And how it important it is to feel joy in the face of despair
One of the podcasts getting me through the darkest times has been the brown sisters' How to Survive the End of the World. The brown sisters are thoughtful, spiritual, insightful, and prioritze pleasure in times of difficult work. I was drawn to the podcast after hearing adrienne speak on her book, Pleasure Activism.
As a social justice facilitator focused on black liberation, a doula/healer, and a pleasure activist, her voice on the importance of pleasure, creativity, and joy while doing difficult work is liberating and revolutionary.
What is pleasure activism, you ask? In the collection of essays, brown focuses on answering the questions: How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we
awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life?
Centering pleasure in a life of activism means placing a priority on self-care, connection, fulfillment, and creativity while doing important work within yourself, your community, your state, and the world to dismantle systems of oppression. It means singing alongside your fellow humans while standing in protest. It means connecting with your partner or partners to feel pleasure, especially while working together to keep each other safe, extending safety to the rest of your community. Pleasure activism is creating works of poetry, art, music, video games that convey beauty and/or important messages. It also means creating for the sake of creating, something that can bring immense pleasure to the creator and those who are witnesses.
But Leslie, how do we practice pleasure and not fall into gluttony or go too far? With our puritanical backgrounds combined with scarcity of capitalism, we have learned not to trust pleasure. That if it feels that good, too much can be a bad thing. In an article for the Boston Review, brown writes:
Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us back our own joy. Some think it belongs to them, that it is their inheritance. Some think it a sign of their worth, their superiority. White people and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess while the majority doesn’t have enough—and, further, that the majority exists to please them.
A central aspect of pleasure activism is tapping into the natural abundance that exists within and between us, and between our species and this planet. Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous.
So rather than encouraging moderation over and over, I want to ask you to relinquish your own longing for excess and to stay mindful of your relationship to enough. How much sex would be enough? How high would be high enough? How much love would feel like enough? Can you imagine being healed enough? Happy enough? Connected enough? Having enough space in your life to actually live it? Can you imagine being free enough?
Do you understand that you, as you are, are enough?
Brown wraps up the article with the following:
Pleasure reminds us to enjoy being alive. Our misery only serves those who wish to control us, to have our existence be in service to their own. True pleasure—joy, happiness, and satisfaction—has been the force that helps us move beyond the constant struggle, that helps us live and generate futures beyond this dystopian present, futures worthy of our miraculous lives.
Pleasure and rest (see next blog post!) are revolutionary at times when our capitalistic society stresses production and striving. As someone who grew up in a Southern Baptist church entrenched in purity culture, finding my own pleasure feels like a monumental task. It also feels like one of the most important tasks of my lifetime.
How are you leaning into pleasure? What are the ways you can weave pleasure into your activism?
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