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"We are therefore in an impossible situation, unable to dream either of a past or a future state of affairs"
(Baudrillard, Hystericizing the Millenniuni)1
I. Erotophobia
Thus Baudrillard on the toll our Western hysterias have taken as we approach 2000. My "we" is American: the Americans, past and future, who participate in this attempt to fashion a post-Foucaldian discourse: not as parody or imitation but in my own voice and inflection and about a subject that has preoccupied me for two decades. The "dream" is erotic: the forms of sexual expression that have been intrinsic facets of human cultures from time immemorial. The syndrome of regulation to which I refer has been discussed under other rubrics and pondered in the media but rarely in this coinage.
Erotophobia then: approximate to Europhobia, xenophobia, homophobia, and the many other phobias clamping down on our regulatory generation. The force of the word lies in the second root - phobia: an unnatural fear, a repulsion, not merely a benign dislike or gentle recoil. Erotophobia: in the longue duree, no culturally sanctioned mass hysteria developing over several centuries, despite cyclical peaks and valleys, based on the terror of sexual involvement. Hence the phobic basis of the hysteria. Some might praise this fear as an internal censor; even so, its recent consequences have been dire for almost every aspect of American life and culture except the economic. These resonances and their implications form the heart of my subject here.
Erotophobia: fear of Eros. Recoil from sex. Eros as state of mind, Eros as body act. A phobia and persistent fear. A construction without lexical 'or sociolinguistic profile. Without discourse or literature. The longue duree of erotophobia rather than its quondam appearances or the pattern of its cycles in history. Hardly a Foucaldian term, despite Greek roots, and neither a fixture of our contemporary mindsets or something on the tips of our imagination. Most of us have never heard of erotophobia, let alone invoked it.2
More locally in diverse America, the national desexualization within our collective fear of sexuality. The empty label - erotophobia - stares us in the face: inherent in our Puritan tradition (in H. L. Mencken's constructed sense rather than the seventeenth-century historical version), revived throughout our American history,...