The Architecture of Desire

How desire has changed as we went online & what that means for feminism and all of humanity.

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Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein Stub, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1806, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

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Desire is the root of suffering, or so Buddhists tell us. To be on the path to enlightenment, we must shed ourselves of constant want.

The path to enlightenment grows farther away in our modern world. “Greed is good” a movie from the 1980s tells us. We are rich in inexpensive goods and abundant in foods that do not nourish or provide good health. We’ve grown poor in spirit; as loneliness abounds and communal bonds are commodified. It’s a crisis, equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. One out of four Americans says they have no close friends. Our subverted version of capitalism teaches us to aspire to greater wealth and material goods while wage workers take on weekend gig jobs to make rent.

We’ve grown increasingly helpless to change our material conditions or strengthen our spirits. We are offered bread and circuses. The internet is our circus, giving us the balm of endless entertainment, perpetual outrage, and assuring us of our individual moral superiority. The endless dopamine of clicks and likes replacing both connection, and the currency we need for sustenance. We are pacified through words and images offering illusions of beauty, women modified to become aspirational to the heteronormative feminine gaze, of fashion, travel and leisure, wealth, violence and power in the form of gaming, parasocial relationships with strangers on the other side of a screen, communities devoid of direct contact and touch, a plethora of naked bodies engaged in extreme acts and modified to be more pleasing to certain gazes.

The fears of the television age are more perfectly realized with the internet: a vehicle that we can access 24/7. More private than a movie or television screen, to further isolate us and increase our dependency. Studies show that our cell phones illicit from us emotions that we used to feel only with romantic loves. No wonder then, that we carry them with us everywhere we go, into our beds too. Once we are online, the internet teaches us that our choices are endless, our options manifold, that we should yearn for greater perfection. It instructs us not to settle for the imperfect normalcy of each other when we can find ideals to desire online.

Desire

But what is desire? Here, I write of desire as the erotic, connected to romantic and sexual love and sexuality.

“Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting,” Ronald Barthes wrote in A Lover’s Discourse.

“The experience of eros is a study in ambiguities of time. Lovers are always waiting.” wrote Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet.

Of eros, Audre Lorde wrote in Uses of the Erotic:

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects — born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson wrote: “It was Sappho who first called eros “bittersweet”. No one who has been in love disputes her.”¹

There are two ancient stories that bring desire — separation, longing, love — for the other to mind: the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and that of Savitri and Satyavan.

Orpheus the musician marries the beautiful maiden Eurydice in a state of blissful love. One day, another spies Eurydice, and he gives chase. As Eurydice runs, she is bitten on the foot by a viper, and perishes from its poison. Distraught, Orpheus plays music in such a beautifully mournful way that he touches the hearts of the gods themselves — of Hades and Persephone, the king and his queen of the underworld. They grant him this: unlike most mortals, he may journey to the underworld alive, and bring back lovely Eurydice. Under one condition: he may not look at her. If he does, he will lose her again. Orpheus uses his musician to put the guard dog to gentle sleep, journeys into the underworld, finds Eurydice…but at the last minute, turns around and Eurydice slips away from him. Was it a loss of faith or a moment of excitement? It’s hard to tell.

In the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019), the artist in a lesbian couple, Marianne, argues that in looking back, Orpheus makes the poet’s choice. The muse of the couple, Héloïse, questions if it was Orpheus’s choice at all — that maybe Eurydice herself that asked Orpheus to look — turning the object of desire into someone with her own voice and agency, just as Héloïse, the muse-lover herself had agency in her love with another women².

In the Hindu story Savitri and Satyavan, it is the wife who seeks her husband’s return from the lord of the underworld³. She is the subject — the heroine who saves the day — and her husband the object. The bride, the princess, Savitri is warned that her husband will die on before their first wedding anniversary. Nevertheless, her love and desire for this man was so strong that she marries this destitute former prince, and lives happily in the forest with him, his blind father, and his mother. After a long day of chopping firewood in the forest, he lays down to rest with his head in his lap, and passes. When the god of death, Yama, comes to collect his soul, Savitri pleads with him to leave Satyavan. She offers a serious of homilies. Yama is impressed with her learning and skill in reciting them, and offers her a boon; anything except Satyavan’s life. She asks for the restoration of her father-in-law’s strength and sight. She continues reciting homilies. Pleased again, he offers her another boon: anything but Satyavan’s life. She asks for her in-laws kingdom to be restored. She continues with the homilies, and pleased again, Yama offers her a third, then fourth and final boon. She wishes for a hundred sons. He grants her the boon. Savitri then points out that she needs her husband’s soul and body to be reunited so that she might have the hundred sons, because she could only have children with him. Defeated, Yama returns Satyavan to Savitri, and they live happily ever after, in their kingdom with a hundred sons. The princess outwits the lord of death, and wins back the hand of the prince.

In short, desire is longing, waiting; it is joy, madness, and suffering too, and it is powerful enough to spark life and fuel creativity. Other than birth and death, it is the greatest mystery of our lives.

Phenomenology of Pornography

In this essay, I’ll wind back to how the internet has changed pornography, sex work, and sexual assault before getting back to how the internet has changed desire itself.

To do that, I’ll first examine the phenomenology of pornography in this section, the influence of pornography and sexualized chat groups and websites on real life-abuse, and then how desire for the unattainable and unrealistic has changed sexuality itself.

For a political critique of desire⁴ before the dawn of the internet era, you read the feminists. Michel Foucault and especially Ronald Barthes — queer men — wrote traditional analytical books and essays, and Barthes especially focused on the subject-object dichotomy. The second-wave feminists, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, but most of all, feminist legal scholar and philosopher Catharine A. Mackinnon — they brought desire down to Earth, to interactions between individuals, and how those interactions are derived from the systemic. What I love about feminist philosophy is that it is grounded in objective reality. These women declared that pornography should be viewed through its effect — the lived experience of people making, watching, and subjected to it instead of its mere creation and existence.

In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Catharine Mackinnon argued that desire was female submission and male domination, marked by “hostility and contempt, or arousal of master to slave, together with awe and vulnerability, or arousal of slave to master”⁵. Through her groundbreaking Sexual Harassment of Working Women, Mackinnon framed sexual harassment as a form of sex-based discrimination⁶, a violation of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.

She tried to use a similar argument against pornography: that it was a civil rights violation and discrimination against women because it was and lead to abuse. Through her book, Only Words, Catharine Mackinnon claimed that pornography was not about what it said, but what it does.

The operative definition of censorship accordingly shifts from government silencing what powerless people say, to powerful people [pornographer] violating powerless people [women] into silence and hiding behind state power to do it.”⁷

In the U.S., pornography is protected under the first amendment as free speech. Mackinnon authored three books with radical feminist Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin claimed that she spoke to hundreds of survivors of sexual assault and abuse. In Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Dworkin shared those stories: of prolonged, egregious abuse by fathers, husbands, and random men — with the survivors claiming or showing that the men were influenced by pornography.

The story that I remember the mostly clearly: a thirteen year old girl away at girl scouts camp. She was small, blonde, still fairly child-like. The girl was walking alone and sees three hunters. “There’s a live one!” They drop their porno magazines and give chase. She thinks that the hunters were talking about deer, but they’re chasing her. They drag her back to their campsite, where the child notices that the girls in the magazines look like her. They beat her with their rifles, one demands she give him a “good” blow job but she doesn’t know how. When they’re finished raping her, they kick her, partially covering with her leaves, and leave her on the forest floor. The other stories are deeply effective: another thirteen year old forced to view porn to learn about sex before being forced into prostitution; young women whose brothers, boyfriends, and husbands abused them in scenarios they had watched in porn.

In short, their argument was: pornography was the cause and impetus, abuse the effect; ergo, pornography was morally and legally wrong.

What about relationships outside of heterosexuality? The lesbians of second-wave feminism argued against BDSM/kink for this every reason: that BDSM was incorporating those misogynistic elements — the abuse of women — into same-gender relationships. The lesbian Substack community makes arguments for and against BDSM to this day — forty-plus years later.

Some lesbian feminist and groups such as The Furies argued for “lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to…end male supremacy.⁸” In lesbian relationships, other intersectionalities aside, the partners have achieved gender equality. Thus, lesbianism became a faster, easy answer to feminist goal. This was political lesbianism, the notion that all feminists should become lesbians. Its advocates claimed that sexuality were both fully controllable and so, easily changeable.

The thought of any sort of romantic and/or sexual engagement with a political lesbian is wholly unattractive for me, as a lesbian who genuinely desires women, and wants to be desired in return.

Pornography, Sex Work; and Assault Online

In this thousand years of silence, the camera is invented and pictures are made of you while these things are being done. You hear the camera clicking or whirring as you are being hurt, keeping time to the rhythm of your pain. You always know that the pictures are out there somewhere, sold or traded or shown around or just kept in a drawer. In them, what was done to you is immortal. He has them; someone, anyone, has seen you there, that way. This is unbearable. What he felt as he watched you as he used you is always being done again and lived again and felt again through the pictures your violation his arousal, your torture his pleasure. Watching you was how he got off doing it; with the pictures he can watch you and get off any time.⁹

A few days ago, Caroline Darian spoke at the Hay Festival. She claimed that there was no way her mother, Giséle Pelicot, would have been raped over 200 times without pornography websites¹⁰. Darian advised the men in the audience to talk between “guys” about pornography, because it is “part of the system” of misogyny and violence.

Seventy thousand men joined a Telegram (private messaging app) that shared ideas about how to rape women. Let that number sink in: 70,000 men¹¹. Men in the group claimed that they had assaulted their wives, mothers, and sisters.

Undoubtedly, you’ve heard of Giséle Pelicot, whose ex-husband had raped her repeatedly, and drugged her and offered her up to other men to rape. An assortment of men — “everyday men” — married, single, young, old, white French and immigrants of color, working class and middle — offered themselves up to complete their fantasies of rape. A few silently fled before raping Pelicot. Dozens raped her. A total of 51 men were tried for assaulting her, others in the videos of her rape weren’t identified.

I’ve read numerous thought pieces on how horrifying it was that it was the man that she loved that was doing this to her. Few writers have highlighted that Mr. Pelicot would not have found so many men so easily had it not been for coco.fr, the website he used to find the men. That website was investigated for facilitating rape and pedophilia. It’s not the only website facilitating abuse: the makers of Tor Network (the dark web browser) and private messaging apps like Telegram and Signal argue that their apps are designed for private and to prevent government interference and spying — and I’ve known people who worked for the parent companies, they are sincere about their goals. Those people never bring up that their apps are also used to view and pay for child pornography. “The cybersecurity research field largely ignores the CSAM [child sex abuse material] epidemic. It is categorically the head-in-the-sand ostrich syndrome,” said professor Billy Brumley¹².

Therein lies the issue: that people on two sides of an argument too often focus on entirely different parts of the argument without looking at the issue as a whole. They jump to simple answers for complex problems. The parties who criticize pornography focus on the abuse and indignities of women. It’s an issues that brings together radical feminists and conservative Christians. Bring up that out that some women derive pleasure from porn or extreme sex, they would argue that was evidence of how bad the situation had gotten. Point out that some women enter sex work voluntarily, and they’d argue back that financial inequality and desperation, coercion, and non-consent are conditions under which women who do all types of sex work.

The people — both men and women — are broadly consumers who defend pornography (and BDSM) focus on personal pleasure they derive it from it, scoffingly saying that problems of sexuality and abuse would be fixed if everyone were sex-positive and sexually liberated — that sexual shame and repression are the problem. They blame abuse on other factors, like a lack of understanding of consent. The feminist argument would be “choice feminism”: that every choice a woman makes is equally valid, and will highlight examples of wholly consensual sex work and the moral imperative to not discriminate against sex workers.

Does pornography lead to the rape culture? No. Rape culture created pornography, then pornography, especially with the internet, spread rape culture farther and wider than ever. They’re bed fellows, so to speak. Caroline Darian’s view — that pornography is part of but not necessarily caused by, that the problems lie in culture of frequent consumption of pornography and not merely the legalization and creation of it — is the more sophisticated answer.

Lust on the Internet

13% of web searches and 20% of mobile searches are related to porn¹³. That statistic is from 2019. I don’t know if you knew this, but internet porn and OnlyFans jumped up during quarantine. In 2020, OnlyFans made $375MM. By 2023, OnlyFans revenue jumped to $6.6 billion. In 2023, NBA players made a combined $4.9BN. OnlyFans creators made more: $5.3BN¹⁴. Unlike most tech companies with that type of revenue, OnlyFans is a privately held company — that means they didn’t need to do a public offering to make those billions. It’s a remarkably profitable company. Evidence that sex sells.

Or does it? Because OnlyFans isn’t selling sex. It’s not selling the lived reality of a person; their scent and touch. It’s not the same as direct sex work — from what I know of sex workers, they describe their jobs as sex but also acting as a companion and alleviating loneliness or providing a sort of therapy.

Sex work over OnlyFans is between traditional sex work and pornography. The viewer has a parasocial relationship — a one-sided relationship because they’ve watching the person online and thinking of them — with that content producer, OnlyFans makes the relationship feel more real. What that sells is fantasy. The bigger accounts hire people/services to message with the users. What happens when a man buys the illusion that a famous woman is messaging him? He is paying for the idea that of her thousands, maybe millions, of fans, she has chosen him. He has paid for the illusion that he is desired in return, and the illusion that he can say anything he wants to her and she will reciprocate.

I believe it’s a very slippery slope from the OnlyFans parasocial relationship to the AI girlfriend/partner — that soon, perhaps our tech overlords will try to fulfill the illusion of desire with AI chatbots, increasing their bottom lines. We’ve been primed for it with digital sexual imagery and messaging, with the shift in the fulfillment of desire.

In Pornography: Men Possessing Women, published in 1981, Andrea Dworkin wrote that porn was already an $10 billion industry. In her era, it took time to seek out and acquire porn. A porn consumer had to go out and buy the magazine. Maybe even subscribe. He had to find out about videos, go somewhere to get the video, watch it using a device. Presuming the consumer was a man and a married father, he would have to hide these from his children and maybe his wife too. In other words, access was curtailed. Even if it was in your home, it lacked the ease and immediacy.

Today, I could search for all the porn I could possibly want (I don’t want) in the comfort of my home through either my phone or laptop. There’s no reflective moment, no hesitation — it can be consumed to the point of compulsion. Thoughtlessly and recklessly, addictively.

Accordingly to Common Sense Media, children now first see porn on the internet at an average of twelve years old. A few Australian studies found that fastest growing — this is an awful sentence — type of child abuse is child-on-chid abuse.

Estimates for the monetary value (not adjusted for inflation or production costs) of today’s porn industry vary from $58BN to $287BN. The size of the porn industry and OnlyFans taken together are enormous.

Here’s the point: earlier, I described desire as longing, waiting, creativity, mystery…. What the internet offers is; it’s definitely not bittersweet. I would far prefer to read stories of love and desire, like Orpheus and Eurydice’s or Savitri and Satyavan’s, than chat emptily over the internet or view porn or pretty Instagram photos — the latter leaves me feeling drained and empty.

The internet has turned instead desire itself into illusions. Desire is now cheapened to entertainment, part of the circus of “bread and circuses”. The internet cuts out anticipation and offers instant gratification. It doesn’t have a scent. We can’t feel its touch, softness, or warmth. It doesn’t say ‘no’, and if it does, it doesn’t really mean it. It doesn’t have a night studying or working or staying out with friends, it doesn’t get upset because you left dishes in the kitchen. It’s always there, always perfect because it’s not real. It’s a dopamine drip.

Have you heard of the rhesus monkey studies? In 1958, Harry Harlow tested the evolutionary theory of attachment with baby rhesus monkeys. The babies were cruelly separated from their mothers immediately after birth. They were instead given two options: a wire “mother” figure that had a bottle of milk attached, and a soft terry cloth mother. The babies would take the milk from the wire figure, then immediately return to terry cloth mother. If the babies were presented with something that scared them, they sought out the soft cloth mother. The experiment became crueler, with some babies given no soft cloth figure. Those monkeys grew up in timid, fearful, unable to socialize or mate as adults. And crueler: even when the cloth mothers were abusive (eg, jabbing or throwing the babies), the babies returned to the cloth mother, over and over again.

The reason Harlow chose rhesus monkeys was that they are similar to humans. The experiment, undoubtedly inhumane, showed that we seek softness, warmth, and touch. Without those — especially without those in early childhood —we begin to lose our the qualities that make us human. The simulacrum of humanity, desire, and sex that the internet and maybe AI gives us can never replace our fundamental need for each other.

The Return

Byung-Chul Han in a film still from the documentary ‘The Burnout Society: Byung-Chul Han in Seoul and Berlin.’

Porn is a matter of bare life on display. The antagonist of eros, it annihilates even sexuality. In this respect, it is more effective than morality. “Sexuality does not fade into sublimation, repression, and morality, but fades much more surely into the more sexual than sex, porn. Pornography derives its appeal from “the anticipation of dead sex in the living sexuality”. ¹⁵

The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han argued eros — romantic and sexual love — has become “gravely ill” because of our modern individualism. Eros is dying because we will in “achievement society” — we’re obsessed with achievement and status over community and emotions. In fact, we’re supposed to be emotionally controlled and always calm. And so, desire became commodified: finding the right partner, a good match, of the right class, with the right education, the right income or looks/status to trade for that. Even when we connect with others, the focus remains on ourselves, what we might be gain from the other.

This was arguably true in earlier eras, but what differs now, I would argue, is that earlier eras were less individualistic and less focus on material benefits. As a result, we’re less likely to find life-long love today, but we’re also less likely to have the community groups — the sewing circles and bowling leagues, the church groups and multi-family living situations, book clubs and consistent, in person gatherings — than previous generations. We instead say that we’re “protecting our peace” and saving our energy. We are too tired of the constantly feed of outrage, and too overwhelmed to foster the type of connection we so desperately need to effective throw off our shackles.

In Hinduism, we can find the concept of maya — the idea that the material world itself is an illusion, that the material is veiled in ignorance. Maya is a powerful force that keeps us from knowing our true divine selves. We attach ourselves to fleeting earthy relationships, material possessions, and our egos. To be conscious of maya does not mean that one renounces all relationships and possession; rather, it means to hold them delicately and let them go in proper time and space (eg., death).

The internet often strikes me a greater illusion than the earthly realm itself, the attachments and mind-bending it fosters too strong.

For both desire and community, we need something else. To relearn that no one can meet our needs or wants instantly or perfectly. To discern the depth in nuance, in mystery; we have to remain curious, to be wooed and woo in return, and enticed into slower, sweeter discovery.

We need to desire one another. It’s that desire that allows us to stay human.

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1. All of the quotes in this section are cited in full here:

Eros is Eternal: Writing as an Act of Love

2. If you’ve watched the movie, I highly recommend watching Spikima Movies analysis, How ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ Reveals Its Secrets

3. I first began studying Greek/Roman myths when I was eight, and someone abandoned a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology in the bed of grandfather’s pickup truck. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of similarities between those myths and Hindu stories (which I was taught at an even younger age, mostly from my grandmother) — this might be because of trade and early communication, but it could also be that the stories and ideas are fundamental to humans.

4. The concept “the political critique of desire” from second-wave feminists, is from Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex. You can read the essay in the London Review of Books; I have the book.

5. Mackinnon, Catharine A. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. (Boston: Harvard University Press. 1989)

6. Mackinnon’s work was instrumental in legal change in the U.S.: it helped both the EEOC in changing the guidelines the year after publication, and the Supreme Court agreed with her interpretation 1986.

7. MacKinnon, Catharine A., Only Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). p 10.

8. “Redstockings Manifesto” Online here: https://www.redstockings.org/index.php/rs-manifesto

9. MacKinnon, Catharine A., Only Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). p 3 - 4.

10. Knight, Lucy. Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter says she believes online pornography played role in rape case. The Guardian. May 29, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/29/gisele-pelicots-daughter-says-she-believes-online-porn-played-role-in-case

11. Luyken, Jörg. Telegram ‘rape chat groups’ with up to 70,000 members uncovered. The Telegraph. December 19, 2024.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/12/19/telegram-rape-chat-groups-germany-investigation-70000-world/

12. Bureau, Scott. New study investigates illegal child sexual abuse material and anonymity on Tor network. Rochester Institute of Technology News. April 2024. https://www.rit.edu/news/new-study-investigates-illegal-child-sexual-abuse-material-and-anonymity-tor-network

13. Buchholz, Katharina. How Much of the Internet Consists of Porn? Statista. February 11, 2019. https://www.statista.com/chart/16959/share-of-the-internet-that-is-porn/

14. The average creator on the platform makes $1,300 yearly.

15. Han, Byung-Chul. trans Butler, Erik. The Agony of Desire. (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2017).