Decolonizing Pleasure

Photo by Lisa Marie Theck on Unsplash

I had a client once describe herself as “queer in theory”. I asked what that meant and she said “well, I’m pretty sure I like women, but I’m too fucking terrified to do anything about it so I date men”. When we explored what terrified her, we found a depth of unlearning to be explored. 

Beside the fact that queerness is not quantified by whether or not we’ve been in a queer relationship, she had a fair point. Most of us have been indoctrinated into some version of a homophobic or hetero-patriarchal social system (whether we identify with queerness or not). And that inherently messes with our notions of pleasure, sex and love.

Decolonizing pleasure asks us to unlearn what we were told about sex, pleasure and love. Dare I say this applies to everyone, not just queer folks but especially queer folks. Being in relationship with other queer beings does not absolve us of the relational harm that hetero-patriarchy encourages. Re-learning pleasure allows us to associate relationships with wellness and care and authenticity.

Some of the questions my client worried about having to answer had to do with what it would mean to have to re-learn her relationship to self and others. Re-learning requires vulnerability, it requires us to be present with the fear, embarrassment, and novelty of being witnessed, either by ourselves or other people. And if we have done colonization right, we have learned how to not appear new, how to appear as if we have it together. All that to say, her fear is not uncommon. 

Most of us engage in sex, pleasure and love from what we’ve learned about these things. And if our learning is fueled by the fear of our elders, mixed messages from peers and educators, shame and trauma, finding our way back to what is true to our roots becomes that much harder and more foreign.

So how do we do it? These are the four tenets that encourage a practice of Decolonial Pleasure, adapted from the incredible Adrienne Maree Brown’s Pleasure Activism.

Radical Honestly

Challenge yourself to be truly honest about what you desire. In relationship, in sex and in love. We need to release ourselves from the belief that love is a limited resource and that we must manipulate ourselves and others into accepting what we perceive as “available”. Hetero and mononormativity have created contexts where the only valuable relationships are those that center romantic love and end in marriage and procreation. As such we find ourselves dimming our own desires, telling white lies to get a fraction of what we believe to be acceptable. Consider in what ways you’ve been dishonest and ithe impact that has had on your access to love, and sex and pleasure.

Resistance to urgency and completion

Coming to my own first relationship with a queer woman highlighted how much of my sex and pleasure experience had to do with urgency. This world asks us to move with urgency and crisis at all times. We learn about sex in hushed tones, with instilled fear of a crisis; an unwanted pregnancy or contracting sexually transmitted infections. Sex, pleasure and love in the media are represented by breathless and urgent sex or hot and cold relationship dynamics. We need to unlearn urgency. Unlearn that satisfaction is tied to urgency. Resist the urge to move quickly in your pleasure and love experiences.

Healing

We all have things we are healing from. And rather than engage with self-reflection and accountability we tend to use our relationships as the foundation upon which to repeat and attempt to repair these patterns. Decolonial pleasure and love comes from holding deep reverence and compassion for our pain, and normalizing accessibility and time for healing. Give yourself permission to be hurt and name it, to be accountable to hurt and ask for forgiveness, and to find wholeness in the selves that were harmed without potential for repair.

Building communities of care

Community is an unconditional care practice that is in our bones. But we have come to mistake community for conformity. We appoint ourselves the authority on which sexualities are acceptable, which genders and actions for them are appropriate. We have determined which people are the legislators of these arbitrary rules without considering the value of generational difference. Building a community of care, involves valuing multigenerational experiences. 

We must seek to be in a community of diverse groups of people that can offer care in different ways. Be in community with elders who can offer you wisdom, be in community with young people who can remind you to seek play and joy, be in community with disabled people who might encourage you to see the ways our world is inaccessible. Be in community with activists, teachers and healers who desire to make change to how we engage with community and care.
_______

Decolonizing our pleasure and love practices is a practice of awareness and presence. These are two pieces of existing that most of us struggle with, as did this client. Decolonizing our pleasure is a practice necessary for all beings who inhabit this earth, regardless of the language and labels we use to define ourselves. If you leave this piece with nothing else, let it be a striving to question how you relate to pleasure, and who or what taught you to relate in that way.