Eros from an Athenian vase 490 BC

As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here for the necessity of reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them.
The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros – the personification of love in all its aspects – born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

~ Audre Lourde from Uses of the Erotic as Power