Let's talk about sex... and belonging

Pleasure as a measure of our liberation

Image source: ISTA (with thanks to Kan Yan for introducing me to them)

Increasingly I’m finding myself drawn to the forbidden, to the taboo, to the shadow as a site of inquiry and exploration. Sex. Money. Death. Places we fear to tread, or shine our full light for fear of what we might uncover. I suspect it has something to do with our intuitive recognition of the limitations of our rational minds, our cognitive selves.

We sense — correctly — that in these domains our minds cannot save us. Logos doesn’t have much to say in the realm of Eros. We cannot think our way into an understanding of our relationship to sexual intimacy. These are topics that live deep in our bodies, in uncharted terrain.

Yet: we know there is something there for us, something profound. What if we took a closer look? Sat with the tension, the discomfort, and allowed ourselves to feel? I recently came across a line from Emily Nagoski that captured for me the radical potential of sex, and its relationship to belonging:

Your desire for sexual experience is a desire to be known more deeply and seen more fully as a human.

So today I want to talk about sex and belonging.

TL;DR: The deep sexual intimacy that so many of us yearn for requires that we first belong to ourselves. Authenticity (being yourself) precedes vulnerability (sharing your authentic self). Pleasure — and the deeper intimacy that transcends pleasure — is both a tool of liberation, and a measure of our progress toward it. We become what we practice.

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Gender, loving, and being loved

A couple seemingly contradictory ideas here. Michael Reichert, in his groundbreaking book on raising boys, notes (the line is actually from this podcast episode, channeling philosopher Nel Noddings):

We first have to learn how to be cared for in order to learn how to care for others.

In our patriarchal society, this often means that men are ill-prepared for love, particularly when it comes to our bodies and the power of touch. Mark Greene writes a brilliant essay on how men are systematically starved of platonic touch from an early age (I’m reminded of a quip from Dan Savage that was too on-point for me to laugh at; something to the effect of “if it weren’t for sports, American men would have no platonic touch in their lives”).

But there’s more. Alison Gopnik’s research on how children learn continues to be stunningly revelatory; in an interview with Ezra Klein, she explains:

We don't provide care to people because we love them, we love them because of the acts of care we do for them.

So here’s the paradox: in order to love, you must be loved (receive care); in order to love, you must provide care. Women are socialized both to provide care (thus equipping them to be more skilled in the art of loving, following Gopnik) and to receive care (particularly as children, in the form of touch and nurturance). Boys (speaking in sweeping generalizations here) get neither: we are not encouraged to provide care (and thus don’t get the practice of what it means to love another) nor do we receive nurturance or tenderness (though we do receive many other forms of care). Comedian Billy Connolly captured the paradox:

Women need to feel loved to have sex and men need to have sex to feel loved… The basic act of continuing the species requires a lie from one of you.

Small wonder our adult heterosexual relationships are so screwed.

“Belonging to yourself is essential to peak erotic intimacy”

This line too from Nagoski, on her podcast. It’s a simultaneously obvious and radical point: of course we can’t allow ourselves to be fully seen — accepted, much less desired — by someone else if we don’t give ourselves the same grace. Here’s Esther Perel:

Desire and self-worth go hand in hand. In order to want, we need to feel deserving.

As with everything under patriarchy, this is deeply gendered. Men are socialized to feel entitled: we deserve pleasure. Women are socialized to provide it. But of course none of us actually get useful training in what we really want: connection, intimacy, love. Instead we chase proxies and phantoms: sex as a metric, what Mark Greene calls “sex as validation.”

I watched Kinsey last night, thinking about this post, and was struck by the brutal reminder: 1948 was not that long ago, and these attitudes still prevail across much of America and the world. The dominant feeling that I suspect most of us still associate with sex, even in 2021: shame. This is about our bodies, our desires, our sense of what we deserve, our concern about our performance… all fears which most of us face with essentially no support (woefully inadequate sex-ed, negligible teaching or practice in consent culture, pleasure or relationships or…).

Laura Flanders did a great interview with sex activists Jaclyn Friedman, Ericka Hart, and Tina Horn, where Jaclyn reminds us:

Fear and shame are what keep us easily manipulated… If we actually put more value and priority in our pleasure, and accept it as our birthright… it would be a lot harder to get us to do things that cause us pain.

And of course, the first target of that shame is always ourselves: it serves to disconnect us from our bodies, and then from each other. It’s shocking how radical it is to say out loud what should be obvious: we have a right to pleasure. This is why movements to reclaim our bodies are so vital: I love Sonya Renee Taylor’s work on The Body is Not an Apology, e.g. This isn’t just a matter of reclaiming our right to pleasure: it’s a question of reclaiming our humanity. As Audre Lorde reminds us:

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

Magnificent sex requires first reclaiming — and then transcending — the self

Here it’s worth quoting Esther Perel at length; I think she beautifully weaves the first two concepts I’m trying to convey in one stunning expression (this whole talk is an incredible watch; Esther in dialogue with sex columnist Dan Savage):

What turns her on is to be the turn on, and that's the big secret of female sexuality is that it is massively narcissistic. It's the opposite of the caring for others, of feeling responsible for others. If she can think about herself, then she can be into it. And in order to think about herself, she then needs to like herself. Hence, she can't be in a critical voice. That's the perfection piece. If she starts to think about everything about her that is not good enough, that she doesn't like, she will shut herself off. Before you ask a woman if she will make love to a man or to another woman, ask a woman if she would make love to herself. If she doesn't want to make love to herself, she won't let anybody else do it either, and that's where the perfection piece comes in.

In order to allow oneself to experience pleasure, one has to feel worthy of it: to belong to oneself. More: it requires that we let go of our responsibility to care for others, that we (at least temporarily!) let go of our “giving” in order to be able to fully “receive.”

That is the precondition to pleasure, and it’s an uphill battle for most of us, especially those socialized female under patriarchy. But this is only the first step. As Peggy Kleinplatz & A. Dana Ménard remind us in their new book on Magnificent Sex:

It’s not just pleasure; it’s ecstasy we’re after.

To get to that place, that transcendent plane that most of us don’t even give ourselves permission to aspire to… requires letting go of the self entirely. It’s a tall order. Here’s how Baldwin frames it:

I think the inability to love is the central problem, because the inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And, if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And, if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive.

I actually think there are three steps here. Nagoski offers a neat distinction between authenticity (being yourself: the ability to love) and vulnerability (allowing others to fully see that authentic self: the ability to be touched). The first is the precondition for pleasure; the second is a condition for intimacy in relationship. There is a third step, beyond vulnerability… which is letting go of the self entirely (the ability to be changed, to be alive).

Kleinplatz notes that the one key feature common across ALL the various lovers profiled in Magnificent Sex, is their ability to be fully present in the moment, to be entirely focused on the pleasure without worrying about anything else. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Pleasure — and sex — is a tool for liberation

Why does this matter? In a newsletter devoted to building a world where everyone belongs, why should we concern ourselves with individual pleasure? As the National LGBTQ Task Force put it, echoing Audre Lorde’s foundational text on the erotic as power:

The erotic is power! Sex isn’t ‘beside the point’ in our activism, it is the bedrock of our authentic selves, and a critical source of strength that our adversaries would have us betray and deny.

My interest in sex as a tool for liberation springs from my own anti-authoritarian nonconformist streak: I set a record in my Catholic high school for the number of times I was kicked out of the “Love and Lifestyles” class my junior year for vociferously challenging what I saw as their homophobic and anti-pleasure definition of sex as “unitive and procreative.” I still feel a little bad for the teacher who had to take my questions on what was wrong with the solitary act of masturbating, or the unitive but not procreative act of oral sex, or why God made the anus an erogenous zone (especially because I sensed she was on my side in the argument).

But my evolution in the context of our movements for justice owes a great deal to adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism, where she gave voice to much of what I’d felt but never fully named. There’s so much there: it’s a beautiful read, combining classic texts (Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic) with her own insights, interviews, poems. She makes the connection explicit:

Getting in right relationship with our bodies is key to getting in right relationship with the planet.

I also love the lessons emerging from indigenous practices around sex and intimacy, and what it means to be in right relationship. This interview with Kim Tallbear on decolonizing sex remains a delightful exploration of what might be possible outside the confines of colonial heteronormative structures.

Not only possible, but necessary in order to transcend those structures. Emily Nagoski puts it this way:

Our pleasure is not just a frivolity; it is foundational to our autonomy and our pleasure. Our free expression of sexuality is the ultimate anti-fascist action.

We are trying to live into a world that doesn’t require coercion. That means consent, and more than consent. Liberation is the affirmative expression of noncoercion: that is the world we yearn for.

“Pleasure is a measure of our liberation”

This line from adrienne maree echoes Nagoski’s refrain “pleasure is the measure.” It’s not only a tool: it’s how we know we’re on the right path. It’s both means and ends; pleasure is its own reward. This is also how we learn: by doing. As Judy Vaughn notes (quoted by Andrea Smith):

You don’t think your way into a different way of acting; you act your way into a different way of thinking.

Orienting toward pleasure is a way of “knowing” when we’re on the right path; it’s a feedback mechanism that ensures we’re heading toward life, toward the liberation we desire. It’s difficult to overstate how revolutionary this is: it flies in the face of everything we’ve been socialized into, and feels transgressive in practice. And: it’s glorious.

I’ll give Esther Perel the last line here, for this is what it comes down to:

Being in our bodies is not about performance or results. It’s about coming home. It's a pleasurable, sensual connection that reminds us that life is worth living even when we are in pain or struggling.

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To close I want to return to Perel’s provocative exercise around the “7 verbs” of sex and love, which I tiptoed into here. Such seemingly simple things: To ask. To refuse. To give. To receive. To take. To share. To play. I’ve found it hugely helpful to really just focus on one at a time (aided in this exploration by our somatic therapist). It’s a fascinating insight into how patriarchy operates in me to notice how my body reacts to these innocuous prompts.

It was difficult to choose an image to accompany this post: I wanted something inspiring, ecstatic, emancipatory, and ideally conceptualized outside the narrow gaze of white heteronormative patriarchal dominant culture. I didn’t find a lot of depictions that served, though I liked this provocative discussion of erotic liberatory art. I initially chose this one, but thought it might be too confronting for social media, so switched to the one you now see.

I’d love to hear how others are navigating these waters; what signposts you’re using for support along the way. I feel like I’m still in the woefully early days of my own thinking on this, and still a long ways from embodiment. Sigh. Easier said than done.