Defining the Anti-Erotic
The year ahead, "Heated Rivalry" and the offline vibe shift
I’m sorry that I’ve been away for the last month. Half of it was procrastination, and the other half was warranted. I don’t like to talk about my personal life much online, and so I largely won’t, but my father had a massive stroke before Christmas. We still don’t know what the outcome will be, long term. We might not really know for several months. This, paired with the usual business of the holidays themselves, had made writing and engaging in the usual New Years trend forecasting feel like an impossibility. But I’ve reached a point where I’m interested in writing again and being present where I can.
In some ways, stepping back a bit from this instinct to predict the culture before it happens and to take some part in shaping it myself has lent a new perspective. Maybe I’ve learned more from just observing. What I have found this year is that many people are displaying a profound sense of boredom. We’re bored with the Internet. We’re bored with the discourse. We’re especially bored with AI. But what seems different this year is that this boredom does not translate to apathy. It’s not a boredom that we’re letting ride out. Instead, I see more and more people looking for ways to shirk that boredom somewhere, somehow else.
I see 2026 as the year when people actually take the effort to live a life more offline in good faith, and from a place of genuine desire to do so. It isn’t just some niche trend like the “Luddite teens” who opt for flip phones or the return of book clubs, though it’s these things, too. It’s a subtle change, the vague sense that the novelty has worn thin. That joke isn’t funny anymore. This sweater is last season. I’m tired of this show, and I’m ready to change the channel.
A vibe shift, if you will.
I wrote a quick essay for Playboy hinting at all this and what it might mean for sex this year. Ever the optimist I am, I like to believe that this is a year sex will become fun and weird (good weird) again. What happens when we keep our phones sitting on the charger and take some time to actually look at each other again? Free from the gaze of the digital dating panopticon? Rediscovering the meaning of privacy?
It’s not like we’re going to be completely offline, though, and I don’t think many of us would really want to be. It’s rather about seeing our phones and online lives for the utilities that they are instead of our de-facto source of entertainment and interaction. I don’t know, is that naive? It might be. But I’d rather be naive than think we’re going to spend even more time this year on gooning and AI slop. It’s just not that interesting anymore. I don’t care if it’s easier than ever for a guy to catfish someone into thinking he’s a sexy gamer e-girl. I don’t care if this image is real or fake. I’m just going to log off and look at what I know is real in front of me.
I picked Georges Bataille’s Erotism off my shelf the other day, a book I’d probably say I’d read if pressed when I’ve really only skimmed. Yet I was struck immediately by the very first line of the introduction: “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.”
!
Eroticism is not defined merely by its proximity to the sensual or sexual. It is instead defined by an affirmation of existence and humanity beyond ourselves. The erotic is that which suggests there is something greater, embodied in the sensual or sexual.
For years I have been attempting to describe what it is about our sexual culture that has felt so anti-erotic. In this one line of Bataille, I now feel closer to defining it. The anti-erotic is that which suggests nothing but itself. — no intimacy, no transcendence, arguably not even real pleasure.
“Eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest independent of the natural goal: reproduction and the desire for children,” notes Bataille. He clarifies that the “fundamental meaning” of reproduction is nevertheless linked to the erotic, in that it deals with the fact that we are “discontinuous beings” able to create more “discontinuous beings’ who, by their nature, are very much a continuation of ourselves. Erotism positions the erotic as a way of grappling with this dichotomy: “the concern is to substitute for the individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of profound continuity,” a method of feeling that there is something that lasts against the knowledge that we will one day die.
Now to bring us back to reality. Much of our sexual culture today, especially that which we see online, is a representation of “simple sexual activity.” It’s sexuality placed under a hydraulic press to the point that there is nothing useful or recognizable of it. And I wonder if what feels so stark and repulsive about it is that on some subconscious level it reminds us of death in the anxious way Bataille describes, telling us that we are only discontinuous beings and in death that discontinuity remains. The anti-erotic, in fact, embraces this reality. The men of gooner communities on Twitter or Reddit who encourage each other to accept porn addiction, isolation and depravity are an example of this. The emptiness of it all is the point. I do not doubt that those who engage in all this are looking for some sort of meaning of their own, but it is a crude aberration. It functions as a distraction in the absence of meaning.
The erotic, on the other hand, functions as a spiritual salve against this. It is a reminder in the form of sexuality that some form of interlinkedness beyond ourselves persists.
In other news, I am still figuring out what to make of the popularity of Heated Rivalry. I watched one episode, and I don’t really feel all that inclined to watch another. I didn’t hate it, it’s just that, for all the gay sex it features, I was still kind of bored! For anyone who isn’t aware (probably my mom — hi mom!) Heated Rivalry is a new HBO show based on a series of books about two rival professional hockey players who develop a very physical secret romance. They are extremely, almost exclusively, popular with women. The show is for women. Yet it is about very gay sex. So why is that? “I think that what women are presented in romance is not always something that interests them in that way,” says the show’s creator. “I think that women are also, in real life and in culture, endlessly exposed to sexual violence… So you’re watching something happen between two men, and there is no fear of violence. There is no fear of things turning into stuff that women have to deal with too much in real life, and don’t want to deal with in their fantasies.”
Well, sorry, but that fucking sucks! It sucks to think that women are so afraid of sexual violence that they can’t even be involved in their own sexual fantasies. And I really, really, don’t blame them at all for thinking that way. I’m not going to argue that there is anything harmful about Heated Rivalry, after all, it’s just a smutty TV show that women are enjoying. But I’m not sure there is necessarily anything beneficial about it, either. Overall, it feels like a very “safe” compartment for women to place their sexuality. But is it actually erotic? That’s an essay for next week.
I think this is a pretty reductive, hasty mischaracterization of heated rivalry, which you’ve made after watching one episode. The show indeed jumps right into sex, which allows the emotional plot line to build over the season without that being the big climax (pun intended) the way it is in most media. Also, to say the show is almost exclusively popular with women is patently untrue and excludes the hordes of LGBT, non-female fans who’ve been able to enjoy a non-tragic, well-acted queer love story on screen - a rare thing indeed. How can you say there’s “nothing beneficial” about it? Of course you’re entitled to argue that there’s nothing actually erotic about it, but I think you’d be claiming that against the adamant, vast majority of those who’ve watched.
Whoa it's so cool to read this, I've been really fascinated recently by how sexually bland "Heated Rivalry" feels despite having so much sex. It seems connected to what you said about the anti-erotic, that it does not suggest/imply/signify beyond itself. Maybe it's that what "Heated Rivalry" reveals about hockey yaoi fantasies is how little those fantasies have to do with hockey or men in specific: these are like functional dressings to create the system or conditions of a specific fantasy, and if there are specific reasons why Heated Rivalry is about hockey and not baseball, those reasons can only speak to like the web of values/feelings we contingently associate with hockey, not some Platonic substance of hockey in itself. But in any case "Heated Rivalry" feels like a let-down because in the TV format, the empire of image and sight, the gay hockey players are forced to just be gay hockey players, whereas in a format that is less sensually immediate, then maybe it could start prodding at whatever part of their story is universal/transcendent/continuous.