What is Eros? And How is it Relevant to Our Work as BPW?

Equality for women is not just about votes, pay, and who can do what job in or out of the home. It’s also about the insidious ways that living in our own bodies is corralled, organized, mandated, and circumscribed by the patriarchal culture that dominates most of the world.

Particularly frightening to that power structure is the power of eros, which encompasses passion in all of its incarnations: for work, for advocacy, for art, between family members and friends. It is the root of all the things we feel strongly about and is the source of power, knowledge, replenishment, and our capacity for joy and creativity. It has, unfortunately, in most cultures, been reduced to things relating to sex.

We are not going to talk about sex here.

The brilliant and insightful British feminist Audre Lorde (1934-1992) gave a lecture in the early 80s that she later turned into an essay, which is included in her book “Sister Outsider” (1984). (You may recall me recommending this book back in February.)

The essay, Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power, is a manifesto for taking back the primal power of eros. Look at that word; it is rooted in man. Then remember that throughout history, the vast majority of manifestos have been written by men, even the Humanist one (which was ostensibly about the agency and potential of all humans) included no women in its creation.

The most famous one in the US includes the word “all” in its opening explanation of what it is and who it is for, but it was understood at that time that “all” meant people like those who wrote it: land-owning, privileged, cis-gender, heterosexual, white men.

While the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal” none but those listed above were included in “all”.

Excluded were:

• women
• people of color, especially Black people, who were enslaved
• Indigenous peoples, who were murdered or “civilized’
• the mentally or physically disabled
• the poor
• those whose choice of how to live deviated even slightly from what this group thought of as appropriate.

I’m sure I’m leaving out many groups, but you get the picture.

The Declaration promises freedom of religion at a time when nothing was acceptable but their version of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Christianity. America did not elect its first Catholic president (JFK) until 1960. And even then, many voted against him, believing the first loyalty of Catholics was to the Pope, making it impossible for them to govern this nation independently. America elected its first Black president (Obama) only in 2008. And, in stark contrast to most of the world’s developed nations, America has never had a woman president and only had a female VP (Harris) in 2021.

None of this is accidental.

All of it was written into our foundational manifesto and its related documents then and over most of the next 250 years. And all of it deliberately disenfranchises women as well as any concept of eros or passion, relegating it to the confines of sex, which was not discussed in polite company.

Yet even that was regulated in the interests of men. The “missionary position,” which offers far less pleasure to many women than other options, was the only socially acceptable option. When to have sex was entirely the man’s decision – and woe to the woman who dared to say “I’m exhausted from caring for our seven children and the house and the animals, could we wait until tomorrow, please?”

Women who cheated were ostracized (or worse). The men they were with were chastised for breaking the religious bonds of matrimony, but often privately congratulated for “getting some on the side.”

Unmarried women who got pregnant were treated even worse, but the men (without whom we all know they could not have gotten pregnant) were free to abandon the woman and their child with little to no consequence, a decision that usually left her and the child poor and in danger. The list of “double standards,” all of which favor men, and many of which exist in some form today, goes on and on.

The power of eros is routinely not only ignored but deliberately stamped out because it is the power that made women force their ways into universities, athletics, physical pursuits, and other fields for which they were “unsuited.” It is the passion that made enslaved persons demand their freedom, and then their social equality (sadly, an ongoing struggle to this day). It is the craving of all who patriarchal society deems “less than” or “other” to be treated with fairness, justice, and equality.

Lorde’s manifesto includes the following:

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.

…It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

…Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from the most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult.

As we know, “women so empowered are dangerous.” Or at least they’re frightening to and thus have been demonized by those in power who have been, throughout history, men.

A glance at the history of the so-called witch trials here and elsewhere (I use the phrase so-called because there was nothing about them that had anything to do with a trial and no human is able to bring on a drought or create a bad harvest, no matter what you call her) shows us that women (who made up 90% of those so charged) who lived outside the guidelines proscribed by men – those who were healers, progressives, outspoken, uninterested in marriage or children (sometimes simply unable to bear children), midwives, physically or mentally different, etc., were the ones most often accused of witchcraft. The reason for their behavior? Eros. Usually expressed as a passionate desire for something not available to them.

A major element of BPW’s mission is to advocate for women and girls worldwide to have access to the pursuit of their own passions – of their own excellence – in their careers as well as their personal and communal lives.

Much of the work of NFBPWC focuses on the lives of women living in the United States of America – the nation founded on that profoundly un-equal equality – and the fact that we, in 2026, still need a committee dedicated to passing the ERA (enshrining in the Constitution the radical idea that it should apply equally to all) which was first introduced in Congress in 1923, passed in 1972, and remains unratified, and a committee designed to encourage equality for and connection with members of the LGBTQ+ community, illustrates how entrenched this inequality is.

It’s woven into the fabric of our nation so thoroughly that even those most interested in change sometimes cannot see it. (Find a timeline for the ERA Amendment here, and one for LGBTQ+ history here.)

Lorde reminds us that over and over that from birth to death, we come across “many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling [and that] we have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society…

“It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power [however, when we are] in touch with the erotic, [we] become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to [us], such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”

Let’s go forward into our 2026-2028 term determined to excavate, elevate, and access the power of eros each of us possesses in order to continue the work our mission requires of us.

Lisa Dicksteen
NFBPWC Virtual