Human sexuality depends on fantasy, not biological excitation
Evidence
What Ballard, Lacan and Burroughs have in common is the perception that human sexuality is essentially pornographic. For all three, human sexuality is irreducible to biological excitation; strip away the hallucinatory and the fantasmatic, and sexuality disappears with it. … The orangutan had been inducted into human sexuality by the “inhuman partner”, the fantasmatic supplement, upon which all human sexuality depends. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 168
Categorization
- XREF: Resonates with the Ballard/Lacan material earlier in this book; also connects to any psychoanalytic theses on fantasy mediating desire. — connects to: Proliferating erotic imagery atrophies rather than stimulates individual sexual fantasy — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2463; Sexual attraction arises from socially conditioned images, not raw nature; Desire, not observed traits, originally discloses sexual being to consciousness. (+5 more)
- QUESTION: Is the orangutan anecdote verified, and does it hold up as an ethological claim about how captive apes respond to synthetic media?
Broader Connections
- Proliferating erotic imagery atrophies rather than stimulates individual sexual fantasy
#responds-to(0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2463 - Sexual attraction arises from socially conditioned images, not raw nature
#corroborates(0.78) - Desire, not observed traits, originally discloses sexual being to consciousness.
#corroborates(0.75) - Favorite sexual fantasies reveal that women want intimacy while men want sex acts
#exemplifies(0.70) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2411