Currently listening to…
Earlier this week, I wrote (again) about sex, intimacy, and pleasure being the work of my life. Overcoming vaginismus, learning how to structure a book about that journey, and trying to live each day as vibrantly and as in my body as possible is my full-time job. When my partner went out of town last week, I seized the opportunity to dust the cobwebs off my dilators and crack open Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown.
This book has been on my TBR list for a while, and the copy I snagged is used with pages that have already been folded over and passages that have already been highlighted — all things that make me love it more. I’m only a few chapters in, but already there have been moments in this book that have made me feel alive and seen and liberated.
For example, this:
“That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.”
And this:
“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.”
Who taught you to feel good? is the question that opens section one, where brown outlines the influences in her life that encouraged her to explore and prioritize pleasure of all kinds — not just sexual. I fully intend to write a One Nightstand review when I finish this book but in the meantime, there’s a homework assignment at the end of the first chapter that I can’t resist.
I've thought about my answers to these questions a lot this week. At first, all I could come up with was a list of things I wasn’t taught about feeling good. That was an easy list to make. For example, I don’t remember my mother teaching me about the female orgasm. I scribbled it defiantly, like I was holding my empty hand out and asking, how could you not teach me the language of pleasure I feel so entitled to now?
Then I thought, wasn’t that the same mother who used to lock herself in the bathroom so she could enjoy a hot bath? The mother who always lotioned her feet before putting on her socks? The mother who curated soundtracks for car rides before playlists were a thing? I can still see her crying at the steering wheel, singing off-key to a song about love and loss, condensing the processing of a spectrum of emotions all characteristic of being twentysomething into the short time it took her to drive us from A to B. Even now when I call her crying, among her first words of advice to clear my muddy head is always, “Get a bath.”
I come from writers. More specifically, I come from a long line of women writing. My maternal grandmother’s mother used to sit at her typewriter on a desk by a window and write murder mysteries. Funnily enough, my family now believes her mother murdered her abusive husband when my grandmother’s mother was only a child.
Some of my first long-form writing was in letters sent back and forth to my grandmother who lived in Tennessee. I can remember sprawling out on my bed trying to decipher her loopy and perfectly italicized cursive handwriting, reading her words over and over again until they flowed in my mind as intently as she’d written them.
I’m the daughter of an English teacher who was probably born an English teacher but at least behaved like an English teacher long before she graduated from college. I remember spending summers writing notes to my mother in a purple pocket-sized journal, answering prompts assigned to me and my sisters to keep us in practice. We would line our notebooks up on the counter so that when my mother got home from work, perhaps before her nightly bath, she’d craft responses and more questions for each of us to ponder the following day. Most years for my birthday, she’d write in two cards, seemingly never able to find one that captured everything she wanted to say.
I have an ambidextrous aunt with a knack for storytelling, and my younger sister was writing popular fan fiction on Wattpad’s Frontpage when she was only a sophomore in high school. When she read the rant I wrote earlier this month, she noted that it seemed I was still “holding back truth,” and I was.
Before she died of breast cancer, my first grade teacher taught me to run for fun, to take pleasure and gratitude in simply being able. It’s a skill I've abused over and over again in a never-ending effort to force my body into thinness, but one I always come back to no matter what I look like.
My paternal grandmother taught me how to bake, but more importantly, she taught me how to savor. Not a day in her kitchen would six hours of labor warrant restriction when it came time to have our cake and eat it, too.
My high school sweetheart taught me how to smoke. He held his hands over mine when I clumsily fumbled for the carb on his favorite pipe and blew minty smoke in my face when I cried about not being able to figure it out. To this day, burnt smoke in my lungs is one of my favorite sensations, and the first hit of anything always makes me think of him.
I was 27 years old the first time a man penetrated me, and it didn’t hurt like I’d always feared it would. That man made my body want to be penetrated before my anxious mind could catch up. Even so, he narrated his movements like I asked him to and paused so I could take deep breaths. He still does this.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t add Emily Nagoski, author of Come As You Are, to this list. She gave me the language of pleasure I felt like I missed when I was growing up. I’ve always thought it was late, but the older I get, the more I write, and the deeper I dive into the experience of pleasure, the more I understand that her words found me right on time.
I think the dealing with your target subject has been wonderful. I am sure you did not expect to reap new insights into your life and all that have made you who you are. Some times the greatest thing about dealing with what we see as short comings comes a flood of new knowledge, feelings, sorrows and great new subjects. I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is as a reader of your work to see you grow and discover and learn all the things you communicate. Just wonderfully awesome as usual!