Jump-cut to today’s humdrum office world, where men and women sit side by side, doing the same routine jobs. Turf sharing and overfamiliarity between the sexes have produced boredom and simmering resentments. Meanwhile, casual, oafish hookup culture has spread from college campuses, turning formal courtship rituals into creaky antiques. Sex has lost its mystique.

Second, in the digital era, the sex symbol as radiant Hollywood icon has been displaced by a blizzard of Instagram selfies, where increasingly young girls strike provocative poses, appropriating star-making techniques pioneered by the movie industry. Bare flesh is suffering serious overexposure. Wholesale blurring of the line between private and public is ultimately antithetical to eroticism. When everything is seen and known, there is no titillating taboo to transgress. Paradoxically, despite its relentless skin display, virtual reality dematerializes the body and has made it a locus of chronic anxiety. Body dysmorphia, from which singer Billie Eilish suffered, has gone epidemic.

Third, the female sex symbol, descended from mother goddesses like Venus and Isis, once implicitly represented the life force, nature itself. Because of overpopulation as well as career demands, today’s values have shifted. Marriage and pregnancy are often delayed or avoided by ambitious middle-class working women. Furthermore, the body is becoming mechanized, wed to technology. From cosmetic plastic surgery to fertility treatments, science rather than mother nature is in charge. The next inevitable step is AI sex robots with “faux flesh.” The sex symbol as natural wonder is fading — and with her goes the internal compass of our primeval animal instincts.

Fourth, in this current climate consumed by politics, interest in psychology has waned. Sex and gender, following academic postmodernism, are now treated as socially constructed matters of choice. Many seem to believe that all the uncertainty, turbulence and risk of sex can be remedied by passing laws and imposing after-the-fact penalties. But great art, including classic Hollywood movies, has always shown the irrational forces boiling just beneath the surface of civilization. Poets since Sappho have seen love as obsession, delusion and madness. The present over-politicized formulas about sex, with their ritual combat of villains and victims, fail to recognize the inherent complications, instabilities and delirium in attraction and desire.