This Essay Shaped Me
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Audre Lorde was right there at the beginning of my awakening.
I first encountered The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power in adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good.1 It was the fall of 2019, I had just moved to Eugene, OR. It was the second major move I’d made in my adult life, and the first that was not related to school, only to my hearts longing. I was in a relationship that was so incredibly misaligned from my truth, and through this book I felt as though I had been shown a world I had only known in my heart. It was through this book that me and my then partner came to the realization that we disagreed on the fundamental nature of human beings: I believed that at our core we wanted for the goodness and flourishing of each other. That we had veered off course, had flung ourselves away from our true selves. The horrors of the world reflected how lost we were.
This book, and this essay, showed me that I wasn’t delusional, that others also felt this longing for the goodness and flourishing of others. That we wanted to feel good, and we wanted other people to feel good. And I’ve spent the years since working, thinking, and loving towards more and more of this practice.
In launching this offer, I am finding myself reflecting on the lineage of my practice, the who and the why of it. I went back to read this essay today, and I wanted to share some of it’s first opening pieces of it with you.
It’s a joy to return to this piece and see how intimately it is woven to how my work conducts itself in the world. This cornerstone piece of work keeps me on the path. Steadily, steadily.
Enjoy.
There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information in our lives.
We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within Western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.
It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.
As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibility of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.
But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.
…
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.
This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors brings us closest to that fullness.
The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible.
At the same time I was reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. If you want a tasty bomb of world shifting, I recommend this same combination of books. adrienne maree brown is an avid scholar of Butler, which makes the pairing extra delicious.