Revisiting authentic pleasure activism through the true intentions of Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic. For more visit my Rapture and Pleasure zine Issue 1.
The definition of female empowerment is a very nuanced concept in modern society. While some cultures connect empowerment to modesty, other cultures correlate empowerment to the rejection of respectability politics. While sexually liberal feminism began as a movement in the 1980s as a response to efforts by anti-pornography feminists, its evolution has created a lot of division and different outlooks surrounding the conversation of sex. Through different conversations and discourse on social media, it shows that sexually liberal feminism doesn’t escape unscathed from patriarchal values and influence.
This especially has garnered a lot of concern from adults towards the presence of minors on social media. I’ve been on both sides of the field, as a fifteen-year-old girl empowered through my public promiscuity and grooming and as a twenty-year-old seeking to protect girls going from online harassment, child pornography, and possible traumatic experiences. The truth is, the common narrative girls become programmed to is a sense of personal value through sexual performance that still benefits the male gaze. These are murky waters to wade through, as young girls have just the right to have space to experiment their desires and find empowerment through the erotic, but it’s necessary that we begin to enforce the idea that pleasure and confidence are more expansive than feeling the need to perform sexuality within a framework centering the male gaze.
In Adrienne Marie Brown’s book, Pleasure Activism, she reflects on her pleasure activism lineage in the first section of the book Who Taught You How to Feel Good? While meditating on Audre Lorde’s essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Brown works to broaden the scope to all the experiences that bring us happiness, aliveness, and transcendence announcing that “this is why it’s called pleasure activism, not erotic activism” (Brown, 15). She then prompts a couple of questions to ask ourselves when seeking out true pleasure and that orgasmic “yes!” in our everyday lives:
What would I be doing with my time and energy if I made decisions based on a feeling of deep, erotic, orgasmic yes?
How do I find balance in the things that give me pleasure, especially the things that tend to be misunderstood and manipulated by racialized capitalism, such as drugs, sex, drink, sugar?
How do we learn to harness the power and wisdom of pleasure, rather than trying to erase the body, the erotic, the connective tissue from society?
Is it possible for justice and pleasure to feel the same way in our collective body? Could we make justice and liberation the most pleasurable collective experiences we could have?
I found Brown’s call to acknowledge our pleasure activism lineage through unpacking past beliefs, looking inwards to what brings us joy and expressing gratitude an integral part of finding my own spiritual alignment and purpose, which is why the meditation on pleasure politics is so important to me as a brown, Latinx, queer woman.
In the past months of shadow work, I’ve been processing my past relationship experiences with heterosexual men. I recognize the way I used to perform a lot of compulsive heterosexuality in the way I desired men and related with them due to the pressures of being a first-generation immigrant from Colombia. Miami, with its incredible income inequality and gaudy performances of capitalism, influenced me to accept a lot of behaviors, mentalities, relationships, and goals that I came to the realization were more influenced onto me rather than coming from an authentic desire. Aligning to a more value-based life rather than a goal-oriented one through the lens of pleasure activism has truly brought me so much more inner peace and alignment to my highest, confident self through the pursuit of rapture rather than ambition that lacked gratitude and celebration of myself, my community, and liveliness.