Pleasure Activism by brown adrienne maree; Rodriguez; Piepzna-Samarasinha Leah Lakshmi

Author:brown, adrienne maree; Rodriguez; Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2019-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

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56 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “I Want You, but I’m Triggered: Finding Pleasure When Trauma and Memory Collide,” January 24, 2018, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/i-want-you-im-triggered/finding-pleasure-when-trauma-and-memory-collide.

57 If it’s nonconsensual, there are options: https://www.wikihow.com/Prevent-a-Potential-Rape.

Strategic Celibacy

Recently there’s been a lot of back and forth about the line between bad sex and rape.58 For some people, this public dialogue has made us look back at our own intimate lives with new eyes.59

What did we want to happen? What actually happened? Why did it happen? Was it harmful? Were we harmed? Did we ever discuss it? Why or why not?

There’s a world of work to be done—people with any sort of privilege in intimate situations have to stop denying what they know, stop pushing past no, stop waiting for mouths to say no when bodies have already expressed it, stop getting off on power expressed as sexual access and harm.

But I think we all need to ask ourselves: Have I been complicit in continuing harmful patterns of sex that blur the line?

I’ve been getting really interested inside this inquiry about a slightly different question: how many of us are trapped in a politically regressive loop of desire?

How many of us, even as we hone a feminist or womanist or post-gender or otherwise radical politics around who we are relative to power, regress in bed into submission practices we are taught are biological, primal, even spiritual? To say it plainly, I suspect many of the most powerful women in the species are still convinced that in bed we need to be dragged by our hair into a cave and ravaged by a lover who plays a traditionally patriarchal role of dominance.

I suspect a key aspect of succeeding in the work of #metoo and smashing the patriarchy will be examining not just true rape culture but our culture of desire. Not with shame or with righteousness but with deep curiosity: What turns us on, and can we change it if it doesn’t align with what we believe? How many of us can even imagine desire that is liberated from patriarchy?

The next few sections are going to focus on how we can grow our desires to align more closely with our dignity, using celibacy, fantasy, pornography, and communication to cultivate new possibilities for desire within ourselves and between us and others.

Celibacy is intentionally refraining from sexual relations. This means not having sex with other people. It can include not cultivating sexual energy with others. Some people also limit their masturbation practices during celibacy.

I’ve intentionally practiced celibacy a few times in my life and find it to be a glorious way to reconnect with what matters in my body, to slow and deepen my pace and relationships outside the paradigm of desire, to decolonize my longings and remember my sacred sensual self.

We are still learning all the strategies we will need to truly dismantle patriarchy. Strategy is just a plan of action toward a goal. To use celibacy as part of our strategy to dismantle patriarchy, we must have a clear goal, a clear intention, a clear process.

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