Mechanized environments shrink erotic experience down to localized sexuality.

Evidence

For example, compare love-making in a meadow and in an automobile, on a lovers’ walk outside the town walls and on a Manhattan street. In the former cases, the environment partakes of and invites libidinal cathexis and tends to be eroticized. Libido transcends beyond the immediate erotogenic zones—a process of nonrepressive sublimation. In contrast, a mechanized environment seems to block such self-transcendence of libido. Impelled in the striving to extend the field of erotic gratification, libido becomes less “polymorphous,” less capable of eroticism beyond localized sexuality, and the latter is intensified. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 327

Categorization

• XREF: Plugs directly into the attention-economy frame: the environment-advertised-body as captive attention; also echoes The Soundscape’s claim that lo-fi environments erase the shape of perception. — connects to: Erotic desire fundamentally resists social regulation and institutions — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 406; Pleasure historically mediated by apparatus collapses into a single technical object — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 376; Sexual liberation has produced de-sexualized sex reduced to physiological function — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 180 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Does the smartphone-equipped city now count as an even more mechanized environment in Marcuse’s sense, or have the meadow and the automobile effectively merged?

Broader Connections

• Sexual liberation has produced de-sexualized sex reduced to physiological function #corroborates (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 180
• Erotic desire fundamentally resists social regulation and institutions #corroborates (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 406
• Prostitution reduces sex to species-generic content matched by money #expands (0.74) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 360
• Pleasure historically mediated by apparatus collapses into a single technical object #expands (0.72) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 376
• Partial localized sexuality release expands rather than drains aggressiveness #complicates (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 341