rage of living in a world in which women does not feel safe. It is the frustration that rises in women, in me, when her intelligence and ambition is respected until it threatens. Her voice is applauded until it says something that challenges. Her sadness turns to anger living in a world in which the desire to be loved is to be desperate and needy, and is thought to be shameful and pitiful instead of the fundamentally, intrinsically human need that it is. To attempt to love men was to fear and risk exploitation and oppression, as bell hooks wrote in The Will to Change.

Women long for men to see them (us) as lovers and partners, as daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts; in discourse and conversation, in workplaces and schools as colleagues and coequals.

A need and longing that men share.

Carl Jung wrote of men carry with them an unconscious, eternal ideal of the feminine which shapes their ideals, romantic longings, and projections of women. The anima. Jordan Peterson spoke of the longing that boys have before they are corrupted, of boys being driven to improve themselves to earn a woman’s love.

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes explains the origins of sexual desire to the intellectual elite. There existed three sexes: male, female, and androgynous. Each being was a double being, with their backs and sides forming a circle. The gods believed these early human beings too proud and strong. The gods feared their creations would be too powerful. Zeus came up with the solution of cutting these being in half. Since then, we humans have longed to become whole again, to merge with another. It is that longing that underlies sexual desire.

Most of these beings had a male half and a female half. There were fewer that were entirely male or entirely female, different in gender and sexuality. As a woman who longs for other women, I am one of those beings who stands somewhere in the balance between the male and the female. As a woman, I share the longing to feel safe from the threat of violence, and to be respected for my intelligence and ambition. As a woman who desires women, I share the heterosexual male idealization of women. I share with them the longing to be accepted by a woman, the ache of being rejected by one. There’s the fear I have that heterosexual women think of me as less of a woman than them, that both heterosexual and homosexual women as a whole will reject me.

I know the origins of the bitterness and anger that consumes some men after they have been rejected one too many times, when they feel (sometimes rightly but more often wrongly) that they cannot bear more. There are those men who are raised to believe that anger is the only outlet for their bitterness, that they must control all that is around them to avoid avoid further hurt. These are the men with bottomless appetites for careless sex, for the emotional conquest, for earning the trust of a woman as a bane to bottomless ego, for needing more money, more titles, more possessions and more people as “network” and…more and more because they can never find what would make them happy: inner peace and self-worth outside the material. Many of these men become the most dangerous ones for women. In his work on rapists, Dr. Neil Malamuth found that rapists are men who felt overlooked and rejected throughout high school.

These aren’t the only men, though. They are not even the majority of all men. Many make it passed the threshold of youth and past the point when the feminine ideal of their imagination becomes flesh and blood.

There is the couple I saw in the park yesterday. Because of the familiarity and comfort in their silence, I imagine their decades together. Their hair has turned silvery-gray, their forms stooped on the bench they share. She holds onto her silver cane, and he has set his aside so that he can hold an umbrella over her, to shade her from the sun.

A replica of Antonio Canova’s Amore e Psiche that I saw many years ago at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in CMDX; it is the only photograph I took of the museum visit.

I think of all the men I see, every weekend in the foreign city to me city I have spent the past three months. How many of them hold their babies strapped to their chests, tenderly cradling their heads as if in awe of such fragility, in awe of their own ability to love so deeply. I remember the one attempting to braid his daughter’s hair outside of his car, she in her school uniformIt reminds me of my own father at first clumsy attempts to do the same with my younger sister.

When I was when I was small, maybe eight years old, I used to have nightmares. My father’s solution was to give me a small pocketknife, to put under my pillow. It would cut through monsters my dreams, he told me. It did. To this day, I sleep with a small knife under the sheets, out of habit and remembrance.

I remember telling that story to a young man who had been hardened by his parent’s divorce. It happened when he was only four years old, and he never saw his father again. My story softened his face, brought a smile to it. I’ve often told that story to the men around me, because I can see the daydreams in the faces when I do.

I think often about my friend J, the only friend who walked away with me from our hundreds-strong friend group after I was assaulted. I remembered how he stayed through his sleepiness as I rambled on for eight or nine hours, talking too much because I was afraid of being alone. Saying little, understanding that merely his presence half a continent away was all I needed. He told me that he shared my story often, that it changed the way he views humanity.

That story is important. I have spent a nearly a decade doing direct anti-rape survivor advocacy. Many of the strongest supporters of my work have been, throughout those years, men.

My friend M, who assures me that I am intelligent and that I do great work. Who will recommend my work to others, and unfailingly support me when I am down. Who assures me that he is glad that he has earned my trust when I feel guilt for burdening him by asking for emotional support.

There are many women who tell me that it is too emotionally difficult to support anti-rape work. There are many men who quietly share the names of dangerous serial rapists with women in their lives. These aren’t the men proclaiming how eager they are to be vulnerable they can, or how educated they are on bell hooks’ The Will to Change and Communion: The Female Search for Love. Those are the men that scare me.

No, I’m instead writing about the ones who show up, and do the work. The ones who listen. The ones who struggle to listen and have been reminded, because, they usually tell me, they have been taught to solve problems, not to hold space for talk and emotions. The ones who thank me for my patience in reminding them. The ones who know they have work to do on themselves, too. The ones who make no loud performance of the work they do. The ones who allow silences to linger after a woman speaks, allowing her not only to speak, finish, but the ones who process what she is telling them. The ones who quietly tell me that they learn to care about all women after their ex-girlfriend, or sister, or mother told them her story.

I think about A, who everyone rolls their eyes at. He asked to speak to me one day, two years after I’d been assaulted. I’m sorry, he said. I didn’t believe you at first, but my [male] roommates talk to me for hours until I did. And I’m so sorry that I didn’t realize that it wasn’t just a rape that happened and it was over. I didn’t know before how traumatizing everything that happens afterward would be for you.

I think of the contempt underlying so much of women’s discourse, in feminist essays such as this one, in which a woman proclaims that it is impossible for a man to be a feminist. Men, it tells its reader, do not know what it is to fear half the population. Feminism, it argues, can only be a philosophy granted to those socialized as women, with the experiences of women, “socialized” as women. Men only outshout women, use their dominance to quote Judith Butler or Simone de Beauvoir. Simone, a feminist who herself lost her teaching credentials after she groomed and sexually abused her teenage female students, and then continue to advocate for the release of imprisoned sexual abusers of children.

That internet feminist is making the same argument that fellow French feminist Christine Delphy makes, to keep men out of the feminist movement, who decades before used the same examples of a man outshouting feminists in feminist rallies. Christine, who, like other trans-exclusionary feminists, today makes the same arguments about “socialization” and “outshouting” today. Where does one draw the line, I wonder, at who is allowed to have a seat at the table. Does it extend to women who gaze at women, too? Does it sneer at women who also see the beauty in a woman’s form and mind, and desire it and her approval as a heterosexual man does? Does their outsider-insider, in-or-out view extend to lesbians like me, who have no “socialization” of dating or marrying men, who do the work but do not hold the same view of men?

While I understand where the mockery, scorn, and contempt of men from girls, women, and feminists arises, I do not agree with it. I know there are men who are worth fighting for, just as there are men who know that women, girls, and children are worth fighting for. I know this because I have witnessed those men, have seen their tenderness and experienced their vulnerability. I have listened to their sadness at rejection by women, I know so many who put in the work to be loved and cannot find it, either.

I love men, not romantically or with the tender desire to protect and provide for them that I do with women, but as colleagues and friends, as humans who are as capable of good as they are evil.

I know this, also: that feminism cannot be by women, for women, for a woman-only audience. That stopping the worse evils of rape, abuse, and more cannot be the purview of women only. That if women speak of this, we need men to listen. That is vitally important, in no small part because more men are rapists. We need men to join the fight.

And frankly, if we replace misogyny with misandry, label all men narcissistic (a term so overused it has lost all power) and controlling; if we conflate masculinity itself with domination and entitlement…well, that gets us no where. It only deepens the gender binary divide, it only causes more separation and discord in humanity, it only gets us further from love.

To simultaneously demand men change while mocking them and declaring them hopeless, inept, and incapable fails. We as women (and others) must demand to be heard, but we must also keep listening. It must be a conversation, not one monologue replacing another.

To those men who are trying, who are sincerely listening and taking in, who do the work quietly and not for glory or attention, and to those women (and others) who welcome their efforts, who understand that they are messy and make mistakes, who understand when to be patient and forgive (and when not to)…you are the people I want to be in conversation with.

And so, welcome to a new Substack about philosophy. It won’t be about feminism, but I’m laying this out as the start. All genders are welcome 🩷🧡