Smartphones and lovemaking
The philosophy of sexiness & cultivating life as one long act of love
Smartphones make you dumb because it atrophies your ability to act. In German, “to act” is handeln, which is related to the word “hand”. Our hands make us human. This shows up in the metaphor, “I can handle it”, meaning I can do something about it. We exist when we’re able to do things. I act, therefore I am.
Digital tools make us handless. In the famous 2007 keynote presentation where he introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs declared: “We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with—born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers.”
Fingers have replaced hands. We no longer have to handeln anything because we no longer deal with things that matter—literally, things made of atoms.
Get out of your head…
Ideas aren’t real in the way the world is real. The smartphone is Plato’s cave, full of shadows and projections: social media gives us illusions of intimacy, moodboards feed us fantasies of perfect kitchens and wardrobes, the screen conjures hallucinations of what to think—if I say “think of a red car” and a red car appears in your mind, the pixels on your screen have just made you attend to something that isn’t real.
In “Your phone is why you don’t feel sexy”
says:Eros—carnal desire—is an embodied experience, and our phones do a terrific job of getting us out of our bodies and into our heads. In the digital age, we often neglect our bodies entirely, and use them merely as a way to transport our heads to meetings.
How many hours do you spend inside your head versus engaged with your body? On your screen versus in the world? Homo digitalis doesn’t act because he is not embodied. How could you feel sexy if you’re not even real? The sexiest you’ve felt wasn’t when you looked hottest, but when you felt most alive.
…and into your body
When we’re not embodied, we stop living with passion. “Passion” typically means enthusiasm, but, originally, it meant to suffer for something, to commit, to endure (Latin, passio). Without a body to act with, we have no art, no innovation, no creation. Sexiness is about creativity and that vital force that makes you feel like the world can expand, that 1+1 can indeed make 3.
Evolutionary biology talks about 1+1=3 literally, like how sexiness indicates health or fertility. But sex appeal transcends facial symmetry or a waist-to-hip ratio. Sexiness is an unfakeable energy, it’s how someone looks when they’re here—not pretending to be anywhere else, not shrinking, not second-guessing, just here, present and in the flesh. Sexiness is a passio for living, a kind of beauty that feels like the freedom to take up space and the confidence to vote for what matters in the room with their attention.
This is why Christianity is about “the Word became flesh” and why the resurrection of Jesus was bodily, not figurative, and why communion is literal, not just a symbol. The deepest truths are not meant to remain abstract but to be embodied: tasted, touched, taken in, and lived through our bodies.
Ultimately, what we’re trying to embody is love: our appetites are fixed on compassion, connection, passion, union—felt both in tenderness and in flesh. Culture might say that all horniness is filthy and that lust somehow has nothing to do with who someone is on the inside, yet Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships with her face, not her personality. Modernity might believe that the body is detached from emotions, yet William Blake wrote:
Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld
Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the
chief inlets of Soul in this age.
Beauty matters because it reminds us that the real is richer than any possible depiction of it. Beauty reminds us that there is something real, like light peeking through holes in a thick blanket, temporarily revealing itself in a material world but originating from and indicating that there’s something yonder. It’s Stendhal’s “Beauty is the promise of happiness,” or Kant’s “Beauty is a sign of the morally good.”
An embodied life cultivated with true intentions is a life lived as one act of love. In a life cultivated with passio, all action is a form of lovemaking: cooking with love, gardening with love, writing with love, and, literally, making children with love. When material reality integrates with compassion—when we’re embodied—the heart becomes as much of a sex organ as any other reproductive part of us. Everything we produce could be a labor of love, from babies to books to brunch.
Beauty will save the world,
says Dostoevsky’s holy fool in The Idiot. In the digital age, it’s true, because beauty pulls us out of the abstract and returns us to our bodies. A charming face across the room, the scent of deodorant in the elevator—these are reminders that we are flesh, not just profiles and avatars.
Love is not a distraction from day-to-day life; it is life. The finger swiping a screen is not the hand kneading dough, turning a page, petting a cat, or caressing another’s cheek. That finger, that cyborgish extension, belongs to a creature of convenience, not of craft or care or love.
Beauty stirs desire in the deepest sense of wanting to live, to notice, to savor, to act. It can only save the world if it saves us first, giving back our hands so we can labor with love using what’s in our hearts.
❤️,
Digital life is a tool like anything. It needs to be purposely channeled towards the good, and can enhance the good, if we make it do so. People (I’m guilty of this) use it to distract from life instead of work for it.
Loved this Sherry!! Trying to be deliberate about living a more embodied life. Also, the cover image you created for this piece is incredible haha!