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': βThere should be freedom to not identify as ace if it doesnβt serve you, freedom to be ace & still be curious about sex, freedom to identify as ace & then change your mindβ¦ 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.β
thank you so much Julia! I will read Ace, thank you. I love the quote you shared and that was so generous of you that way we can capture an idea from the book for those who won't be able to read it. Thank you so much . TRUE SEXUAL LIBERATION MEANS HAVING MANY CHOICES! I soooo love this. No sex forever! Sex 3 times a day! Yes. One thing I HATE is the idea that loving sex or being allosexual makes you more of a feminist or a human... I've also been wanting to read the book "Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture" by Sherronda Brown so now we have a lil list going <3 thank you Julia for pointing this out! very empt!! (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710512/refusing-compulsory-sexuality-by-sherronda-j-brown/)
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!
Thank you so much Beywn for this deeply thoughtful comment. I love how you describe how porn has directly and indirectly shaped your ideas around sexual desirability, that is sooo true and resonates deeply with me too. I love your question on how to decolonize desire and desirability. In the book Pleasure Activism she encourages that we really CAN change what we desire, or we can bring our desires closer to the world we want to see. I love when she says think some more, and some more, and some more... it's interesting and counterintuitive since our desires are so entrenched in these oppressive systems of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-fatness, transphobia etc etc etc. I think our desires are more malleable than we might believe they are originally. And at the same time both the underlying structures have to be uprooted and our desire has to be reshaped! Thank you for your amazingly thoughtful comment, I really appreciate you being here!
thank you so much for sharing your words and wisdom!! and thank you so much for connecting us with essays by amb and so many others, you are a light and an infinite force for good in this world and we are so grateful for you!!! we love you & are thankful for you and thank you for helping us all to re-imagine a new world, to paradigm shift our consciousness, & thank you too for facilitating such important and vital conversations with the collective!!! you are so amazing π
thank you so much for this divine comment my darling! I love you!!! You are so amazing!!! ugh thank you for this incredible comment as always and for supporting me DAY IN AND DAY OUT thru and thru out loud and in quiet I LOVE YOU <3
I love this topic! I love it especially because it feels foggy, confusing, complicated, hard,- like I know the ground I've stood on is maybe made of sand. I'm so thankful for this community to really stretch out in. π
oh wow "like the ground I've stood on is maybe made of sand", LaLeigh -- you always leave such divine comments that stay on my heart and consciousness. I am so thankful for YOU truly, this is so wonderful. I know the exact feeling you mean. It's unsettling -- but the kind that one feels is important to their coming to a deeper truth or pain of our world. Thank you for being here my darling <3
Hi hi first of all thank you so much for sharing this! I just finished listening to your podcast episode on finding your voice and it literally had me in tears in public! Didnβt know where to comment to this but I just wanted to say it deeply moved me and inspired me so much. It means so much to me and I, along with many others are so grateful for your work!! Thank for helping us all move towards being more in touch with our innate divine creative essences *mwah*!
Iβve been thinking a lot about desire and itβs political potential lately. These essays made me reflect on the ways in which we reach for convenience out of exhaustion and fear in so many areas of our lives including our sexual lives. The fear of truly imagining new ways of desire is so palpable because doing so forces us to confront just how much work there is to be done. It is so challenging and scary to truly and deeply confront how loveless a lot of our upbringings have been. How capitalism and patriarchy have not only created cultures of lovelessness but have exploited that absence of love and that yearning partly through sexualizing oppression. It is so scary to truly dig and try to sit with that and imagine new desires and realities as it can bring up a fear that they may never be realized. You cannot bridge the chasm of lovelessness without recognizing it is there in the first place, and that is painful.
In order to move towards the desires we want and need to cultivate to break cycles of oppression, it is necessary to first sit with the intensity of the pain that the absence of love and acceptance brings and has brought us. It is necessary to sit with the pain of rejection brought on by society, our families, friends, societal standards that have told us are bodies are not desirable as they as. We must sit with the pain of how we have then internalized that rejection and have rejected ourselves in the process. We must alchemize that pain and face it in order to imagine new possibilities. In a culture that encourages us to further numb and consume instead of feeling, we must be brave enough to feel our pain and hold one another in that process.
I want to be turned on by care, reciprocity, respect, trust, community. I want to eroticize my liberation. I have practiced this individually by trying to, as often as I can, when I am feeling insecure about my appearance, asking myself who benefits from me feeling this way? Who benefits when I feel insecure, when I yearn for a past or future version of myself who is anyone but who I am in the present? Who benefits from me being robbed of my ability to be present and full of love for who I am right now? I say, fuck those raggedy old white men (not literally). They can get absolutely fucked. Then I think, wow how incredibly sexy of me to deny these shits the satisfaction of profiting off of my being. Now thatβs fucking hot.
This is literally DIVINE OH MY WORD. I am floored. Thank you soooo much for this deeply thoughtful and wonderful comment, Sam. Wow! I love the idea of "cultures of lovelessness" omgomg.. it's so true and beautifully put. I completely agree that sitting with and confronting with the pain comes first, and your dream for what you want to be turned on by. "I want to eroticize my liberation" I Looooooove that !!!! The very idea of that turns me on immensely. So proud of you and adore this comment, thank you!!!
I am also so glad to hear that the finding your voice episode spoke to you, that fills me with deep fulfillment and peace and joy! Thank you for telling me!!! <3 <3 <3
I was literally having a conversation with my best friend on FaceTime yesterday and he suggested that we should put ourselves out there and find romantic or sexual interests. He has had more than a handful of these interests whilst I havenβt had that. Not that Iβve never tried to. He is light skinned and Iβm darker in comparison. When he suggested this I told him that whilst the beauty standard favours you, it doesnβt do the same for me. It never has. I donβt know how he felt or what Iβd said even registered.
But there is a beauty standard. And the closer a person is to whiteness the more it favours them. To the other questions you asked on desire, I have no answers but I plan on using them as journal prompts when I write down my thoughts later today. Thank you Ayanda for such an amazing read.
Omg thank you Mthobisi -- this idea that you and your friend face different realities based on Desirability and Beauty capital and access is soooo real and it's easy to not bring this up when our friends say things like this so I am so proud of you for naming this painful reality. Thank you for your precious comment! I am dreaming of love for you. I would like to share this essay with you by Da'Shaun Harrison which I think may speak to you: https://dashaunharrison.com/to-love-and-be-loved-from-the-fat-perspective/
hi lovely!! both articles and your commentary on the topic are truly so spot on. i've been exposed to porn at around the ages of 10-12, and it's taken me until i turned 18 this year to at least slightly grasp the repercussions and consequences it had on me as a young girl.
currently in a relationship with my first boyfriend and getting to know his experience with porn and desire, as well as experiencing LOVE in such a beautiful form of it made me reflect on my younger self and her thoughts and desires. not only was porn the only place i'd gotten information about sex from (like a super messed up sex ed class made by old men for little girls), it was also what made me want to have my first time having sex with a stranger that i'd never see again. it never happened, thank god because it's simply not for me, but i recognised it came from a place of insecurity of not being experienced, of not looking like the actors in those videos, of wanting to just get it over with. and it all stemmed from porn and its loveless sex, its sameness, its perverseness.
and it was scary for a 15 year old girl to think of sex and equate it with the strangeness that is porn, it was uncomfortable for someone that was so hopeful about love and relationships and the DEEPNESS of it all to just view sex as a means to an end, or rather something so shallow and oppressive from all perspectives.
now, of course, i feel so much more differently, and i'm glad i'm now able to see sex and desire for what they are and what they mean to me, at least the me of now. maybe the me of ten years from now on will feel some other way ;D
however, the question of reimagining desire is so interesting and important. looking at desire and sex and sexuality straight in the eye might be uncomfortable for a bit, but finding the answer we're looking for is so worth it. especially in a society where porn is maybe the number one cause of violence against women, pedophilia, and rape. not only does it benefit ONLY the perpetrator, but it continues to prevail and seemingly worsen as social media and technology expands.
my god, this is a bit lengthy and i apologise for rambling!! maybe the things i've said aren't all exactly on topic, maybe they derailed a bit, but this conversation has awakened a lot of thoughts and feelings in me that i hope will somehow resonate or at least reach you and the purpose of this post. will keep thinking about this topic, and encourage my boyfriend to think of it as well, so we can redefine our desire together to something that serves US and our love, and will bring this up with anyone i feel is looking for the same.
I loved reading that essay on porn by amb, thank you for sharing! It's a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently. A few months ago I stopped watching porn and also cut waayyyy back on social media... I just found myself feeling so overwhelmed all the time and so zapped of creativity, imagination, desire, even empathy. It's been really exciting to watch myself slowly recover; I've started thinking up new fantasies, and my sensuality feels more connected to an inner wellspring of desire vs. an external one. It's like my desire is becoming more authentic, more nuanced and more mine.
omg thank you for sharing this Erin!!! This is AMAZING! I love how stopping watching porn and reducing social media has reconnected you with INNER desire, omg, I am making a podcast episode related to this and I LOVE this so much. I did the same thing, reclaiming my own fantasies and imagination, and it's truly SO powerful. I like the idea that your desire is becoming more "nuanced" that opens my heart and soul I love it. Loving this chapter of desire for you!!!
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': βThere should be freedom to not identify as ace if it doesnβt serve you, freedom to be ace & still be curious about sex, freedom to identify as ace & then change your mindβ¦ 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.β
thank you so much Julia! I will read Ace, thank you. I love the quote you shared and that was so generous of you that way we can capture an idea from the book for those who won't be able to read it. Thank you so much . TRUE SEXUAL LIBERATION MEANS HAVING MANY CHOICES! I soooo love this. No sex forever! Sex 3 times a day! Yes. One thing I HATE is the idea that loving sex or being allosexual makes you more of a feminist or a human... I've also been wanting to read the book "Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture" by Sherronda Brown so now we have a lil list going <3 thank you Julia for pointing this out! very empt!! (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710512/refusing-compulsory-sexuality-by-sherronda-j-brown/)
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!
Thank you so much Beywn for this deeply thoughtful comment. I love how you describe how porn has directly and indirectly shaped your ideas around sexual desirability, that is sooo true and resonates deeply with me too. I love your question on how to decolonize desire and desirability. In the book Pleasure Activism she encourages that we really CAN change what we desire, or we can bring our desires closer to the world we want to see. I love when she says think some more, and some more, and some more... it's interesting and counterintuitive since our desires are so entrenched in these oppressive systems of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-fatness, transphobia etc etc etc. I think our desires are more malleable than we might believe they are originally. And at the same time both the underlying structures have to be uprooted and our desire has to be reshaped! Thank you for your amazingly thoughtful comment, I really appreciate you being here!
thank you so much for sharing your words and wisdom!! and thank you so much for connecting us with essays by amb and so many others, you are a light and an infinite force for good in this world and we are so grateful for you!!! we love you & are thankful for you and thank you for helping us all to re-imagine a new world, to paradigm shift our consciousness, & thank you too for facilitating such important and vital conversations with the collective!!! you are so amazing π
thank you so much for this divine comment my darling! I love you!!! You are so amazing!!! ugh thank you for this incredible comment as always and for supporting me DAY IN AND DAY OUT thru and thru out loud and in quiet I LOVE YOU <3
I love this topic! I love it especially because it feels foggy, confusing, complicated, hard,- like I know the ground I've stood on is maybe made of sand. I'm so thankful for this community to really stretch out in. π
oh wow "like the ground I've stood on is maybe made of sand", LaLeigh -- you always leave such divine comments that stay on my heart and consciousness. I am so thankful for YOU truly, this is so wonderful. I know the exact feeling you mean. It's unsettling -- but the kind that one feels is important to their coming to a deeper truth or pain of our world. Thank you for being here my darling <3
Same here!!!!!
β€β€β€
Hi hi first of all thank you so much for sharing this! I just finished listening to your podcast episode on finding your voice and it literally had me in tears in public! Didnβt know where to comment to this but I just wanted to say it deeply moved me and inspired me so much. It means so much to me and I, along with many others are so grateful for your work!! Thank for helping us all move towards being more in touch with our innate divine creative essences *mwah*!
Iβve been thinking a lot about desire and itβs political potential lately. These essays made me reflect on the ways in which we reach for convenience out of exhaustion and fear in so many areas of our lives including our sexual lives. The fear of truly imagining new ways of desire is so palpable because doing so forces us to confront just how much work there is to be done. It is so challenging and scary to truly and deeply confront how loveless a lot of our upbringings have been. How capitalism and patriarchy have not only created cultures of lovelessness but have exploited that absence of love and that yearning partly through sexualizing oppression. It is so scary to truly dig and try to sit with that and imagine new desires and realities as it can bring up a fear that they may never be realized. You cannot bridge the chasm of lovelessness without recognizing it is there in the first place, and that is painful.
In order to move towards the desires we want and need to cultivate to break cycles of oppression, it is necessary to first sit with the intensity of the pain that the absence of love and acceptance brings and has brought us. It is necessary to sit with the pain of rejection brought on by society, our families, friends, societal standards that have told us are bodies are not desirable as they as. We must sit with the pain of how we have then internalized that rejection and have rejected ourselves in the process. We must alchemize that pain and face it in order to imagine new possibilities. In a culture that encourages us to further numb and consume instead of feeling, we must be brave enough to feel our pain and hold one another in that process.
I want to be turned on by care, reciprocity, respect, trust, community. I want to eroticize my liberation. I have practiced this individually by trying to, as often as I can, when I am feeling insecure about my appearance, asking myself who benefits from me feeling this way? Who benefits when I feel insecure, when I yearn for a past or future version of myself who is anyone but who I am in the present? Who benefits from me being robbed of my ability to be present and full of love for who I am right now? I say, fuck those raggedy old white men (not literally). They can get absolutely fucked. Then I think, wow how incredibly sexy of me to deny these shits the satisfaction of profiting off of my being. Now thatβs fucking hot.
This is literally DIVINE OH MY WORD. I am floored. Thank you soooo much for this deeply thoughtful and wonderful comment, Sam. Wow! I love the idea of "cultures of lovelessness" omgomg.. it's so true and beautifully put. I completely agree that sitting with and confronting with the pain comes first, and your dream for what you want to be turned on by. "I want to eroticize my liberation" I Looooooove that !!!! The very idea of that turns me on immensely. So proud of you and adore this comment, thank you!!!
I am also so glad to hear that the finding your voice episode spoke to you, that fills me with deep fulfillment and peace and joy! Thank you for telling me!!! <3 <3 <3
I was literally having a conversation with my best friend on FaceTime yesterday and he suggested that we should put ourselves out there and find romantic or sexual interests. He has had more than a handful of these interests whilst I havenβt had that. Not that Iβve never tried to. He is light skinned and Iβm darker in comparison. When he suggested this I told him that whilst the beauty standard favours you, it doesnβt do the same for me. It never has. I donβt know how he felt or what Iβd said even registered.
But there is a beauty standard. And the closer a person is to whiteness the more it favours them. To the other questions you asked on desire, I have no answers but I plan on using them as journal prompts when I write down my thoughts later today. Thank you Ayanda for such an amazing read.
Omg thank you Mthobisi -- this idea that you and your friend face different realities based on Desirability and Beauty capital and access is soooo real and it's easy to not bring this up when our friends say things like this so I am so proud of you for naming this painful reality. Thank you for your precious comment! I am dreaming of love for you. I would like to share this essay with you by Da'Shaun Harrison which I think may speak to you: https://dashaunharrison.com/to-love-and-be-loved-from-the-fat-perspective/
hi lovely!! both articles and your commentary on the topic are truly so spot on. i've been exposed to porn at around the ages of 10-12, and it's taken me until i turned 18 this year to at least slightly grasp the repercussions and consequences it had on me as a young girl.
currently in a relationship with my first boyfriend and getting to know his experience with porn and desire, as well as experiencing LOVE in such a beautiful form of it made me reflect on my younger self and her thoughts and desires. not only was porn the only place i'd gotten information about sex from (like a super messed up sex ed class made by old men for little girls), it was also what made me want to have my first time having sex with a stranger that i'd never see again. it never happened, thank god because it's simply not for me, but i recognised it came from a place of insecurity of not being experienced, of not looking like the actors in those videos, of wanting to just get it over with. and it all stemmed from porn and its loveless sex, its sameness, its perverseness.
and it was scary for a 15 year old girl to think of sex and equate it with the strangeness that is porn, it was uncomfortable for someone that was so hopeful about love and relationships and the DEEPNESS of it all to just view sex as a means to an end, or rather something so shallow and oppressive from all perspectives.
now, of course, i feel so much more differently, and i'm glad i'm now able to see sex and desire for what they are and what they mean to me, at least the me of now. maybe the me of ten years from now on will feel some other way ;D
however, the question of reimagining desire is so interesting and important. looking at desire and sex and sexuality straight in the eye might be uncomfortable for a bit, but finding the answer we're looking for is so worth it. especially in a society where porn is maybe the number one cause of violence against women, pedophilia, and rape. not only does it benefit ONLY the perpetrator, but it continues to prevail and seemingly worsen as social media and technology expands.
my god, this is a bit lengthy and i apologise for rambling!! maybe the things i've said aren't all exactly on topic, maybe they derailed a bit, but this conversation has awakened a lot of thoughts and feelings in me that i hope will somehow resonate or at least reach you and the purpose of this post. will keep thinking about this topic, and encourage my boyfriend to think of it as well, so we can redefine our desire together to something that serves US and our love, and will bring this up with anyone i feel is looking for the same.
much much love <33
I loved reading that essay on porn by amb, thank you for sharing! It's a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently. A few months ago I stopped watching porn and also cut waayyyy back on social media... I just found myself feeling so overwhelmed all the time and so zapped of creativity, imagination, desire, even empathy. It's been really exciting to watch myself slowly recover; I've started thinking up new fantasies, and my sensuality feels more connected to an inner wellspring of desire vs. an external one. It's like my desire is becoming more authentic, more nuanced and more mine.
omg thank you for sharing this Erin!!! This is AMAZING! I love how stopping watching porn and reducing social media has reconnected you with INNER desire, omg, I am making a podcast episode related to this and I LOVE this so much. I did the same thing, reclaiming my own fantasies and imagination, and it's truly SO powerful. I like the idea that your desire is becoming more "nuanced" that opens my heart and soul I love it. Loving this chapter of desire for you!!!
Wow I loose this and itβs giving me a bit to think about !!!!!