Ethicosexual Gaze

 

The Ethicosexual Gaze

By Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy

In a world increasingly governed by the optics of beauty, performance, and perfection, desire itself has become commodified. Bodies are sculpted for consumption. Voices are curated for effect. Love often folds itself into market logic: match, swipe, acquire. Yet, beneath this glossy surface, there persists a more elusive and radical form of attraction—one that is not driven by symmetry or status, but by ethical substance. I call this the ethicosexual gaze: the erotic pull toward a soul governed by integrity.

To be ethicosexual is to experience desire not for the performative gestures of virtue, but for the internal consistency of a person who is good—regardless of whether anyone is watching. It is a longing not for perfection, but for coherence. Not for dominance or submission, but for trustworthiness and presence. The ethicosexual gaze sees through charisma and cleverness and finds beauty in quiet moral resolve.

🧭 Ethics as Erotic

This may seem paradoxical. After all, isn’t eroticism driven by passion, instinct, and thrill? Yet, as Plato suggests in The Symposium, the soul’s highest form of love is not for a body, but for the Form of the Good. Erotic love, in its purest form, is aspirational—it yearns upward, toward clarity, truth, and transcendence.

To the ethicosexual person, a moral act is not dry or dutiful—it is magnetic. There is something deeply attractive about someone who speaks the truth even when it costs them, who refuses complicity in harm, who embodies care not as branding, but as lifestyle. Their ethics are not performative; they are embodied. That embodiment itself becomes erotic.

 Ethical Beauty in Mysticism and Philosophy

This moral-aesthetic longing is not new. In Ibn Arabi’s cosmology, to love someone ethically is to perceive divine attributes in them—justice, patience, mercy, balance. The beloved becomes a mirror of God's names. Similarly, Simone Weil speaks of attention as the highest form of love—the ability to regard the other without attempting to possess them. In both cases, ethics is not a restraint on love—it is its deepest form.

The ethicosexual gaze, then, is not about abstention or purity. It is about a profound type of recognition: the attraction to someone who lives with intention, who wrestles honestly with right and wrong, who is not seduced by power but anchored by conscience. Their aura is not polished—it is luminous.

 Ethicosexuality in a Post-Truth World

In our era of manipulated truths and curated personas, the ethicosexual gaze is not merely romantic—it is revolutionary. To desire someone because they are kind when no one is watching, honest when it would be easier to lie, or just when the world rewards injustice, is to reorient love away from surfaces and back toward substance.

This is also why the ethicosexual person may often feel isolated. The moral imagination is rarely popular. In societies that valorize dominance, speed, and aesthetics, ethical slowness and depth can be mistaken for weakness or naivety. But those who see—really see—with the ethicosexual gaze know better. They recognize the rare flame that burns quietly in those who walk with inner dignity.

 Desire, Slowness, and Moral Recognition

To be ethicosexual is to fall in love with a choice someone makes. It is to be aroused by restraint, impressed by compassion, moved by accountability. It is not prudish—it is precise. It seeks not the loudest, but the most aligned.

The ethicosexual does not ask, “What can you offer me?” but “Who are you when no one is looking?”

And that, perhaps, is the most radical question of all.

 Closing Thought

In naming the ethicosexual gaze, we name what our culture often overlooks: that moral depth is not just admirable, but desirable. That ethics, far from being a constraint on desire, can be its highest expression. And that to love someone for their integrity is to love with one’s whole soul.


Adapted from my poem "Ethical Being" 

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