The Book that Changed My Orientation to Life, Pleasure, and Revolution: Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown
Everyone has that one interaction with a person, a class, or a piece of media that fundamentally altered the course of their life. Your existence is now defined as life before encountering it, and life after. For me, this canon event occurred when I read Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown.
During my junior year in college, I was accepted into a peer health educator program at my university. As part of the training, we were instructed to read Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown. While reading, it was my first time ever being invited to critique the U.S.’s current economic system and imagine something more human-centered than capitalism. Additionally, brown’s writing style fascinated me. It was rich, well researched, and informative without being pretentious or confusing. It felt approachable, relatable, refreshing, and engaging. I was hooked and yearned for more.
After doing some research, I came across her first NYT Bestseller, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. The book is organized in different essays written by brown and other prominent thinkers, interviews, poems, and songs. Pleasure Activism discusses a range of topics surrounding the intersection of activism and pleasure including queer and trans desire, the pleasure of friendship, the politics of radical drug use, sex work, nonmonogamy, raising sexually liberated kids, pleasure after sexual abuse, disability and chronic pain and pleasure, and so much more. I was intrigued by the cover that featured various different animals having sex – bunnies, grasshoppers, snakes, birds, etc. The taboo nature of sex makes it so that the realities are rarely discussed. I shared this vision with brown of discussions around this topic as an enormous area of untapped potential.
Prior to discovering brown’s work, I accidentally experienced my first orgasm via a jacuzzi jet. My first instinct was to share this information with my friends, but shame overtook me. I noticed my peers fascination with the topic of sex, but I also noticed the harm it caused; nudes leaked and spread around classes, slut shaming, casual sexual harassment and violation (grabbing girl’s butt’s walking down the hall), rape jokes, and adults hypersexualing children – calling young girls “fast” just for having curvier bodies. My private experiences illuminated the positive potential of sex, yet my observations pointed somewhere different.
To my surprise, when I opened page 1 of Pleasure Activism, the very first footnote read:
“If you can, I suggest that you have an orgasm before diving into this book and at the beginning of each new section. I am not joking – an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away and the worries at bay.”
I couldn’t remember a time in my life where I had been given permission to center my own sexual pleasure – where pursuing my own pleasure was celebrated, encouraged, and advocated for. Living in a capitalist society that sees your value solely as what you can produce for others will make that so. The first time I had sex, it was very painful. But I desperately wanted the experience to be pleasurable for my partner, so I winced, grimaced, and endured. I never spoke up unless it was to ask him if he was enjoying it. When I watched porn, the women always looked like they were in pain. Additionally, sex seemed to start when the penis got hard and end when the penis ejaculated. Porn also featured majority white characters unless there was some racial fetishization being sprinkled in. Consequently, I thought that sex was not really about me, a cisgender black woman, and that pain during sex was commonplace.
While I found the seemingly sexual nature of the book alluring, I was simultaneously bewildered. I knew brown to be a serious, professional, social justice advocate. So what was she doing encouraging me to masturbate? I thought to myself, “surely me and brown were not living in the same world.” Black women are not allowed to bring our full authentic selves to work without also jeopardizing the little respect, dignity, status, and financial stability white men afforded a small percentage of us. Despite this, I saw this book as brown’s invitation to step into a world I didn’t know could exist or that I’d been longing for. I allowed my mind to be blown and happily followed her instructions. I allowed the shame and limiting beliefs causing resistance to vacate my body, and I buckled up for the otherworldly journey I was about to embark on.
Brown defines Pleasure Activism as, “… the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy. Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression.” On brown’s podcast, How to Survive the End of the World, she talks with her sister about one of her intentions for writing Pleasure Activism. She speaks to it as a form of harm reduction, “…carving out a space for me to be my whole self.” This level of authenticity resonates deeply with me and reminds me why I’m so drawn to the Reproductive Justice movement. Black women and all people with intersecting identities know too well that attempting to address our identity-based injustices in siloes creates huge gaps that impede our liberation. For instance, we cannot put down our race or our socioeconomic status when discussing our gender or sexuality. The unique combinations of our marginalized identities creates specific challenges (and at times, joys and pleasures) that must be addressed with cultural competency, care, understanding, specificity, and consideration.
The chapter, Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure by Joan Morgan gives us historical context regarding how we got where we are currently. Morgan is an award winning author and scholar known for her contributions on the intersections of hip hop, Black feminism, and pleasure. She quotes a mentor of hers who once said, “You do know that feminists are allergic to pleasure, right?” Morgan disclaims that the statement was a joke, but I believe there is some truth in every joke. Black women’s history in the U.S. is wrought with state-sanctioned rape and gender-based violence, making so much of our work as Black women pushing back against our dehumanization and this subsequent violence. It is time we recognize that our freedom as Black women is as much about eradicating violence as it is about embracing pleasure sexually and in general. Black feminist philosophy espouses that the personal is political, and what is more personal, more intimate, than sex? We must push past the awkwardness and discomfort that comes from rendering this area of our lives traditionally seen as private, suitable for public discourse.
Brown’s work also includes Audre Lorde’s popular essay, the “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in section one, which is widely regarded as a foundational text within Black feminist thought. Lorde recognizes the erotic, our repressed and unrecognized feelings, as sources of power that systems of oppression understand and intentionally attempt to stifle. However, “It [the erotic] 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.” I see this book as brown’s attempt to help us all strive towards this space of satisfaction in all areas of our lives, and afterwards, hopefully, finding it impossible to go back to accepting the bare minimum.
The subtitle of the book initially struck me as oxymoronic, The Politics of Feeling Good. Prior to reading Pleasure Activism, my perception of a life committed to activism was one of great nobility and commitment, but also neverending performance, burnout, and exhaustion. But social justice is often a matter of life or death, so the drawbacks to me seemed justifiable. Seeing brown approach such a solemn topic with this unforeseen lens of sexuality and pleasure felt forbidden, but I was intrigued by this unique juxtaposition. A quote in the introduction reads,
“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” – Toni Cade Bambara
After reading this quote, I thought to myself, “If activism is such important work, then why aren’t more of us involved?” In order to make the revolution “irresistible” we’d have to think about what the barriers are to entry and how we could remove them. Brown proposes that the enormous self sacrifice typically associated as fundamental to real activism is not necessarily mandatory. In the chapter titled Wherein I Write About Sex (Five Tangible Tools of a Pleasure Activist), brown writes, “I have been thinking, what feels good is sustainable. When my body feels good, my life feels good, and I want to keep going, and fight for my right to exist and love and grow and evolve.” There is an unimaginable amount of work to be done in order to abolish white supremacist patriarchal imperialist capitalism and achieve true liberation for marginalized communities. Theoretically, we could spend every second of our lives working to solve these problems, living a life void of joy, laughter, and rest. Or, as brown suggests, we could integrate these good feelings into the process of activism and “recognize that pleasure is a measure of freedom.”
Brown is thoughtful, brave, vulnerable, and insightful to make these connections and introduce a radical and transformative way of thinking about our path to liberation. I am grateful to her for this mindset shift, and I now identify as a Pleasure Activist myself, taking this framework with me everywhere I go.
Naima is a public health advocate, writer, and filmmaker. She is passionate about providing marginalized communities with the resources and education they need to live …
More By This Author
