Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Explore More Summit 2019 is HAPPENING! The 4th annual free online conference is all about pleasure this year. You do not want to miss these conversations. They are incredible. Check out the line-up and register FOR FREE at exploremoresummit.com.
adrienne maree brown is one of my heroes and she makes my heart sing.
I am over the moon to get to share this with you. adrienne maree brown is one of my biggest heroes. Her work has influenced me on a very deep and transformative level, so getting to speak with her about her new book, “Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good” was a dream come true.
We talk pleasure, pleasure activism, drugs, sex, and so much more.
adrienne explains how pleasure activism is anti-capitalist because it’s not about spending more money, but about tapping out of believing something is wrong with you and instead realizing you are enough as you are and you can access enough-ness and satisfaction through your body today.
We talk about what gets taken from us, what it means to center the most marginalized when we consider access to pleasure, what it means to be satisfiable versus numbing out, and why all of this helps us to settle more deeply into our own wisdom and healing.
AK Press, an independent anarchist publisher, has “Pleasure Activism” on sale RIGHT NOW for just $15 before February 24th when it gets released. Support them, support adrienne, buy it today.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
adrienne and I talk about:
- Pleasure activism and what it can offer us. (Buy the book here!)
- How prioritizing and centering the pleasure of the most marginalized allows us, as a society, to also be able to access that pleasure, too.
- Taking up space and how we are taught to not feel good in occupying space, how it limits us from demanding and building boundaries around what is safe for us.
- Capitalism and the ways it pushes us into buying things because we are taught that we are never enough.
- Directing your attention to the things that give you pleasure and focusing on what makes you feel good instead of what society dictates as pleasurable.
- Pleasure that manipulates and uses other people vs. pleasure that is deep and healing.
- How much we are taught that pleasure comes from being ravished and swept off of our feet when in reality, pleasure has room for awkward moments and communication and learning.
- What we should be teaching young people in school and how there is so much richness & delight in navigating the messy things.
- Finding out what satisfies us and what enough-ness feels like.
- Exploring and experiencing pleasure outside of sex by being in relationship with other people.
- How often we ignore the power of touch and how it helps us connect with our bodies more.
About adrienne maree brown:
adrienne maree brown is author of the soon to be released “Pleasure Activism The Politics of Feeling Good by AK Press, “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is a writer, social justice facilitator, pleasure activist, healer and doula living in Detroit.Listen and subscribe to Sex Gets Real
- Listen and subscribe on iTunes
- Check us out on Stitcher
- Don’t forget about I Heart Radio’s Spreaker
- Pop over to Google Play
- Use the player at the top of this page.
- Now available on Spotify. Search for “sex gets real”.
- Find the Sex Gets Real channel on IHeartRadio.
Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.
Dawn Serra: Hey, you. Welcome to this week’s episode. So first off, I just have to apologize. We did not have a new episode last week because I am eyeball deep in Explore More Summit 2019 interviews and prep. It is overwhelming and magical. I cannot wait for everyone to see it. Speaking of, registration is now open. If you go to exploremoresummit.com you can see the fucking incredible lineup. The theme this year is all around pleasure. All of the conversations I’m having with all of these incredible, incredible experts is about everything relating to pleasure, what keeps us from pleasure, how we can access more pleasure, how we can expand our understanding of pleasure; everything has to do in some way with pleasure, our access to it and what it all means. It’s free to attend, which is incredible and it runs for 10 days starting February 25th. Entirely online. You can watch it from home, from your office, from your phone, anywhere you want. There’s three talks per day, totally free. Of course, once you register, you also get access to the free conference workbooks and they are going to be so amazing this year. Plus, you get access to our exclusive Facebook community.
I would love to have you be a part of Explore More Summit. So it’s exploremoresummit.com to sign up and you can check out all the incredible conversations that I’m having with people. But needless to say, things are a little bit intense right now. Being able to squeeze out an episode last week just wasn’t going to happen. I had to take care of myself because I’ve been in many hours of interviews over the past couple of weeks. So we are this week and holy shit, it’s an incredible episode.
Dawn Serra: This week, I’m talking with adrienne maree brown who is one of my personal heroes. She has fundamentally transformed the way that I move through life, the way that I think about where all of us are going, the way that I think about pleasure and how I interact with it, and how I invite all of you to interact with it. Her influence on me has been tremendous. So getting to talk to her was a dream come true and what was even more fun was I had the opportunity to get an advanced copy of her new book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, which is out by AK Press and I got to read it months ago, and it’s going to be a game changer for so many people just like her other book, Emergent strategy was.
The other awesome thing is this book comes out February 24th, 2019 which means it’s in preorder right now with the publisher. If you go to AKpress.org/pleasure-activism.html. That link is in the show notes and at dawnserra.com/ep247 for episode 247. They’re having a sale on the preorder right now. You can get this incredible book for $15 directly from the publisher. Of course, we want to support, not only independent publishers, but specifically AK press. They’re an anarchistic press that is anti-capitalism. They put out some of the most amazing books right now. If you support them, you can get the book for $5 off as part of their preorder frenzy. So please go buy the book, you’ll especially wanted after you hear this conversation with adrienne. And supporting AK Press and independent publishers is the way to go. I also have another amazingly exciting announcement. The podcast flew past 5 million downloads a couple of weeks ago. So to help celebrate that, I’m doing a huge giveaway. There’s going to be three lucky winners for this giveaway and we are celebrating 5 million downloads in style. If you go to dawnserra.com/five/, spelled out FIVE, for 5 million between now and February 5th, 2019 you can enter your name and email address to help celebrate 5 million downloads.
Dawn Serra: I recorded a special little video just for you that you can watch on the page and there’s three prize packages. There’s things like Jizzly’s Coming Out like A Porn Star, the board game Consentacle, which I adore. It is such a fun, sexy, even kinky little game all about communication and consent, and you can’t find it anywhere anymore for less than $150 or $200. So trust me, you want this game. Plus I’ve also got Kate Kenfields’ Tea and Empathy cards, which are one of the most powerful tools that I used to work with clients and in my own life, around developing emotional connection and finding new language for our feelings. There’s some Uberlube, Silicone lube, which is my very favorite lube in the world. Plus, access to different Explore More products. So the prize packs are worth everything from 50 bucks to a couple of hundred dollars and I would love to see you win as a way to help celebrate this massive milestone because I could not have hit 5 million without you. Yes, you. So go to dawnserra.com/five/ and you can put in your name and email address to enter to win.
I’ll be doing the drawing on February 5th, 2019. If you’re in the US and Canada, I will mail it to you if you’re one of the winners and if one of the winners is from another country, then we will talk about shipping options. But help me celebrate but your name and email address and it will also mean that I can give you updates about the show. Stay in touch with you just in case the show ever gets pulled. Fuck you, FOSTA and SESTA. But anyway, big things. So go sign up for Explore More Summit. It’s totally free. It’s an online conference all about pleasure this year at exploremoresummit.com. Go to dawnserra.com/five/ all spelled out and put your name and email address in to win for the 5 million download extravaganza.
Now, it’s time for me to tell you a little bit about adrienne maree brown. So adrienne maree brown is the author of the soon to be released, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, as well as the groundbreaking, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. And she’s the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is a writer, social justice facilitator, pleasure activist, healer and doula living in Detroit. Here is my conversation with one of my heroes, adrienne maree brown.
Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, adrienne. Getting a chance to read Pleasure Activism was the best part of my weekend. So thank you so much for joining us.
adrienne maree brown: Oh, thank you so much for being a reader and supporter of the book. I’m really excited to talk to you and get to touch it with your audience.
Dawn Serra: Yes. Pleasure of course is a huge, huge topic here on the show where we explore all things sex and love, and bodies and they have heard me rave endlessly about Emergent Strategy. Hopefully many of them are familiar. I would love to start with something just really simple. Since we’re going to be talking about pleasure, I’d love to know what’s bringing you pleasure today.
adrienne maree brown: Well I just got to visit with one of my nibblings. Niblings are, as you remember probably from the Emergent Strategy work, a nibbling is the child of your sibling without having to pre gender this person. And I came down and I got in late, so she had already gone to sleep last night. So I got to wake up this morning to her voice and her wanting to play, and her wanting to fix my hair, which is bright pink right now. Her wanting to show me her new words and her new outfits. That brought me a lot of pleasure this morning. It was just like, “Oh, I’m alive and really connected to this little being who is excited to see me.” And there’s that thing where you’re like, “I love children.” But sometimes you see the kids and they’re like, “I’m kind of doing my own thing right now.” It was great to wake up and be like, “I’m so loved. So loved.”
Dawn Serra: Well, thank you for sharing your pleasure with us.
adrienne maree brown: I also had the recent pleasure of yesterday, I took a drive and I took like a mild edible and it was just a really pleasurable drive.
Dawn Serra: Yay for that too. So for folks who are new to pleasure activism and who maybe haven’t read some of your past blog posts, let’s just start with how you define pleasure activism.
adrienne maree brown: Awesome. A couple of ways. It’s something that doesn’t have one solid definition for me, but I think of it in a couple ways. The first way is I think of it as politicizing and understanding the politics of feeling good, that all these things that we do to pursue pleasure, to feel good: sex, drugs, spas. There’s all these things that are measures of freedom and measures of how much we get access to controlling our own lives. I think at they’re very politicized and we try to act as if they’re not like, “Why doesn’t everyone do it this way?” And there’s a lot of reasons why everyone doesn’t have access to pleasure. So that is one level of it. And then I also think of it in relationship to justice. I think of it as how can we make justice and liberation work the most pleasurable experiences we can have with each other as human beings? Right now, it feels like those areas of our being together are really trudging uphill and going through the hardest times, being unable to understand and hear each other and reach each other. So I think about that, what can we learn from intimacy? What can we learn from laughter? What can we learn from the way our minds open up with certain substances that helps us to say, “Oh, we’re in our agency. We’re together and we’re growing each other.” That could be pleasurable.
Those are kind of two ways of coming into it and it looks a lot like harm reduction. It looks like sex worker empowerment. It looks a lot at like demystifying different forms of relationship and particularly relationships around the body and around sex and around getting your needs met and decolonizing that territory because we think of sex still so much as like how does my body belong to another person rather than how does my body belonged to me and how do I share that with another person? How do my desires belonged to me and how do I share that with another person? So those are some of the areas we’re moving in.
Dawn Serra: All of that just feels luscious and important.
adrienne maree brown: [Singing] Feels good.
Dawn Serra: So coming into this space around how much access do we have to really have that agency in our lives, to access the things that give us pleasure. You talked in the book about we have to prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression.
adrienne maree brown: Yes. It feels like that’s the main thing. That’s one of the main things that get stripped away from us. If I think of the legacy of my people on this land, which is, I am a black, multiracial woman, who’s queer. If I think about all the different populations and the different communities that I’m a part of, for most of those communities, one of the ways that we have been controlled being here has been that pleasure has not been ours. Our bodies have not been ours. If we had children, our children have not been ours, relationships and falling in love were not ours. They weren’t a way that we were supposed to operate. And if we did that, we could be punished, our love could be taken away. There’s a huge deep and really relatively close by trauma.
I tell folks folks that often or just remind folks if they have forgotten that it’s the majority. It’s not like, “That happened a long time ago. Move past it. The majority of our time in this country has been that. And then this relatively short period now has existed where there’s been other options where we might maybe expect to be able to stay together and to actually create a family that we self determined; that we might maybe be able to keep our children and there’s folks now who are still in that struggle. It blows my mind. Just like my ancestors experienced this, there are people now who their children can be taken from them because of what someone else thinks of their base or where they came from, right? For me then, it’s prioritizing the pleasure and wellbeing of those who are most oppressed is a way that we guarantee it for everyone. In the same way…
I grew up, I read the Combahee River Statement and I really identify as a black feminist worker and a black feminist thinker. To me, that’s one of the things that I tune into. It’s like, “Who is getting access to this? Who do we prioritize for this?” And if you prioritize the person who’s experiencing the most harm and is the furthest from power, then in a way, everyone would have to have it if that person had it. Because we would have had to have made sure that everyone had it so that we could get it to the person who’s the furthest away. I love that way of thinking. I’m like, if we focus on black women having pleasure, then everyone else in society will actually be getting access to that pleasure.
Dawn Serra: Yes, yes. And if we can make a space where folks with disabilities and trans folks and fat folks are accessing the pleasure…
adrienne maree brown: Accessing the pleasure as a sign that we are turning 180 degrees in a way that we treat our communities. As as a fat woman, this is something that I walk with is when I moved to the airport, when I’m on a plane, when I’m in a theater, when I’m in multiple spaces in the world, the way that the space itself indicates to me that I don’t belong there; much less that I shouldn’t feel the pleasure of this movie or the pleasure of this flight through air, which is a miraculous, awesome thing. Instead I should be concerned with how can I shrink myself until I don’t have any impact and how can I make sure that I don’t touch anyone, that I am untouchable myself? We do these two pieces of societal shaming that lead people to believe they are untouchable, unwantable, unlovable and that they don’t deserve to exist.
A big part of my work feels like turning that around and saying, “Actually what does it look like, not just to say I tolerate this fat person or I don’t have to actively shame this fat person when they’re around me.” But to go further in that and to imagine fat pleasure, and to imagine fat as desirable. To imagine that kind of pleasure for folks that we think of. That, to me, was an exciting territory to explore in the book was thinking about people with disabilities, not just to go from the place of, “People had disabilities that scares me.” I think that that a lot of people are like, “It’s scares people because they’re afraid of their own mortality. They’re afraid of their own limitations.” And we create a society in which it’s not only not accepted, but it’s people given phobias about these ways that people are just born. It’s like no one made some decision here. I was born and my brain works this way or I was born in my body works this way. Just like you and just like everyone else, I’m trying to figure out how to be in my body and how to feel good given that. We pathologize it so much. And so, to me, it’s like a sign that we are post pathological, postcolonial, posts racist, post capitalist in a lot of ways if we are actually attending to the pleasure of those most marginalized.
Dawn Serra: I had this really fascinating experience over the summer and I’m sad to say that at 40, it was the first time I’d ever experienced it. But I experienced it, so it’s something. Where I went to a book festival, a feminist book festival here in Vancouver. And I walked into the space with a friend and the friend immediately looked at the seats and looked at me and said, “You’re not going to be comfortable in these seats. These are not only fat friendly seats.” And she walked right up to the organizer and said, “My friend is in a fat body. And these seats are going to make her uncomfortable. I don’t want her to be comfortable while we’re here. What can we do?”
adrienne maree brown: That’s so great.
Dawn Serra: Amazing. And it had honestly not occurred to me that I was allowed to be comfortable in a public space.
adrienne maree brown: Yes. Right? It’s like the multiple, to me, that’s the most full layers. Where I’m like, “I’m already doing so much of the compromising for everyone.” And if you’re like that– I think this all ties together. If you’re like that walking into a public space like, “I don’t have the right to be here. I don’t have the right to take it a space.” That same thing translates into the bedroom. As fat women and fat people, it’s like, “You’re lucky to be here at all. You’re lucky to be here. You’re lucky if anything is happening to you. You’re lucky if someone’s treating you like a desirable person.” That’s not a place from which can make demands. That’s not a place from which you can set boundaries. It’s something is happening that’s supposed to be good enough. And I think, for me, that was a big liberation point is my pleasure is actually the thing that is– anyone who’s interacting with me is lucky to get to witness my pleasure. It’s not the other way around. I’m not lucky to get some and the more I’ve understood that the more pleasure has come my way. So that’s something I often will tell folks who are wrestling with weight, who undergo major changes in their weight. Sometimes due to illness, sometimes due to injury, where the body changes and all of a sudden it’s like, “I don’t know how to be sexy in the ways that I learned to be sexy.” And I’m like, “We’ll examine that.” A lot of it is what a man told you is sexy or what an older woman told you was going to be sexy to a man.
It’s these societal norms that gets set that are– It is that post capitalist, for me, as a postcapitalist or anticapitalist analysis to be a pleasure activists because it’s not pleasure as the luxury of things that you can… the very, very dear things that you can barely afford and trying to get those things. To me, it’s actually tapping out of capitalism because capitalism is there’s always something wrong with you. There’s always going to be something that needs to be fixed. You’re never a satisfied person. You can never be happy with what you have.
adrienne maree brown: Capitalism wants you to constantly be a little miserable so you will do shopping, right? And you will go out and spend your money on facials and waxing, and diet pills and surgeries and ripping your face off, all this stuff. It’s all of these horrific things we do to distort what we had been given and to reject what we’ve been given. And so in all of that trying to fix it, when do you stop and actually get to feel like if I stop– I find that is that when I’m having a moment of insecurity, it’s usually that I’ve been going too fast to actually give myself pleasure, and it’s been going too fast to notice what’s feeling good. That’s something I started to tune into. I tune into with younger and younger people, do you know what it means to feel good inside your own skin? Do you know what it means to feel content with how you spend your time? Do you know what it feels like to have agency over how you spend your time, who you spend it with, what you do?
I was telling someone the other day, I really think that– And this is a big reason why I’m a proponent of meditation as an accompanying activity to anything else related pleasure, anything else related to the body, is the moment you are able to direct your own attention, you’re free. It really is a moment of freedom and it’s what gets taken from us or what gets broken down the most is that idea that you can actually put your attention where you want it to be. You can put your attention on the things that are wrong with you or the things that society says are wrong with you and you can experience great misery or you can turn and put your attention on how good it feels to be in a human body and how many pleasure communication tools exist inside your body, and you can put it on risking being like, “Can I tell this person I like them? Can I invite this person on a date? Can I invite this person to fuck me the way I want to? Can I keep learning skills that will increase my pleasure?” And very quickly those insecurities fall away because you find people who want to play with pleasure and desire as much as you do. You don’t really have to look back at the folks who are still are feeling nothing, trying to impress some stranger.
Dawn Serra: Yes. And so much of, not only the being able to direct your attention, but pleasure is only ever in the present moment.
adrienne maree brown: It is.
Dawn Serra: And so we have to be able to be present in order to really truly feel that experience as it’s happening.
adrienne maree brown: Yeah. I used to say this all the time, anticipation is my favorite feeling and anticipating a future pleasure is one of my favorite feelings. But still I’m feeling that feeling in the present moment. Letting myself daydream about it, letting myself be like, “That’s going to be so much fun.” I also think it really helps to make the distinction between what’s pleasurable and what’s numbing. Because I think when you can feel yourself in the present moment, even if you’re like, “I can feel myself with the assistance of mushrooms,” or “I can feel myself when I’ve had a few drinks,” or “I can feel myself, whatever.”
I think there’s a distinction of that you can feel yourself versus when you cannot feel yourself and you either self numbing or you’re turning to substances for that or you’re even turning to sex are turning to working out or other things that are moving you away from feeling. And to me, that’s the main way you could tell the difference. It’s like, can I actually feel myself right now or not? And then inside of this feeling myself, do I feel like I have agency over feeling good? Can I move towards feeling good?
Dawn Serra: I’ve been trying to find the language and I’m wondering if maybe this is the language that I’ve been hunting for around this experience of pleasure that’s self serving and performative and almost in a way using and manipulative like I’m going to use these other people from my pleasure versus this deep confronting healing type of pleasure that we’re talking about. And I’m wondering if maybe numbness or moving away from feeling is part of where that comes from.
adrienne maree brown: I think it’s a huge part of it because when you’re using someone else to move your pleasure, you’re not feeling that person. So it’s like, “I’m here in this moment and maybe this person is inside my body, but I can’t really feel them,” or “I’m inside their body and I can’t really feel them.” There is no eye contact. There’s no sense of togetherness. And that, to me, is really interdependence, which is one of the core elements from Emergent Strategy really gets exciting. Emergent Strategy is all about what do we learn from the natural world about collaboration, about being in right relationship with each other. And to me, pleasure is one of the great teachers of how to be in right relationship with each other because it’s like saying, I’m balancing out the dynamics between us and finding the power balance, finding the agreements we need. Not even spoken agreements but like, “Not quite like that. Touch me like that. It’s not quite there. This is actually how I really want to be touched.”
As you navigate all of that to increase your pleasure, it’s all about being in relationship with this other person and not being in big romantic relationship, but actually being in a dynamic of bodies, a dynamic of desires and you’re coordinating your promises that you’re making to each other. It’s like, “I promise to make you feel good and I promise to stay in my body and to be honest with you about if it feels good or not.” And I wish that that’s what we were teaching kids in school. When we talk about sex education that we were teaching kids, “Here’s what you’re actually navigating for. You’re navigating for, do I feel good? Do I feel powerful? Do I feel like I can communicate what I need? Do you feel good? Do you feel powerful? Do you feel like you can communicate with you need? Let’s have an adventure. Let’s be safe and let’s be sound.” And all that stuff. But instead of saying, “Let’s be terrified.” No one says what they want, no one uses their actual words. We kind of hope that some other person who, maybe, hasn’t even ever done sex before is going to know how to please us well. We don’t think of it as we’re going to learn together how to please each other. That’s a place where patriarchy still sews up in such a major way as–
adrienne maree brown: One of my best friends and I were just talking about this this morning. We were like, “Frozen. Frozen is pretty cool as a movie in part because it’s really encouraging consent.” That it’s like, “I’m not asking for your kiss. I’m saying, can we kiss? Are you interested in us kissing?” It’s something we’re going to do together. I’m not going to just do this thing to you. And I think about that a lot. I was definitely raised in environment where a man is supposed to grab me up on a horse or by my hair or some other uncomfortable way and taking off somewhere and ravish me. He should just know how to ravish me with some impossible huge penis or something. But I really think back, I how was I told that sex was supposed to happen? And then when I look at the actual, most pleasurable experiences in my life, it’s not that there hasn’t been any ravishing, but there has been so much more communication, awkward, weird, bumpy moments and crashing into each other’s teeth and learning how we actually like to kiss. Doing stuff that’s like, “That doesn’t actually feel good and I’m going to tell you in real time so that you can do something that does feel really good.” Or being with someone like, “You don’t know how to have the conversation about consent. We’re going to slow it way down because that’s what I need.” So trying to be like, “Oh, yeah.” Letting the knight in shining armor keep riding past because that’s going to be probably a mess of an experience instead of waiting for all the other people out there who really want to connect.
I think communication is key. A big piece of pleasure activism, a big part, one of the themes you’ll see as you move through the different essays and pieces is so much is about learning how do we use our communication skills; in order to increase pleasure and justice and liberation when it comes to these things? How do we stop thinking that someone’s going to be able to read our minds or let it grow. There are ways to grow that you can be transparent enough and honest enough that someone can learn what your actual preferences are and then they can begin to anticipate those and meet those. And one of the things from Emergent Strategy we talk about is moving at the speed of trust. Even in a casual sexual situation, how do I move at the speed of trust? How do I move in such a way that we start to be like, “We’re taking these next moves together and I feel safe.” That’s a major piece for me. I want more people to be able to feel safe and excited and thrilled inside of pleasure rather than kind of scared, kind of repressed, kind of distant.
Dawn Serra: Yes. That piece around helping young people, especially, to really figure out their own edges. I am still trying to figure that mess out still because I spent so long performing. And letting people in because I thought I was supposed to, not because I wanted to. There’s some really beautiful messiness in thinking about how would things shift if we had more space when we were young to really get to delight in our bodies, and to know how they felt with mostly yeses and super yeses and kind of nos and maybes.
adrienne maree brown: Yes. And just getting to know all of that.
Dawn Serra: Right. And then being able to practice communicating that before we even moved beyond that. That exchange feels so different.
adrienne maree brown: And this is why when I think about work, I’m like, I’m excited about this work that’s happening out in the world. There’s a group called Generation Five, they came into existence with the intention of ending childhood sexual abuse in five generations. And I think about their work a lot because I think so much of what should happen when we’re young as ways of helping us understand our bodies and understand what we’re feeling and be pleasure oriented. So much of that gets distorted because there is such rampant childhood sexual abuse. You’re in a world where– and people are trying to protect for that, right? So people are like, “I don’t want to get hurt. There’s scary people out in the world.” So quiet the whole urge all together like, “That is wrong, that is bad.” Or punishing around it, hide it. All this kind of stuff happens and there’s so much that gets distorted in there that I think will be hard to undistort until the issues of childhood sexual abuse are addressed more openly. These are the kinds of things that I was trying to get at in the book was, there’s really complex dynamics.
There’s a whole piece in there from my friend Amita who is really publicly and very bravely speaking out about the childhood sexual abuse she experienced. She’s really been a leader in helping people find their voices to tell these stories. And I think it’s so important what she’s doing. So she’s in the book and talks about the different patterns that got set in the abuse that she experienced with her father and trying to break through those cycles, trying to find her way back to pleasure again; finding that so much of it was in the realm of communication and finding people who would listen and who would touch her as if she had that trauma in her history. I wish that for so many more people that I think have that trauma in their history is to be able to say it and to be able to say, “Here’s what I need around it.” I think even sometimes when people are… You can start to see it. I feel like now I do a lot of work around sematic stuff and I feel like I start to really pick up on certain cues that I’m like, “That person probably experienced something when they were young.” You see it in folks who are highly sexually performative. It’s like “Sex, sex, sex is all. That’s the direction that I went in and it’s like,’This is who I am and this is what I do.’”
adrienne maree brown: I just feel like it’s something that I want more people to tune into and to clear out of the way. All of these things are like, “Here’s the rose and here’s the thorn.” With drug culture, I feel like so much of it gets set in really unhealthy ways. We have communities that had been decimated by certain drugs. We have communities where folks are serving time for drugs that are now being legalized in the country. So to me that was a really important thing to address is none of these things are easy, but that doesn’t mean we give up on getting access to them or we give up on them for the medicinal qualities that they have, including the piece around the people’s dispensary. It felt really important to me that like, “Actually, we’re figuring out ways to tap into the industry of legalizing marijuana in ways it’ll circle back and serve the community rather than in ways that are like capitalism 101. It’s legal now. Everybody just make your buck off of it and keep it moving.” That to me feels so important. I’m like we can’t just be out here irresponsible. I think a lot of times when people think of pleasure, they think of debauchery. They think of no rules. Everything’s just out here. And actually, the better options are when there’s clear communication and that the freedom is happening between two people who are able to say what they want rather than lurking around the sidelines. What you think someone else desires of you and trying to perform that and be that. And getting in trouble because you’re black person doing the same thing that a white person is doing all this fucked up stuff that’s out there that we want to break all these cycles and it’s something that ties them together and it’s pleasure.
Dawn Serra: It’s really interesting because I’ve been doing a lot of work lately with people coming out of eating disorder recovery and how to start reconnecting to pleasure and body when you’ve had a really, really challenging,
adrienne maree brown: What are you learning there? How do you do it?
Dawn Serra: I know, right? It’s so much. Yay to BeNourished for helping me doing all this learning. One of the things that’s really occurred to me both as I was reading the book and and as you were speaking was there’s this fear when we change our relationship with food that if we’re not hypervigilant and hyper controlling, that the only other alternative is gluttony and the biggest fear in the world of fatness and all those things; and what people have to swing through is there does have to be a little bit of a pendulum. But then you slowly find your way to that middle ground of just enoughness. What’s satisfying? What do I need today? And I think that’s so important in this conversation around pleasure, too, whether we’re talking about sex or we’re talking about food or we’re talking about drugs. If we want to eliminate or significantly reduce the impacts of capitalism and colonialism, and white supremacy and ableism and trauma, then we would all be able to come from this place of what’s satisfying and enough. Because we wouldn’t be responding to violence and trauma and grasping for things that feel like we are going to run out of them. Because historically, they haven’t been available to so many.
adrienne maree brown: I feel like that’s so true. I have a little section in the book that’s just a word on excess because I think that so often when people think of stuff they’re so hungry. We’re so oppressed. We’re so not getting what we need that it’s over the top. It has to go so far over the top. I really, really, really think how do we avoid the excesses? And I’m someone who loves access. I have loved it and I enjoy it. But I enjoyed it in the right time and place, where it’s like, “Now I’m going to go a little overboard here.” But that’s not daily life and daily life is really about getting into that, “What does it mean to be satisfiable? Are you a satisfiable human being?”
I think that we live on this planet that is actually very satisfying. It’s a very satisfying planet, but we’ve been disconnected from that. Some of it is reconnecting. Letting those pathways open back up that are like– It can be super satisfying and just go on a walk and notice that the leaves are changing color or go on a walk and be stopping through the snow or just be outside in the world, to go be in the ocean, to go be calm somewhere. Then it can be very satisfying to climb something that’s really tall. There’s ways we relate to the natural world. They’re like, “This is very satisfying and good.” And juxtapose that with what we’re often given as, “This is supposed to be your food. This is supposed to be your pleasure.” And everything is so… There’s nothing real in it. You’re not actually supposed to get satisfied from it. When I think about chips or something where I’m like, “It’s designed to keep me hungry. It’s designed to plant the seed for me wanting another bite rather than to nourish me and excite me.” And I think the same thing, for how we approach– I think sex and pornography and all of that is very much like that where so often we’re put in circumstances where it’s our satisfaction is not even on the table. Our hope is that you’re just clicking through and clicking through and clicking through and that we’re just racking up the money while you do that. I think when you have that awareness of like, “You’re trying to trick me. You’re trying to just get my resources from me. You don’t really care about my happiness.” Then it makes it, for me at least, it always makes it easier to step back and be like, “Do I really care about my happiness? If I care about my happiness, then how would I move right now? What direction would I head in? How would I treat myself? How would I treat other people around me? And if it’s radically different, then it’s humbling.
Most of us are not operating on behalf of ourselves. Even when we come in– I do most of all my work is in social justice work. So social and environmental justice work. I do facilitation and I do training and I hold those spaces through conflict and I do mediation things like this and it’s one of the pieces I’m like, “It’s not imaginable. I can be satisfied with less injustice.” I’m like, “No. I don’t want to be satisfied with less injustice.” But I do want to be satisfied with being in the company of people who I think are really brilliant. I do want to be able to rest into like, “I’m amongst some of the most incredible humans that are alive right now.” I want to be able to really feel that and trust in what we’re doing and know that like what we’re doing is making some impact. All of that comes from being able to feel myself, feel others, feel connected, and then feel the pleasure of being with.
Dawn Serra: That pleasure of being with is something else that really resonated for me. Just taking the book as a whole, so many wonderful essays about sex, about squirting and a relationship with your womanizer. It’s so a playful and fun and wonderful and there’s also this really wonderful response that you note around creating a pleasure culture in relationship with others. And ow often in our culture, especially I’m talking for cis men, sex becomes the only path to touch, intimacy, vulnerability, validation, pleasure. Being able to say there’s so many ways to experience pleasure in relationship with others outside of sex. Can we explore those too?
adrienne maree brown: Yeah. And I feel like this is one of those things where people are like, “That’s some lesbian shit or something. You want to cuddle whatever.” And I’m like, yeah, but if we try to really learn from all the different ways that people are on the planet. It just amazes me the number of men I know who, once they really gave into cuddling, would say, “Oh, this actually is the shit. That’s pretty awesome.” Or a massage. A ton of people have never had a proper massage, just a good massage that’s not sexual. It’s not part of a service. It’s someone attending to the part of your body that needs to be held and needs some attention.
One of the things I love is when we’re doing the somatics work that I do, we’ll get a bunch of people in a room together and the majority of them are not people who do body work or healing or any of that kind of stuff. They’re just humans and we’ll guide each other through ways to be in contact with each other that invite healing; which might be like there’s a certain way that you could put your hands under someone’s head that invites sent to really relax and let go. And then there’s different parts of the body, different bands in the body that given even just the right kind of small attention can actually release, let go. You could experience some real transformation in the kind of chronic pain that can come with trauma. You’re like, “I’m in pain because I’m always trying to hold my legs tightly closed because I’m terrified.” A good healer can bring some attention to your hips. A good healer can bring some attention to your body in a way that gives you some relief. And then you find this like, “It’s not just a good healer, it’s like another person.” If you can say to another person, “Can you bring your hands here and your attention? Can you hold my feet? Can you hold my knee?”
adrienne maree brown: Our bodies actually respond similar to other things in nature, the way that plants respond to sunlight. We respond that way to touch and to the right kinds of touch, to consensual good touch. It’s like, “My body is relaxing, my body is feeling more at ease, my health is increasing because of that and I’m getting some relief.” And if we get that really often, then it becomes a part of our norm that I can turn to others for relief from pain and relief from pain as a step on the way towards pleasure. I think about the number of people I know who are in chronic pain on a regular basis and don’t have that sort of regular touch. It’s like, “I have to pay someone to have to go and get a certain kind of touch to feel any relief, much less pleasure.”
That’s another piece. I’m like, I just wish more people would understand that just their presence, just a caring presence combined with touch is actually healing and it’s a healing modality that almost any human being can tap into. It does mean things like can you tune in to touch in a way that’s not a purely about sex? If you can’t, what’s that about? Get curious about it. There’s some healing to do. Something got wound up the wrong way. This is why at the majority of the body is not the clitoris. I would argue a different case. If I was just a massive clitoris walking around, I’d be like, “Nope, that’s what touch is for.” But my whole body can feel really good in ways that are not tied to orgasm. And that feels important. This is the piece where Emergent Strategy comes in. If you just pay attention to nature. If you just put it switched to the nature of your own body, it guides you in terms of how to navigate this stuff. And that’s what I do. That’s what I really try to drop into.
Dawn Serra: I actually want to talk to you for three more hours, but I also want to really respect your time, and we are at the end of our time together today. I want to just throw out really quickly that your team bloody awesome and team bloody fetish were hysterical and wonderful. I will tease listeners in the intro a little bit more about that since we didn’t have time. But I would love it if you could share with folks how they can stay in touch with you and find you online.
adrienne maree brown: Yeah. So the main place that I do things online is… I love Instagram. Instagram is the page if you really want to come see my work or see what I’m up too. I’m just @adriennemareebrown on Instagram. I’m also on Facebook and Twitter, but I don’t use them as much or in the same ways. I run something called The Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute. So that’s generally a place where you can kind of find out more about the work, the actual like trainings or there’s going to be a book tour for Pleasure Activism. Those are the places where people can go find out about that.
Dawn Serra: Great. I’ll have all of those links in the show notes. I just want to thank you so much, adrienne. Not only for sharing yourself with us, but also for the work you’re doing in the world. It’s actually deeply impacted my life over the past couple of years. So thank you for just being who you are and doing what you do.
adrienne maree brown: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you. I appreciate this podcast. I’m so glad it exist. And I look forward to connecting more in the future.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, absolutely. To everybody who tuned in, thank you so much for listening. Go preorder the book immediately. I will have links down below so that you can do that. Support AK Press by heading to their website, please. And until next time, I’m Dawn Serra with adrienne maree brown. Bye.
Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com had to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses.
As you look towards the next week, I wonder, what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?