Has the abundance of digital erotic imagery made the human body more sacred, more disposable, or something else entirely?

“Paradoxically, some digital erotic images become hyper-invested with meaning. Certain figures (e.g., camgirls, influencers, digital dominatrices) accumulate semiotic and libidinal power that borders on the sacred. This is not Benjamin’s pre-mechanical aura, but a kind of post-digital aura: a uniqueness born not from authenticity but from algorithmic scarcity, curation, and parasocial intimacy.

The ‘OnlyFans priestess,’ to borrow a metaphor, may cultivate rituals, linguistic codes, and emotional scripts that elevate her image into the realm of the quasi-sacred—fetish not in the vulgar sense, but as fetisso, that which is made sacred through attention, ritual, and exchange.

Drawing from Durkheim's notion of the sacred as socially constructed through ritual demarcation, and Bataille’s exploration of the sacred as excess, rupture, and the dissolution of the self, one could argue that the digitally eroticized body returns the sacred, albeit in mutated form.”

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