Proliferating erotic imagery atrophies rather than stimulates individual sexual fantasy

Evidence

Schelsky’s counter-Enlightenment position gave him, like Freyer and Gehlen, a shrewd approach to the dialectic of enlightenment. What Marcuse later attacked as repressive desublimation was exposed no less acutely by Schelsky in his Sociology of Sexuality. … There has often been controversy as to whether our age really shows a high degree of eroticization or not. Those who claim that it does can appeal to the ubiquity of erotic images in modern advertising and propaganda, to the most candid possible display of sexual stimuli in magazines, cinemas, hit songs, advertisements, television and so on. The question whether this represents eroticization as such seems to me to be irrelevant in comparison with the realization that these erotic images and clichés, delivered with the constant pressure of modern mass communication media, relieve the functioning of the individual’s own sexual fantasy to the extent of virtual atrophy, and thus inhibit it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2463

There has often been controversy as to whether our age really shows a high degree of eroticization or not. Those who claim that it does can appeal to the ubiquity of erotic images in modern advertising and propaganda, to the most candid possible display of sexual stimuli in magazines, cinemas, hit songs, advertisements, television and so on. The question whether this represents eroticization as such seems to me to be irrelevant in comparison with the realization that these erotic images and clichés, delivered with the constant pressure of modern mass communication media, relieve the functioning of the individual’s own sexual fantasy to the extent of virtual atrophy, and thus inhibit it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2464

There has often been controversy as to whether our age really shows a high degree of eroticization or not. Those who claim that it does can appeal to the ubiquity of erotic images in modern advertising and propaganda, to the most candid possible display of sexual stimuli in magazines, cinemas, hit songs, advertisements, television and so on. The question whether this represents eroticization as such seems to me to be irrelevant in comparison with the realization that these erotic images and clichés, delivered with the constant pressure of modern mass communication media, relieve the functioning of the individual’s own sexual fantasy to the extent of virtual atrophy, and thus inhibit it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 612

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Marcuse’s repressive desublimation in Eros and Civilization (ch74) and to Adorno-Horkheimer’s culture-industry claims about standardized pleasure from earlier chapters. — connects to: Daydreaming substitutes fantasy for the disciplined transformation of present reality; Partial localized sexuality release expands rather than drains aggressiveness — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 341; Human sexuality depends on fantasy, not biological excitation — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 168 (+1 more)
• SHARE: This precise Schelsky formulation about erotic imagery atrophying fantasy is exactly the kind of claim a media-theory colleague would enjoy.
• QUESTION: Schelsky published this in 1955, predicting repressive desublimation before Marcuse’s 1964 One-Dimensional Man. Worth checking the dating of who got there first.
• DEFINE: Presents a distinctive Frankfurt-School-adjacent move: reframing eroticization as the atrophy of individual fantasy, not its growth.
• DEEPTHINKING: A sharp, non-obvious mechanism: saturation with erotic images doesn’t heighten desire but inhibits the private imaginative faculty — relevant far beyond the 1950s context.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2463; Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2464; Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 612

Broader Connections

• Daydreaming substitutes fantasy for the disciplined transformation of present reality #expands (0.72)
• Partial localized sexuality release expands rather than drains aggressiveness #complicates (0.70) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 341