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Eros: An Obituary

Eros: An Obituary

George Orwell, 1984

In his preface to Love & Friendship, titled “The Fall of Eros,” Allan Bloom perfectly expresses the thoughts I have been having for the past few years concerning the current state of men, women, love and sex. If you have ever experienced the sensation of “a book reading you,” then you know the feeling of which I speak. Bloom wrote “The Fall of Eros” in 1992, when I was still in diapers. His work, then, is one of those odd volumes that perfectly describes the time in which one is living, even though it was written in a different time.

Bloom himself was an interesting character in twentieth-century century American philosophy. Adored in his day by conservative giants such as William F. Buckley and George Will (mainly for his criticisms of relativism), Bloom was always quick to reject the conservative label. He was an open homosexual and atheist, at a point in American history at which to be either was far outside the realm of mainstream acceptance. Bloom’s last book, the aforementioned Love & Friendship, perhaps acquires more credibility, then, when we learn that it was dictated from his hospital bed as he laid dying of AIDS: yet another loss among millions from a community of men who, during the 1980s and early 90s, knowingly and willingly loved one another in the face of danger.

I discovered Bloom when a reader commented beneath my essay “Love: The End Of An Art?” that my observations regarding love and sex in the digital age, based on Erich Fromm’s Art Of Loving, were also similar to Bloom’s observations in Love & Friendship. In the Wikipedia entry for Allan Bloom, I came upon this brief description of his work and was immediately intrigued:


In “The Fall of Eros,” Bloom takes on an ideology he calls radical egalitarianism. Upon reading his first use of this phrase, my eye-roll was reflexive. Equality isn’t radical. At least, not if we go by the definition of equality that has been the ideological pillar of Western civilization for the past three centuries: that all people deserve equal rights and opportunities. But this was not the kind of egalitarianism Bloom took issue with. Radical egalitarianism, according to Bloom, is a different beast entirely, one that seeks utopia through sameness. Radical egalitarian holds that all human conflict has its root in difference, and therefore the elimination of difference—along with all cultural and traditional practices which support it—will usher in global peace, the unity of all mankind, etc. But, more specifically, radical egalitarians hold—at least partially—to the Freudian view that every human pursuit boils down to sexual/erotic motivation, and therefore any attempt at eradicating pursuits which encourage or praise difference must begin in that most personal of realms. There are three main ideas and characteristics contained within the radical egalitarian worldview as described in “The Fall of Eros”:

  3. Bureaucratizing relationships by speaking of them in contractual terms rather than in terms of mutual affection, caring, sacrifice and selfless love; also, presenting relationships as a gender “power struggle,” where one half is privileged and the other oppressed. Additionally, individuals have the ability to be completely self-sustaining on an emotional level; individuals don’t need intimacy with other people, intimacy with other people is merely a “perk” that one can do with or without while still having a fulfilling life. This makes relationships purely transactional and wholly self-centered. The idea of devoting oneself to another is regarded as silly and outdated, if not downright oppressive and “old world.”

At first glance, these three tenets and characteristics of radical egalitarianism don’t really seem like they tie in with each other. But, as Bloom goes on to show, what unifies these seemingly different and separate ideas is the elimination of the concepts of beauty, mystery, romance and transcendence, as experienced through the enjoyment of intimate sex: all in favor of utopia through sameness.

I have never heard anyone refer to themselves as a radical egalitarian. And, even if they did, they obviously would not word their philosophical beliefs the same way I just did by paraphrasing Bloom. But, although radical egalitarianism is not a spoken philosophy promoted by self-declared advocates, it is a philosophy that likes to hide within other philosophies which are very loud out in the open today: philosophies and attitudes I initially began to notice while at university, and am now noticing seeping into society as a whole.



There’s definitely a lot to unpack in this statement, but the most important takeaway is how we deal with the complexity of beauty. One could easily make the mistake of thinking Bloom believes there are objective standards which decide what a beautiful person is. But this isn’t what Bloom is arguing at all. While there are features consistently desirable across cultures (like symmetry over asymmetry), individuals clearly have their own unique preferences when it comes to potential partners. In fact, Allan Bloom’s beauty preferences and my own form a perfect example: to me, a beautiful person would be a Latin woman with dark hair, while for Bloom, a beautiful person would likely be a tweed-jacket-wearing male academic type. So there is a certain subjectivity when it comes to what we see as beautiful, and Bloom wouldn’t have disagreed. The problem, he notes, is when that subjectivity is presented as shallow and unjust—when the beauty that one is drawn to is presented as a thing to overcome, rather than a thing to enjoy and feel comfortable with.

One catches a slight whiff of this attitude in today’s movements against body standards and sexual racism, in which men and women are chastised as bigoted for daring to establish dating criteria based on height, weight, appearance or even gender. Supporters of these movements would counter that, yes, such criteria are bigoted because one is judging a person based on looks and not on character traits or moral attributes (as if attraction were synonymous with judging). But arousal—by its very nature—is sensational and animal, not logical. Its deliberations are as immediate as they are visceral: rarely does it allow the host it possesses time to get to know the person before kicking in or not. Assuming there is such a thing as individual will, arousal/attraction should be understood as a mysterious force that is wholly separate from it, whilst still being able to arrest it, toy with it, burden it and bend it to its will like a puppet master. The idea that one can train one’s unconscious instincts reveals a complete denial of human nature on the part of those who hold that view. Despite our boundless arrogant optimism that we are in control of all that resides in our own inner world, we are not in control of our passions and never will be. But even assuming it were possible to train our instincts, the demand that we be attracted to everyone—if obeyed en masse—would ultimately render attraction meaningless. All the better for radical egalitarians, of course. Eliminating attraction and the concept of beauty was the intention all along. As Bloom writes:


On the second idea of radical egalitarianism—that the motivations and power dynamics behind love and sex should be analyzed so thoroughly, and so microscopically, that both are completely de-eroticized—Bloom writes:

Constantly looking at one’s motives [behind why one loves someone or has sex with him or her] in this way is demystifying and furthers rationalizing calculation. This is peculiarly deadly to love, where being serious about the reality of perfection imagined in another is essential to self-forgetting in passionate concern with that other … Listen to Mozart and then see what psychoanalytic interpreters do to his work. You have to become very perverse to think such interpretations tell us anything about the music itself, which opens out onto a higher real world that cannot conceivably be constructed out of Freud’s childish building blocks.

Bloom’s example of Mozart brilliantly illustrates the problem of analyzing love and sexuality, something so often attempted in sociology and gender studies courses. An analogous process occurs when, for example, a man tells a joke that makes every person in the room laugh except one, who says “I don’t get it.” This irritates the joke-teller because he knows that breaking the joke down and explaining why it’s supposed to be funny, will, in turn, make it unfunny and ruin the moment. Likewise, the attempt to deconstruct the reasons why we love and have sex, especially through the lens of critical theory, in which Freud is a heavy influence, is a real mood killer. Because, like humor, the transcendence experienced during love or sex (or during love and sex) dies with dissection. That which inspires feelings of awe, passion, ecstasy and elation, does so precisely because it takes our words away.

Bloom continues:


This last quotation from Bloom overlaps heavily with the third idea of radical egalitarianism—that relationships are spoken of in contractual terms, and presented as gendered power struggles in which one party is privileged and the other oppressed; and further, that individuals are completely self-sustaining emotionally and don’t need intimacy with other people. You can be a romantic today if you so choose, but it is a little like being a virgin in a whorehouse. Bloom expounds on this attitude when he says:


In college, I took History of Feminism as an elective study, and I remember hearing what one would expect to hear in a feminist course: how the interests of men and women were diametrically opposed to one another, and how men had been the privileged class throughout history and in every society, while women had been the oppressed class. One example that stood out to me was my (single) professor’s portrayal of American domestic life. Women alone, we were told, were expected to do unpaid household labor, even at a time at which women and men were increasingly beginning to share the role of breadwinner outside the home. As our professor put it, “Women have two jobs while men only have one.” And I immediately knew that wasn’t true. Men are often the ones who tackle household repairs (leaky pipes, rain gutters, broken appliances, etc.), yard work, vehicle maintenance and—most importantly—men are the ones expected to risk loss of life defending their families in the event of a break-in or assault. So not only do men do their fair share of unpaid domestic tasks, but we also function as unpaid bodyguards. If this sounds like a cold way of considering domestic life though, it should! By presenting household upkeep as unpaid labor, instead of an act of love, relationships take on an eerie corporate nature, resembling business partnerships more than a bond of two hearts, defined by transactional expectation rather than selfless giving.

For this, as you’ve read, Bloom blames radical feminism. However, I believe that the commodification of love, and of acts of love, is a product of the unholy alliance between sex-negative feminism and capitalism. But more on that later. For now let us focus on the major implication of power struggle theory: consent.

If women, as a group, are an oppressed class, and men the privileged class, according to power struggle theory, then consent to sex opens up another ethical can of worms. Because, as Bloom notes, how do we know women are fully consenting if their agency has been compromised by their having been indoctrinated by sexist culture, education and advertising? Such a view is, of course, absurd, as it infantilizes women and portrays them as incapable of speaking and thinking for themselves. But this perception has prompted demands for the only solution an alleged problem like this could yield: state intervention in people’s personal lives. This is what Bloom—and I—mean when we refer to the bureaucratizing of sex and relationships: the demand to end patriarchy by creating a paternalistic government tasked with looking after women, who, bless their hearts, are incapable of looking after themselves.

In California, for instance, in 2014, the state legislature passed the Yes Means Yes affirmative consent law (SB-967), which redefines consent as


I added emphasis on the throughout sexual activity part, because, according to the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs, Project Respect and Mic, this means that a person must gain verbal permission to engage in each sexual act, not just in the encounter as a whole. Picture what that looks like: “Can I kiss your lips?” “Yes.” “Can I kiss your forehead?” “Yes.” “Can I kiss your ear?” “Yes.” “Can I nibble your ear?” “Yes.” “Can I kiss your neck?” “Yes.” “Can I kiss your breasts?” “Yes.” “Can I go down on you?” “Yes.” Such needless narration wouldn’t even be sexy if you were James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman. But that’s precisely the unstated intention. Continual enthusiastic consent has a dampening effect on sex. It’s robotic and condescending. It doesn’t feel natural. It’s not meant to enhance Eros; it’s meant to kill it. As feminist firebrand Camille Paglia noted in her 2015 Spiked Review profile:


Laws requiring continual enthusiastic consent also effectively outlaw seduction. While seduction is not pursuing a person who has rejected your advances (that’s harassment), seduction is a largely non-verbal cat-and-mouse game, where the pursued—aware of his or her pursuer’s intentions—erects barriers of paper, not of stone, intending to signal virtue as a form of self-flattery, before eventually yielding to forbidden pleasure. Many captivating romances, old and new, fictional and real, have been written on the theme of seduction. It could even be said that seduction is one of the great pleasures of life (though a rare pleasure, and one not experienced by all). Yet this surrendering of the will to the will of another in playful submission, once seen as a form of consent itself, is now shunned as yet another manifestation of sexist culture in need of eradication.

As Lara Kipnis observed in her piece on the future of seduction for the Cut:




The trepidation about seduction—especially in light of Yes Means Yes—on the surface appears to be about social incompetence: What happens if non-verbal cues are misread, or even outright imagined?, What happens when an attempt at seduction ends awkwardly? And what can be said in response? Some people suck at romance. Some people have no game. Not my problem and not yours. It’s also not really what ending seduction is about. What ending seduction is about—just like ending of non-verbal consent (i.e. reading body language)—is the killing of Eros.

As Cristina Nehring noted in this article in Elle:


To understand why this is a goal, we need to look to the second part of Bloom’s third point: the radical egalitarian belief that individuals are completely self-sustaining emotionally and don’t need intimacy with other people. Recall the last portion of Bloom’s statement above (emphasis added):

Radical feminists insist that the liberals’ ‘consenting adults,’ especially the women, consent only because they are forced to by sexist education and public opinion. So we must in the first place reeducate the partners so that they no longer think they need each other.

In the my book A Letter To The Left, I voice suspicion that sex-negative feminists—who used to be on the fringes of feminism but are now mainstream—are ultimately seeking to make heterosexual sex completely undesirable: recalling Catherine MacKinnon’s statement that “The major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.” The way sex-negative feminists strive to achieve this is by promoting fear and suspicion of men in popular culture, as well as by propagating the notion that men are generally useless.

If you think this agenda is far fetched, or even a kooky conspiracy theory, look no further than this New York Times author who writes:


Or this writer for Entity magazine, who lets us know:


If the end of heterosexual sex and relationships isn’t the goal, then it’s mighty suspicious that the language of independence is used in the context of the absence of romance, but never in the context of any other type of relationship. You don’t hear anyone saying, “A strong woman doesn’t need friends in order to be accomplished and fulfilled.” Nor do you hear anyone argue that family relationships—with parents, siblings, grandparents, cousins, etc.—are unimportant for strong women to maintain in order to be happy. But, for some reason romantic love, especially from a woman towards a man, is now perceived as unnecessary for achieving a feeling of completion. The cultural message is clear: while no man is an island, every woman is.

Predictably a reactionary movement of men has risen out of this phenomena, mostly online. They call themselves MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way). A story in the Independent tells us how these men, mostly between the ages of 25–45, have grown resentful toward a society that increasingly views them as disposable, and as a result have chosen to avoid sex and relationships altogether. “There are individuals realizing that the deck is stacked against those that choose to try to engage in traditional relationships and are opting out,” one MGTOW explains to a Sun reporter. And another says, “We’re just a bunch of men who’ve decided to live our lives alone peacefully without outside interference or validation.”


No matter how empowered we are and no matter how long we might go our own way, eventually we’re going to need (not just want) someone with whom we can share our secrets, our joys, our excitements, our disappointments, our sorrows, our boredom, our hatreds and our laughter. Human beings are social, interdependent creatures. We evolved to survive and thrive by cooperating with each other, not just to fulfill one another’s material needs but our emotional needs as well. And we should all strive to have a love like that as described by the poet Pablo Neruda:




I remember the old left. And by”old left” I mean the left of nearly six years ago that I became a part of, and which I saw begin to be erased roughly a year later. The old left’s approach to sex was as simple as it was wonderfully hedonistic: what consenting adults did within the privacy of their bedrooms was nobody’s damn business. Individuals deserved to be free to pursue their pleasures and to define their own ways of consenting—verbal, body language, bright purple smoke signal, whatever—rather than be told what defined consent by any bureaucracy on high. This was a big part of why I was drawn to the old left. I was twenty-two, and had recently left the conservative church I had grown up in, and the prospect of forging my own path philosophically, ethically and sexually was tantalizing and liberating. As no hell below us, above us only sky became a triumphant anthem that rang through my mind, I also became excited at what was, for me, a new secular, Enlightenment, anti-totalitarian, and yes, socialist vision of the way the world could be, filled as much with personal liberty as economic justice.

It was almost overnight, it now seems, when a major part of the left made the transition from liberation and freethinking to control and moral panic. Frenzy over the alleged prevalence of rape culture, male privilege and harassment occurred simultaneously with frenzy over the need for trigger warnings, prevention of microaggressions, and calls to censor—or outright ban—certain speakers from giving lectures at campuses.

But, more to the point, the new left, in contrast to the old, has a deep suspicion of pleasure, and an open loathing toward the timeless dance of the masculine and feminine. Judging by its opposition to pornographyprostitutionBDSM and strip clubs, the new puritanism of left sexual politics has resurrected pearl-clutching from the graveyard of the religious right. The distance between the ghostly echoes of Andrea Dworkin and Jerry Falwell is a puddle, not an ocean; and while the spirit of the latter has only managed to possess inconsequential conservatives like Rick Santorum and Mike Pence, who have very little ideological sway over the political movement they belong to, the spirit of the former possesses nearly all mainstream feminist voices today. Thus, the new left, especially modern feminism (in contrast to older schools of feminism), has been fertile ground for radical egalitarian ideology.


There is a lot of overlap between the radical egalitarian idea of self-fulfillment and the lack of need for romance, and the philosophy of Ayn Rand that selfishness is the only virtue and love is for fools. Perhaps this is part of why the modern feminist prescription for how young women should live their lives closely mirrors corporate culture, where everything is done with frigid formality and calculated ruthlessness. Capitalism drives all human interaction away from affection toward profit motive. In the age of dating apps which function as virtual people stores, consumer mentality has caused individuals to be commoditized into personality packages, meant for consuming and discarding upon a whim (ultimately leading to feelings of dissatisfaction for the user and the used); and, in this sense, radical egalitarians, within feminism and wider leftism, who seek to bring about the end of romantic love find within the monstrous economic system a strange bedfellow.


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