Reclaiming Our Right to Pleasure
If you read my last article, “Boundaries and Consent: Start by Saying No,” I reflected on the importance of setting healthy boundaries, which I believe requires recognizing the difference between willing consent and self-compromising acquiescence. Towards the end of the article, I discussed ways saying no can also open up the deliciousness of an enthusiastic “hell yes!” I’m writing this article to expound on this idea, as I feel particularly inspired having just read Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” which if you haven’t read, I’d highly recommend.
I’d like to shift focus and have us start thinking about boundaries on a macro level, to start thinking about the intentional ways we can distance ourselves from the denigrating societal structures and frameworks that seek to maim and suppress our erotic power, particularly women’s erotic power, though I believe all bodies can tap into the feminine erotic power Lorde references. I’d also like to acknowledge that when I use the term women, this is inclusive of all women, cis women, transwomen, or any and all people who identify as a woman. It is also important to distinguish between the erotic and the pornographic. Lorde defines pornography as “sensation without feeling,” while “the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings, an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire, a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane” (Lorde).
She claims women in particular have been taught to vilify, suppress, and devalue our erotic power, that “we’ve been taught to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings,” keeping us loyal, docile, and complicit in oppressive structures. As individuals become complicit, we live on what Lorde refers to as external directives, rather than our own internal knowledge and needs. In doing so, we neglect ourselves and maim the connection to that deep intuition and responsibility we have to being the architects of our own lives, to saying yes to what we desire. Of course, this suppression of the erotic, of that innate, deeply spiritual and feminine source that exists within all bodies, is one way in which we consciously or subconsciously uphold heteropatriarchy and capitalism; in fact, it’s exactly what these frameworks thrive on, complicity, for we all know an empowered, erotic woman is a “dangerous one.” We must tap into the “life force of women,” the ``creative energy empowered, `our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” (Lorde).
Marianne Williamson said “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” The erotic is our power. Our desire for deeply shared experiences is our power. Our creativity, our resistance, and our love is our power. We as individuals do not need to rely on our suffering to bond us but can rather rely on our joy and our pleasure, which can simultaneously be used as tools for dismantling racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, misogyny, and white supremacy.
Society has taught us to sever the connection between the spiritual and political spheres, yet that too is simply another one of the master’s tools of oppression. What we need is a collective movement of individuals brave enough to prioritize, nurture, protect, and wield the power of their eroticism, reclaiming in our own language our right to say yes to ourselves, to our deepest yearnings and cravings, so that we may grow beyond the distortions of docility, submission, and complicity. Lorde states, "to refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.”
The erotic is a breaking free of the fear, of the hiding, the silencing, the shrinking, and a reclaiming of the ineffable, the chaos, the deepest, ancestral, creative, feminine life forces we can all use for metamorphosis, justice, and collective healing. We must be brave enough to refuse settling for “the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, the merely safe.” (Lorde). We must discard our perceived sense of powerlessness and learned satisfaction with suffering and self-compromising abnegation, and instead-unveil our wild magic from within.
Exercising and honoring our erotic power then becomes not only our personal responsibility, but our collective responsibility and essential tool for political resistance and change. Recognizing and acting with our deeply feminine and creative power is an avenue for reclaiming our rights to pleasure, to desire, to independence, and ultimately, to liberation.
Link to Audre Lorde’s “The Erotic as Power”