The radical case for pleasure in a dark and uncertain world

It's no easy task to be a sex columnist during a contentious election week. I am thinking of all the things I could have written leading up to the election: the role of reproductive rights in this election; the impact of Project 2025 on my industry and the LGBTQ community; the significance of a Black woman on the Democratic ticket for President. I'm also thinking of all the negative comments I often see on my columns when they ostensibly have nothing to do with politics (though like any good feminist, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that ). Things like, "Is this news?" "Is there anything more important happening in Pittsburgh?" "Why should we care about this?" "The is going to trash." Yes, I read the comments. I am often taken aback by them. I'm a sex writer who writes about sex, and my doing so doesn't preclude anyone else from writing about the things they find more important. And for readers, there is certainly no shortage of political think pieces about the stakes of this election season, including right here at .. What stands out most to me about these comments, though, is the notion that sex and sexuality is somehow frivolous, unimportant, and apolitical — the notion that sexuality doesn't cut to the core of who we are and what we long for. As our sexual freedom hangs in the balance this election, I want to remind you what Audre Lorde told us decades ago: a focus on our erotic lives is "not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." In a world where we are made to feel small and incapable of enacting political change or even being heard, making room for pleasure, joy, and love in our lives is a way of fighting back against a cold world that would watch us die. Recently I was listening to an interview with Adrienne Maree Brown , author of , and was struck by her notion that we cannot know what we are fighting for (politically or otherwise) unless we know what it feels like, in our bodies, to be satisfied. She points out that this notion runs counter to all of our capitalist programming. She comments, "Capitalism has us socialized to think we constantly have to be looking elsewhere for it, so we're running around, not satisfied, not satisfiable, no sense of what that would be like." Being in touch with our pleasure, our sexuality, our desires is a way of knowing what we are fighting for. Sexuality is central, in this regard, to our political lives. She spells this out:

And in our justice movements, that's not a good look, because if we have no idea what it feels like to be satisfied, we won't know when we win. So I'm always like, we need to be satisfiable. We need to know what that feels like. And one of the fastest ways to know what that feels like is to be satisfied in the body. Like, you know what an orgasm feels like, most of us do, and even if we can't feel an orgasm, we can feel pleasure. We can feel the beauty. We cannot, in other words, repress pleasure and intimacy and expect to understand what it is that we are striving for politically and otherwise. There is also no way of knowing when we have achieved that if we don't know what it means to be present in and to our joy.