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Day 5: The Erotic Mind: Today's Exercise
Day 5: The Erotic Mind: Today's Exercise
“There is one place where the superpowers of our imagination meet—we call it “The Erotic Mind.”
Today's Exercise
Today’s exercise invites you to tap into imagination and fantasy. Your task? Plan a steamy movie
date night.
Create an ambiance that makes you feel that there’s nowhere else you’d rather be.
Choose a film featuring your favorite sexy movie scene. Need some inspiration? Take a look at the
best steamy movie scenes recommended from Esther and her Instagram community.
The environment sets the mood, but the film transports your imagination. It could be to a villa on a
bright blue ocean, the dark corner of a bar, wherever the characters are making love. You join them
in their erotic journey without ever leaving the comfort of your home.
So where do you want to visit from your living room?
Variation: If you wrote a romance novel scene or directed an erotic movie scene, what would
happen? Be as detailed as possible. Write this in your shared journal for your partner to read on
their own or read aloud to each other.
An Invitation to Fantasize
Physiologically, watching erotic scenes triggers arousal, adrenaline, a dopamine rush. It awakens
us to our own desires and projections. We identify or idealize those who break out of shame and
restraint. Sometimes we imagine ourselves in the situation, which triggers memories and feelings of
prior experiences or something we want to try. Sometimes we wonder what it would be like to have
someone watch us in the act the way we’re watching the characters on screen. To be gazed upon or
to gaze—both deeply sexy. Moreover, sex scenes express the confidence, irresistibility, or
sensation of being wanted to which we aspire.
Watching erotic scenes is an act of desire. Desire, as in owning a wanting that is made ever-
stronger by not having the very thing we covet, as Plato so well outlined in “The Symposium.”
Who can’t relate to that? The sense of deprivation combined with the rush of fulfillment fits
squarely within the great sexologist Jack Morin’s erotic formula: attraction plus obstacle equals
excitement. A central theme of the erotic crescendo is overcoming the obstacle. They finally are
able to meet. They've been able to escape. They've been able to let each other know the secret love
they’ve held for their whole lives. The merging of lovers is the victory against forces trying to
keep them apart. In some scenes, desire is devouring them to the point that they betray their own
moral principles. Giving in to their deepest yearnings, they find themselves with people and in
places beyond the scope of their imaginations. In other scenes, it isn’t so much about engaging in
the forbidden but in marrying the emotional and sexual—sex and love; sex and grief. Erotic scenes
can be light, others dark.
Watching Morin’s erotic formula play out on screen shows us how life’s trajectory can change in a
moment. They fuck. They fall in love. They throw the rules out the window. They give in to some
greater arc, some irrepressible cosmic force. We know the feeling, don’t we? To connect with the
parts of us we never knew existed is an experience of freedom, power, greed, ardor, intensity. When
we watch these scenes, we also get to play with the constraints of morality, reality, properness, or
good citizenship, without ever having to learn the hard way. Oh, the fantasy of Transgression! Just
like our own internal fantasies take us outside of our everyday lives and counter the fears and
inhibitions that live inside of us, so too do erotic moments in film.