| Image description: The inner petals and centre of a yellow Lilly, with dusty pollen on the ends of the stamen.
The Trouble with Pleasure
For the past two years I've been exchanging voice notes with one of my dear friends on the other side of the country. They moved out west early on in the pandemic, and like so many relationships in these past two years, we had to find new ways to stay connected.
This friend and I are excited about a lot of the same things including the nervous system, and the role of culture in trauma healing — and we often find ourselves in deep questions and reflections about our work and our values.
A few weeks ago they sent me a note about pleasure; something that wasn't sitting right with them about how this word has been taken up in the wellness sphere. We got to talking about what happens when whiteness and capitalism get their claws into ideas that emerge from queer, working class, disabled, and racialized communities.
What's in a Word?
We can trace the recent resurgence of pleasure along several paths, one being the publishing of Adrienne Maree Brown's book "Pleasure Activism", the "Me Too" movement and the reclamation of women's sexual pleasure, and the influence of queer and sex worker communities — who have always talked about sex and pleasure, and made it safer for others to as well.
Pleasure Activism is an important book, written by a queer Black feminist activist about the revolutionary power of pleasure, and the idea that movements for liberation will be more effective and compelling if they are rooted in life affirming desire, rather than critique and control (also drawing on Audre Lorde's work and a long lineage of Black feminist thought).
In this context, pleasure absolutely is radical, with the power to be revolutionary.
But something has happened with pleasure, maybe you've noticed it too?
Many revolutionary ideas can lose their potency when they are taken out of context. In the wrong hands, pleasure can become more about escape, bypassing, and individual satisfaction. The word pleasure is too blunt to hold all the nuances and possible meanings it can contain.
Is it possible to become over resourced?
Bodies have different baselines, different starting points when it comes to both individual and collective nervous systems.
One of the problems with having predominantly white, cis gender, heterosexual, and able-bodied teachers in the field of Western somatics, is that the idea of a "normal" baseline is not reflective of so many oppressed peoples' experiences. This shapes a kind of culture within the field that privileges the ease and comfort of bodies who likely already hold more power.
When an emphasis on "pleasure" becomes popular in such spaces, a part of me becomes skeptical and uneasy. This is the conversation my friend and I were having, trying to get to the bottom of this discomfort. Was it rooted in shame around sexuality? Was it judgement? The longer we explored it the closer we got to a sense of clarity that for bodies starting with a baseline of relative safety, the work of politicized somatics needs to be around increasing the capacity for discomfort. This is rarely what we see white folks who do work around pleasure offering.
Certain styles of somatics can teach resourcing until the cows come home, always afraid of too much "activation" – but how does this prepare us to live in the reality of our current world?
Pleasure can mean so many things, and without a doubt should be a birthright for all of us. But what kind of pleasure can we really experience in isolation from our fellow humans and the more-than-human world?
For me, pleasure is a measure of my relationship to interdependence and the wellness of the collective. I feel pleasure when I surrender unjust power and control. It's true that being resourced is helpful with learning these skills, but so is working the edges and leaning in to what sometimes feels scary or uncomfortable.
We don't all start with the same baseline, and individual healing alone is not enough to change systems. A one-sized fits all approach to pleasure, without context or analysis of power is simply more of the same individualized "self-care" that serves to keep us from asking questions or challenging power. An approach to somatics that over emphasizes resourcing and pleasure runs the risk of keeping privileged bodies comfortably numb, and of excluding the very communities who brought the radical possibilities of pleasure to the foreground in the first place.
We can do better, friends.
What does personal pleasure feel like in your body? What does collective pleasure feel like? How are the two connected?
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