If Nehamas mainly takes issue with the disavowal of desire within modern aesthetics, Richard Shusterman’s main target is the “idealist-rationalist repugnance for the body” which he finds is permeating the entire tradition of Western philosophy (2005: 324; see also Irvin (ed.) 2016). To counter this, Shusterman proposes a new discipline, “somaesthetics,” which aims to study the “experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning” (1999: 302) and which has as one of its main subsidiary ambitions to “(i)mprove our appreciation of the artistry, beauty, meaning that sexual experience can offer” (2008: 85). In several of his essays he argues that sexual experience itself can qualify as an aesthetic experience, since most of the crucial features attributed to aesthetic experiences are also attributable to erotic experiences: they are pursued and valued for their own sake, they are rich in intensity and stand out distinctively from the flow of ordinary humdrum experience, they display harmonies of structure and developing form, they are being subjectively savored but also intentionally directed at an object, they deeply engage thought, feeling, and imagination, and stimulate both body and mind (2007: 57, 2008: 93). Hence, instead of ignoring or disenfranchising the tradition of erotic art, Shusterman pleads for the reassertion of an “ars erotica” which would not just involve a renewed attention for certain works of the past, but would entail the development of genuine erotic art forms that could help increase our understanding of the relation between aesthetics and sex, deliver aesthetically rewarding erotic experiences, and deepen our appreciation of the aesthetic potential of other somatic practices (2007: 57).