We live in an age in which desire is constantly stimulated and, at the same time, constantly interrupted. We open an app, we scroll, we pause for a few seconds on an image or a video, we scroll again. Excitement is born and dies in the space of a thumb gesture. There is no time for it to settle, to transform into something deeper. Eros, which by its nature requires duration, waiting and imagination, finds itself colliding with an attention economy designed for the opposite: for rapid capture, for continuous stimulation and for the immediate obsolescence of whatever has just captured us.
The phenomenon does not concern only pornography. It concerns the way we have learned to desire. Attention, once considered an inner resource to be cultivated, has become a commodity. Digital platforms compete to fragment it, to divide it into ever smaller and more monetisable units. In this context, erotic desire is no exception. It is reduced to a series of brief, easily replaceable impulses, devoid of memory.
Cognitive psychology has long described the costs of this fragmentation. Studies on “continuous partial attention” and “task switching” show how the brain, subjected to rapid and repeated stimuli, progressively loses the capacity to sustain prolonged mental states. Erotic arousal, in order to develop richly, requires precisely what scrolling obstructs: a certain temporal density, a permanence of the image or thought, the possibility of slowly elaborating what one is experiencing or imagining. When attention jumps from one body to another, from one scene to another, from one fantasy to another, desire has no time to take root. It remains superficial, easily satiated, and equally easily forgotten.
“Fast” pornography — the kind made of clips lasting a few seconds, of endless galleries to scroll through, of algorithms that always propose the “next” content — is not only a commercial product. It is also a form of training. It trains the gaze not to linger, the mind not to elaborate, the body to react automatically. Excitement becomes a reflex rather than an experience. One seeks the peak, not the path. One seeks the stimulus, not the construction of desire.
All this has subtle but profound consequences. Many people report feeling “accustomed” to a certain intensity of stimulation, and struggling to become aroused in slower, more real, more relational contexts. This is not a moral issue. It is a matter of neural plasticity and attentional habits. The brain adapts to what is proposed to it most frequently. If what is proposed is speed and infinite variety, slowness and depth end up seeming insufficient, almost boring.
Faced with this scenario, literary eroticism and slow imagination appear almost as countercultural practices. Reading a well-written erotic scene requires time. It requires entering a different rhythm, following the construction of desire page after page, inhabiting the thoughts and sensations of a character without being able to “scroll” ahead. There is no possibility of jumping to the culminating moment. There is only the possibility of remaining, of allowing the image to form slowly in the mind, of participating actively in its creation.
This kind of eroticism does not stimulate only the centres of pleasure. It also stimulates memory, empathy, the capacity to project oneself into another time and another body. It is an exercise in prolonged attention applied to desire. And precisely for this reason it can seem, to those accustomed to scrolling, more tiring at first. But it is also more lasting. The images it constructs do not vanish at the next scroll. They remain, they transform, they return at unexpected moments.
Culture has already known, in other eras, forms of eroticism based on delay and suggestion. The libertine literature of the eighteenth century, certain novels of the twentieth century, the erotic poetry of various traditions: all worked on the power of waiting, of the hint, of the image that does not exhaust itself. What changes today is the context. We are no longer in an age in which access to erotic images was scarce. We are in an age of overabundance. And in overabundance, what becomes rare and precious is no longer the stimulus, but the capacity to sustain it, to deepen it, not to consume it immediately.
There is also a political, or at least ethical, dimension to this reflection. An attention economy that fragments desire produces subjects who are more easily orientable, more dependent on the next dose of stimulus, less capable of building desiring relationships that require time and presence. This is not about demonising technology or pornography in themselves. It is about recognising that certain formats, certain rhythms, certain ways of consuming images have effects on our inner and relational lives.
The alternative is not necessarily abstinence. It is the conscious choice of different practices. Choosing to read instead of scrolling. Choosing to remain with an image or a scene long enough for it to work on us. Choosing to construct fantasies that do not exhaust themselves in a few seconds, but that require to be inhabited. Choosing, sometimes, slowness as a form of resistance.
Eros, in its most interesting form, is not only discharge. It is also construction. It is the capacity to keep a desire alive, to make it grow, to let it transform. Scrolling, as it is structured, makes this construction difficult. Not because it is “bad,” but because it is designed for another kind of economy: that of immediate capture and rapid passage to the next.
Reclaiming one’s own desire, today, also passes through a reconquest of attention. Not as an ascetic discipline, but as a practice of presence. As a choice not to allow oneself to be fragmented. As a decision, from time to time, to switch off the flow and to remain, for longer than expected, with an image, with a thought, with a sensation.
In that remaining, something different can happen. Desire ceases to be an impulse to be satisfied and becomes a space to be inhabited. And in that space, perhaps, eros rediscovers a density that scrolling, by its nature, cannot offer.
