🥀 Reimagining desire
Ft. 2 adrienne maree brown essays 🍄🌼
🍄Essay: Liberating Desire: It's Time to Shift Your Fantasies (adrienne maree brown)
This essay is very powerful and precious; I love it. When I read Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown (amb), one of the many ideas that struck me was that we don’t need to view our desires as fixed realities — including the lack of desire we may have for ourselves. Desire, like all things in nature, is adaptable. To an extent. In community, we can learn to see ourselves as desireable, even if we are not written into society’s definition of Desireability. And, also in community, we can learn to align our desire closer to the kind of world we want to see, by desiring people who don’t look like the people we were taught to find desireable. Is desire adaptable? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
The goal here is not to shame our desires or view them as inherently problematic, but to ask the deeper questions about Desire beyond mere consent. We can interrogate with curiosity and non-judgment why we want what we want, and what we may come to want in a liberated future. Or what we observe others want, in general, or from us.
On the topic of theorizing about desire and sex beyond consent, I recommend the book The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, in which she provocatively asks: “What would it take for sex really to be free? We do not yet know; let us try and see”.
🍄Essay: You Can Say Yes to Pornography and Accountability (amb). Trigger Warnings!
Let’s imagine the end of all oppressive systems. The idea that what is desired and desireable in that world would look the same as what is in ours seems logically impossible. This is because many of our desires — for people, actions, and experiences— are rooted in oppression, either our own or someone else’s. We can observe this without shame.
My favorite invitation is: “What do you want to be turned on by?” I have never been asked that question, and it has stuck with me. I invite you to respond to this invitation in the comments if you like! How do we move “toward the desires we want and need to cultivate to break the intersecting cycles of harm we are in?”
This idea goes beyond consent to interrogating why we want to consent to what we consent to, and what we would need to want to consent to in a liberated future. A fascinating idea: desire exists in and through the imagination, and we are being invited to reimagine our imagination! I love it.
💛 Collecting wisdom
My goal for this newsletter is to learn and explore ourselves and the world together and gather our collective wisdom in loving community with each other. I am a student of life and learn best in a classroom with curious and loving individuals like you.
There are not many safe spaces on the internet to have this conversation and learn from each other’s perspectives and experiences, so I’d love to create one here in the comment sections. I love seeing you respond to each other it literally warms my soul deeply. I will also be responding to as many as I can!
🍇 Food for thought
I would love to hear any thoughts on what comes up for you as you read these essays or summaries, and what you think reimagining Desire could look like.
What comes up for you in general?
How do we reimagine and liberate our desire from the oppressive scripts we’ve been born into? Can we? Have you had experience doing this? How?
(How) are you learning/have you learned to desire yourself if you are not the beauty standard? Any advice for others?
What is your version of utopia of desire and love in the future?
i recommend reading the book 'Ace' by Angela Chen, which through exploring asexuality delves deeply into desire & the meaning of sex. when you posed the question "What would it take for sex really to be free?" by Amia Srinivasan, it made me think of this quote from 'Ace': “There should be freedom to not identify as ace if it doesn’t serve you, freedom to be ace & still be curious about sex, freedom to identify as ace & then change your mind… Exploration is impoverished unless it is paired with full societal acceptance of aces...True sexual liberation means having many choices - no sex forever, sex three times a day, & everything in between - that all feel equally available & accepted, & that all can lead to happiness if they are right for you.”
Love these two article picks. I have been looking for essays on porn that center how it changes our perspectives as opposed to the same old porn=sin religious narratives. I would love to hear and read more perspectives about how porn shapes beauty and desirability especially through a decolonizing lens if anyone wants to send links my way!
Most people know nowadays that unfortunately porn consumption starts at a really young age. As a older Gen Z, most of my male peers knew of and watched porn since middle school or even earlier. While we are always fed a lot of moral narratives about it, as I grew older I started analyzing more how it has shaped my personal ideas around sexual desirability. I love this line from adrienne "men taking advantage of skinny women, secretly watching them, trapping them, or women having to change for the desires of men." This sort of normalization of rape culture and patriarchy in something as addictive as porn is an insane combo at a young age because we did not have any of the knowledge needed to process and deconstruct it. I think the question for me now is that as young adults, how do we begin to decolonize our ideas around desirability that we have learned subconsciously through porn, and how can we begin to imagine desire as an entity no longer tied to physical beauty and white supremacist logic?
This is really interestingly addressed in the second article. If we are asking ourselves what is programming our desires and note that it is the typical culprit of white cis hetero patriarchy, can we shift the popular imaginings of fields such as sex work and porn as areas that can reflect how radically diverse desire is in real life? I think about how the internet has exposed that humans will make a fetish out anything, just look at all the rule34 stuff, is that not proof that sexual desirability is this infinitely vast sandbox? Idk just some thoughts!