In Greek mythology, Eros is the Greek god of love and desire. His Roman counterpart was Cupid. In the earliest account, he is a primordial god, while in later accounts he is described as one of the children of Aphrodite and Ares and, with some of his siblings, was one of the Erotes, a group of winged love gods.
Podcast (Therapy with Guys - Quique Autrey) w/Barry Taylor and translator Eric Butler (much more interesting than listening to me talk to myself): • Agony of Eros
He is usually presented as a handsome young man, though in some appearances he is a juvenile boy full of mischief, ever in the company of his mother. In both cases, he is winged and carries his signature bow and arrows, which he uses to make both mortals and immortal gods fall in love, usually under the guidance of Aphrodite. His role in myths is mostly complementary; he often appears in the presence of Aphrodite and the other love gods and often acts as a catalyst for people to fall in love, but has little unique mythology of his own; the most major exception to that being the myth of Eros and Psyche, the story of how he met and fell in love with someone forbidden.
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;; 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".
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 p*rnography, with the anti-p*rnography activist Andrea Dworkin saying, "Erotica is simply high-class p*rnography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer." This confusion, as Lynn Hunt writes, "demonstrate[s] the difficulty of drawing... a clear generic demarcation between the erotic and the p*rnographic": "the history of the separation of p*rnography from eroticism... remains to be written".
Audre Lorde recognises eroticism and pornography as “two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual,” defining the erotic as “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” In her 1978 essay, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Lorde identifies the erotic as a source of creative power that is deeply rooted in a spiritual plane of unrecognised or unexpressed feeling and sensation.
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