Pleasure Activism

Amita Swadhin's story of navigating pleasure during and after childhood sexual abuse spoke to me in ways that I didn't expect. I have acknowledged for a few years now that I have a dissociative disorder from dealing with my own child abuse, but I didn't realize how much this played into my understanding of pleasure in life. It seems obvious now, for how much I have spoken on how everything in our lives are affected by our experiences. Maybe I just forgot, or locked it in a box to try to separate myself from it, as if age separates the abuse from its lasting affects on me.

For my entire life, my mother has believed that if she is not with a man, then she is worth nothing. This lack of valuing herself lead to many men who didn't value her either, and in turn did not value the two children that she had before she turned 24. Many of the men that my mother became involved with made it clear to me and my younger sibling that they wished we were not there at all, that we were a burden between him and my mothers relationship, and my mother was terrible at acting as if she didn't feel the same way.

For the last few years I have been reflecting on how I treat myself and how that inherently has been affected by the ways others have treated me and how I treat others. Choosing to be kind is not a one way street, it doesn't begin or end with how you treat others but is an amalgamation of how you treat yourself and the people around you, as well as who you choose to keep around you.

"I can grant others the same autonomy I am learning to wield on my own behalf - how I spend my life is my decision, based on all kinds of data coming from my body. And I can grant others the same level of complexity and contradiction as I am learning to embody - we are all multitudes in process." (Brown, p. 277)

I have learned that most people are not on the same page, not on the same stage in life, in experience, and this affects our relationships with one another, and that is okay. The expectations we hold for others are often held up by the expectations we have for ourselves, and learning how to hold space for yourself to not be perfect, to be empathetic and caring for yourself, is extremely impactful on how you treat the people around you.

"I am a whole system; we are whole systems. We are not just our pains, not just our fears, and not just our thoughts. We are entire systems wired for pleasure, and we can learn how to say yes from the inside out." (Brown, p. 277)

As someone who has used weed medicinally for six years now, I could go on forever about the benefits it has for me and how it is difficult for me to function without it. I have severe anxiety and I have intense anxiety attacks, and I have extreme migraines that no amount of ibuprofen can sway, and the precious flower has been the only reliable medication I have found for myself since I turned 18.

Although this is true for my experience, I am aware that all drugs affect people differently and that for some people, smoking every day would completely incapacitate them from being able to function. I appreciated hearing Brown's perspective that pointed out that weed can be used to keep someone from feeling wholly. I feel that I personally don't do this often, but I do live with men who exclusively use weed as a way to detach themselves from feeling, and that is definitely harmful in the long run.

I also deeply appreciate Brown's attention to harm reduction when discussing drug use, not leaving that part of the conversation hanging in the air. She writes about the topic without judgement and gives the feeling of empathy through the ways in which she encourages others to respond to those who are struggling with addiction.

"There are so many reasons why people are scared to get naked. We are told over and over again by capitalism that our true selves are not good enough. We are told that only the wealthy deserve to be well and receive care. Our bodies are not beautiful, because we are disabled or fat or not white or not pleasing to a man or..." (Brown, p. 208)

Last semester when I learned about and read Rest as Resistance by Tricia Hersey I really recognized how important it is to yourself as enough, period. The workings of everything outside my control has to be secondary to my control over my mind and body, and I must put in the effort for myself to have moments of rest every day. Even when things feel scary and like they are going by very quickly, I recognize that I need to take moments for myself to breath in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and out 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This has also been integral groundwork for me to be able to handle my body image issues and keep myself from becoming overwhelmed with working on myself.

Recognizing the reasons I had kept myself from resting were often connected to the unreasonable expectations I had held over myself, and has lead to a perspective change in how I see myself and my body. Capitalism has a way of crawling into the insecurities that are reinforced by societal and cultural norms, and recognizing just how embedded companies are in upholding these norms in order to keep steady income has really shifted how I view topics that are heavily influenced by the current culture.

The entry "Are You There God? It's Me, Day" made me think a lot about my partner and the trans male friends I had in high school. The fear of communication with new people about gender, and how it can feel (and sometimes be) life or death when you know that the conversation about it is going to be required at some point. Although my partner doesn't experience this through dating, it is something that they think about often when making new friends and visiting family. Just having to sit with this information that is so important to your identity is really difficult, especially when you care about keeping relationships with people who might not understand.

I am glad that the journal entries spanned over so many years, and showed their headspace from pre-transition to two years after. Too many trans lives end too soon, and hearing stories that don't end in tragedy are really encouraging to hear.

When reading the entry "Confessions of a Queer Sex Goddess" I felt seen in a way that I haven't been before. Really, I guess I felt called out in a way I hadn't been before, and that was about my perception of what sex is and isn't. Hearing Brown's own realization that she had been making the penis a monolith in her understanding of sex with men and women made me recognize that I had been holding onto similar beliefs, even if I had never expressed them so directly.

My partner is on the nonbinary spectrum, and their penis has been a problem area within our intimate relationship due to their body dysmorphia, and going through this entry I realized that I had been also treating the penis as if it was something required to sex, despite how we are able to make one another feel without it. I think that in recent years I have acted a lot less so, but I remember feeling that way more often early on in our relationship.

"Acknowledge and unlearn regressive beliefs inside our own pursuit of pleasure." (Brown, p. 151)

Going forward I want to make the active effort to stop seeing the penis as something required in intimacy, and more as an optional tool. I think this would also make my partner more comfortable about being intimate to know that it isn't something we have to engage with to have a valid sex life.

I remember having conversations on the playground with the girls in my girl scout troupe about sex, acting as if we knew anything. We knew not to bring it up around adults, but when we were allowed to get out of hearing range of our teachers it was always a topic of conversation. As early as age 8 I remember having these conversations, and although I know now as an adult that those conversations were built off of misconceptions and extremely limited understanding, I am also extremely grateful that my friends and I were able to hold those conversations at all.

"It became clear to me that if more people were encouraged to masturbate early and often, to learn what feels good to them and that they have the right to communicate that, there would be less sexual trauma, assault, patriarchy, misogyny, and general awkwardness." (Brown, p. 118)

I have met and heard the stories of so many people, especially those from a deeply religious household, who were never given the space to have those conversations comfortably or at all and ended up being put into situations which harmed them because they couldn't identify what was happening in the moment, and didn't know how to communicate about it afterwards. This is why I am firm in my beliefs that communicating with kids from an early age about sex and intimacy is extremely important in reducing the harm that is already a reality for children everywhere.

Too often the importance of learning how to clearly, calmly, and freely communicate about our emotions and how we are feeling is either silently implied or entirely ignored when we are taught how to create relationships. Not only have we avoided the conversations of clear communication, we often get uncomfortable when someone is able to communicate clearly, leading to socialization behaviors that discourage it when it's brought up. This has long lasting effects on how someone communicates in general, which means that conversations that are seen as socially taboo are shoved further out of sight to avoid the feelings of uncomfort that are inevitable with topics that imply moral guilt like sex and sexual pleasure.

"Learning to speak from our root systems about how we feel and what we want. Speak our needs and listen to others needs...The result of this kind of speech is that our lives begin to align with our longings, and our lives become a building block for authentic community and ultimately a society that is built around true need and real people, not fake news and bullshit norms." (Brown, p. 61-62)

My entire life I have been called "blunt" and "intense" because I have always been very straightforward about my feelings and what I think. As a neurodivergent person who has never been great at reading social ques, I have learned to notice why my straightforward communication style makes them uncomfortable, and it is often less that they really believe that there is something wrong with what I am asking and more that they have never had a conversation about it before and don't understand how to navigate it, so they want to jump ship as fast as possible. But the people who have stayed, those who communicate the same way or have withstood the growing pains of becoming comfortable with direct conversation, those relationships have continued to grow like our communication is its fertilizer.

Communication between lovers, friends, and community is the nourishment needed for the roots in our lives, and without it nothing can stand.

Growing up as the eldest daughter of single mother who had been an eldest daughter herself, the idea of self-preservation was something I didn't understand until recent years. I was always taught that whatever my idea of "self" was would (and should) only be a vehicle in serving others, and if I partook in anything that could be seen as "self-serving" I would be seen as lesser than as a person by my community. As I got older and began to recognize the patterns which created these beliefs, I realized that these ideas were not only misguided and extreme, but that it was far outside of my mother's control that I was taught to behave this way.

"We have a deeper socialization to overcome, one that tells us that most of us don't matter - our health, our votes, our work, our safety, our families, our lives don't matter - not as much as those of white men." (Brown, p. 59)

Quotes like these from the many feminist texts I've read since I've been in college have helped me in recognizing the ways that society over time has played a hand in how we perceive others, and inherently how we perceive ourselves. This recognition understanding is what really made me begin to care more for myself, the people I love, and the people I haven't loved yet (everyone else). I don't believe that white men are more more deserving of anything than myself or any minority person is, and it is up to me to change the ways in which I respond and act toward others so that I do not continue the harm which keeps white men in power.

The erotic that is natural to all things has historically been used against women as an ambiguous claim to power for men. They molded and decided what has become culturally agreed upon as erotic within culture, using it as a tool to continuously objectify and control women.

"For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives." (Brown, p. 27)

I think that women are often conditioned from an early age to believe that their "control" over their erotic-ness is directly tied to their value and power, despite the fact that what we often perceive as erotic is natural to all people. I wonder how different my life would be today if I hadn't been conditioned through my culture to constantly be thinking about how someone may use my body against me to say I am not worthy of the power that I naturally hold within. My body is not inherently erotic, but the erotic parts of me are natural and human, and they will never take anything away from my power and personhood.

I believe that the repression of the erotic parts of ourselves is always more harmful than learning and teaching ways to manage and embrace them. I've seen how repression of natural feelings often lead to repressive behaviors that affect more than the perceived "problem", just to realize that the "problem" was never a true enemy to begin with.