Eroticism in Fantasy

By fantasy author Charles Moffat.

When I say the word "fantasy" I don't mean daydreaming about hot sex in a Brazilian waterfalls... as nice as that sounds, what I actually am talking about is traditional "Sword and Sorcery" fantasy. ie. Conan the Barbarian by fantasy writer Robert E. Howard. (Or Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, although really, there isn't much eroticism to speak of in Harry Potter so it doesn't really prove my point.)

Basically fantasy, as it mostly marketed towards men in the same way vampire books are marketed towards women, often employs eroticism either in the cover art and/or the contents of the book.

Star Wars is an excellent example. (My apologies to anyone who thinks Star Wars is science fiction... there is no science in Star Wars. Its a fantasy. Force = Magic, Light Sabres = Magic Swords, etc. They never even bother to explain scientific concepts of how the Death Star actually works, hyperspace, etc.)

But back to my original point: Eroticism in Star Wars. Think scantily clad dancing aliens and Princess Leia in her slave costume.

To be fair there is also the kissing scene between Harry and Hermiome in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1) which is carefully censored to make it erotic and yet not show any naughty bits.

So suffice to say fantasy writers (and fantasy movies) will frequently throw in something erotic to tantalize their audience. Some writers (ie. Stephen King, Guy Gavriel Kay, George R. R. Martin, etc) will even go into explicit detail and you might think you were reading something out of Penthouse Letters or some similar literary sex magazine.

I think however that adding such scenes to books really is more about the writer than the audience. The writer is living vicariously through their characters, imagining sexual fantasies that they desire to fulfill but knowing they never will.

ie. Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan the Barbarian) is reputed to have had only girlfriend during his short career (he committed suicide in 1936 at the age of 30). The girl who was the object of his affections (Novalyne Price) didn't return his interest and broke up with him in 1934. One might argue that his lack of a serious love interest led to his depression and eventual suicide.

Howard's literary creations however, especially Conan, didn't just have women he had many women. But Conan only had one main love interest, a woman named "Belit", the heroine in the story "Queen of the Black Coast". In the story Howard even alludes to their relationship to having sadomasochistic undertones.

Unlike other Conan stories however where Conan essentially walks off into the sunset with the rescued damsel by his side instead Belit dies at the end of the story. Given a viking funeral no less.

It is interesting therefore to note that Howard wrote and published "Queen of the Black Coast" in 1934, shortly after being dumped by Novalyne Price. He also wrote the book "Almuric" shortly after in which he makes some interest comments about suicide (the book was later published posthumously in 1939).

But I digress!

Robert E. Howard, more so than other writers of his era, was deeply sexually repressed and was expressing himself via eroticism in his writing to make up for his lack of emotional connection to a woman in real life. His mother's coma in 1936 and the announcement that she would never awaken was the final nail in the coffin. He went out to his car and shot himself with a .380 Colt Automatic. He died 8 hours later, never regaining consciousness.

Speaking for myself I believe in a much more happy-go-lucky lifestyle. I firmly believe a person can always just start over anew. (Songs like "Eye of the Tiger" help for those who lack motivation.)

When I was living and working overseas I was missing my girlfriend back in Canada and wrote a series of short stories about an interracial relationship between a barbarian human named Brutus and an elf female named Avianna. Its true I was lonely and missing her, and thus expressed my loneliness through the stories which I emailed to my then girlfriend. But at least I never gave up hope for finding true love.

Years later the Brutus & Avianna stories are now available as an eBook on Lulu.com.

Some people might say sex and violence go well together. They're exciting. But I disagree. Violence only seems to work in fantasy pulp fiction when the hero saves the damsel and they live happily ever after. Morbid endings, however more realistic, are downers. (My apologies for the morbidness of this post!!!)

I firmly believe that love, sex and by extension eroticism are all reasons to live. Heroes in fantasy stories don't fight for gold or meaningless things. They fight for love, freedom, justice and ideals.

Take Don Juan as an example. He seduces women (usually virgins) and then fights their bigoted husbands / overprotective fathers. There are many variations on the Don Juan myth, but my personal favourite is the film version "Don Juan Demarco"... a modern fantasy with swordfighting and a happy ending.

Essays explore new perspectives about nature of love and erotic desire

by Jennifer Carnig

Johnny Cash was not known for his philosophical insight, but when he compared being in love to falling into a “Ring of Fire,” he may have been on to something.

In Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, a new collection of articles just published by the University Press, two-dozen of the world’s leading scholars—half of whom are Chicago faculty members—take on the subject of Eros and offer their reflections on the nature, history, and power of love and erotic desire.

While contemporary Western culture tends to characterize Eros with, for example, the romantic comedies starring Meg Ryan, wedding magazines with too-perfect brides pictured on their covers and five-pound boxes of heart-shaped chocolate, these essays look at Eros across time and culture. And while there is no one conclusion, none of them looks on love as a happy experience.

“Eros is about longing and lack, it’s a desire for love that possibly cannot be filled,” said Shadi Bartsch, the Ann L. & Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor in Classics and co-editor of the book. “It’s depicted as a violent, unpleasant and overwhelming emotion in many ways. The abduction of Helen by Paris leads to the Trojan War, Dido is spurned and so Carthage hates RomeÉ This idea of love as a desire to possess has a lot of ramifications. It’s our inheritance from the classical world.”

That inheritance is explored in Erotikon through a debate on the nature of love and erotic desire led by experts in philosophy, religion, classics, film and literature, as well as artists — included in the volume are selections by poet Susan Mitchell; poet Mark Strand, the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought; and author J.M. Coetzee, Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought.

“The goal was to offer a fascinating series of ideas from a fascinating series of perspectives,” said Bartsch. “We wanted to produce a modern-day answer to Plato’s Symposium.”

Erotikon, the book, was inspired by Erotikon, the conference, a three-day event held at the University in 2001, in which a variety of scholars, many different from those published in the volume, shared their thoughts on the evolution of Eros. Both were modeled after the Symposium, Plato’s account of a gathering in Athens more than 2,400 years ago in which Eros also was explored. But while the discussion in the Symposium was sparked by a complaint that the Greek poets neglected Eros, Erotikon was organized in response to the grand role that conceptions of love have played in our imaginations since their time.


This visual from the film Vertigo, which also is found in the book, Erotikon, illustrates the feeling of dizziness, but, says Professor Thomas Gunning, it represents much more. “The circular and spiral forms of Vertigo revolve around the fullness and the fear of loss. The film figures the power of Eros precisely as ‘vertigo.’”


“It’s difficult to imagine a subject more important as far as human nature goes,” said Bartsch.

A doctoral student in Social Thought and co-editor of Erotikon, Thomas Bartscherer said, “Eros won’t be ignored — it can’t be. Eros is an inescapable aspect of our individual and collective lives, something we don’t fully understand and are drawn to like moths to a flame. It’s something that constantly must be grappled with anew.” Bartscherer organized the Erotikon conference in 2001 with Katia Mitova, also a student in Social Thought.

That grappling takes place from the classical through the contemporary eras. Glenn Most, Professor in Social Thought, dissects Plato’s theory of Eros and how it must be sharply distinguished from the modern conception of “platonic love.” Plato advocates the stimulation of sexual desire as a way of escalating psychic energy, but insists that this energy must ultimately be diverted from physical expressions and toward philosophic pursuit.

David Tracy, the Andrew Thomas Greeley & Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Professor in the Divinity School, explores Augustine’s view of Eros, concluding that Augustine is a “Christian pessimist” because he maintains that there is necessarily a tragic dimension to erotic experience. Tracy proposes that this tragic vision allows us to affirm Eros while also recognizing its destructive potential.

Robert Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought, studies the erotic Nietzsche. He argues that for Nietzsche, “the problem of nihilism does not consist in a failure of knowledge or a failure of will, but a failure of desire, the flickering out of some erotic flame.”

Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought, and Slavoj Zizek, a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, engage in a heated back-and- forth debate over Freud, Lacan and Lear’s understandings of Eros. Lear offers a re-interpretation of the Dora case and posits two kinds of psychic activity, “swerve” and “break.” Swerve is the functioning of the mind according to the pleasure principle, or its variant, the reality principle. Break is what cannot be explained by swerve — the “disruption of primary-process mental activity itself.”


Shadi Bartsch co-edited Erotikon with Tom Bartscherer.


Balancing these scholars are artists who evoke Eros in their work — Mitchell, Strand and Coetzee — as well as scholars who explore the idea of the erotic in other people’s work. Thomas Gunning, Professor in Art History and Chair of Cinema & Media Studies, traces the conceptions of Eros as both lack and abundance as they play out in the 20th-century Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece Vertigo.

“More than a simple evocation of the sensation of dizziness,” argues Gunning, “the circular and spiral forms of Vertigo revolve around the fullness and the fear of loss.” He further proposes that, “in a manner perhaps only the visual fascination and almost physical effect of cinema can express, the film figures the power of Eros precisely as ‘Vertigo.’”

“Films aren’t records of real life, but they do help us understand real life,” Gunning said.

In Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart plays a detective who becomes obsessed with a woman, portrayed by Kim Novak, whom he was hired to watch. Years after he sees her leap to her death, he meets another woman who reminds him so much of his lost love that he seeks to recreate her in the image of the dead woman.

“It illustrates the tragedy of love, the inability to deal with love even when you get it, even when it returns to you from the land of the dead,” Gunning explained. “Is marriage the continuation of Eros or is it the end of it? The error of thinking is that fulfillment is always boring, and so once we get something, we don’t want it anymore. Desire can’t be desire if you have what you wanted.”

His conclusion both on the film and beyond is that Eros really is like a fire.

“If love doesn’t risk being self-destructive, if it doesn’t burn, I’m not sure it’s love,” he said.

The University of Chicago Chronicle, November 17, 2005 Vol. 25 No. 5
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/051117/eros.shtml