Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy Book 1)

I believe that the roots of most harm are systemic, and we must be willing to disrupt vicious systems that have been normalized.

and that we can offer each other tools and education to make sure sex, desire, drugs, connection, and other pleasures aren’t life-threatening or harming but life-enriching.

The Salt Eaters, the one to tell us writing was a tool for the revolution, that our task was to make revolution irresistible.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

And we need more tolerance. If you want to break through to the multi-orgasmic level, you have to be willing to kind of push through something that feels like discomfort the first few times. You’re like, “Can I get there?” And you’re like “yes, I can.” It’s just like, if you do, then something else is going to become possible.

Pleasure activism is about learning what it means to be satisfiable, to generate, from within and from between us, an abundance from which we can all have enough.

If I were living purely from my body, I might have achieved some world record for sexual activity, or at least be the belle of some wild bordello. Perhaps a Black Moulin Rouge singer4—I love seduction, I love sex, I love an exposed shoulder, the curves of the hip, the moment of realizing that under the top layer of clothing there’s no bra or boxers

I used to say, “I don’t know if I love myself.” And one of my aunts put me in front of the mirror at age six and seven, and she said, “You are gonna look at yourself in the mirror and say ‘I love myself.’ And then you’re going to say ‘I love Black people.’” And at first I resisted, but then I was like, “OK. Let’s do this.” And she was committed to

From religious spaces to school to television shows to courts of law, we are socialized to seek and perpetuate private, even corporate, love. Your love is for one person, forever. You celebrate it with dying flowers and diamonds. The largest celebration of your life is committing to that person. Your family and friends celebrate you with dishes and