Sex & Pleasure Activism

In this section, we encourage you to explore inviting pleasure into your healing journey. Adrienne Maree Brown’s book, Pleasure Activism, inspires us and helps us understand that pleasure is key to understanding the trauma we’ve experienced, and to sustain our healing journey, we have to feel good throughout the process.

Here are some key concepts to understanding pleasure:

1. Pleasure is a measure of freedom.
2. Pleasure is about noticing what makes you feel good and what you are curious about.
3. Pleasure is about learning about the ways you can increase the amount of feeling-good time in your life.
4. Pleasure allows you to create more room for joy, wholeness, and aliveness and less room for oppression, repression, self-denial, and unnecessary suffering.
5. Pleasure decreases any internal or projected shame or scarcity thinking around the pursuit of pleasure, and it can quiet any voices of trauma that keep you from your full sacred sensual life.
6. You are allowed to have abundant pleasure.
7. When we collectively orient around pleasure we can begin to understand that liberation is possible.

“ The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and selfrespect we can require no less of ourselves. - Excerpt from Uses of Erotic: The Erotic as Power by Audre Lorde

So let’s get into it, sex can make us feel good and orgasms are truly the best for a lot of different reasons. When it comes to sex, it’s important to acknowledge that everyone is different and we all have different likes and dislikes. Getting to know yourself sexually and tapping into the power of the erotic is a process and a journey. It’s okay to skip to other sections if you’re not aligning with this message. Only you get to decide what that looks like.

Here are some tips if you’re resonating with this message so far. It’s okay if you want to come back to this at a later time.

Masturbation

You don’t have to be with someone in order to have wonderful orgasms. Masturbation can be a great way to connect with your body and for you to know what feels good to you. Masturbation is one way you can reclaim the senses of your body and you can explore your own ability to bring pleasure to your body. The best part about this is that you are in complete control, you can go as deep into your senses as you’re comfortable with and you can stop whenever you want. Everyone is different, you can masturbate without sex toys or with sex toys, you can do it in front of a mirror or in the shower. You get to decide what masturbation looks like for you and at the end of the day, masturbation can be a fun and safe method to explore your sexuality. You can read this article, Sex after Trauma: How Masturbation Can Help You Heal if you’re curious to explore this route.

Consensual sex

Having safe and consensual sex can allow us to feel that sense of satisfaction that is aspired by so many and you have the opportunity to connect with your partner(s) more intimately. Here’s what we mean by having consent during sex.

Consent means...

• Everyone involved should be able to freely communicate what they do or don’t want, as well as read and respect each other’s signals and boundaries.
• Everyone involved is sincere in their desires and has clearly communicated their intent.
• Anyone can change their mind at any point in time and they should not be pressured or shamed if they want to stop sex.
• Choosing to have sex once does not mean you are choosing to have sex every time. You need consent every single time.
• When a person is under the influence, they cannot give consent.

It is never your fault if you were not able to give consent or someone else did not respect your sexual boundaries. No one deserves to be sexually assaulted or raped and you are not alone. Perhaps that experience is the reason you’re reading this zine. We want you to know that what happened to you does not define who you are, you can heal from the trauma of sexual violence and you deserve a healthy and pleasurable sex life. For this reason, consent is especially important because every time you engage in consensual sex, it creates new neural pathways in your brain that say sex can feel good and you are safe. Through the process of neural plasticity, those new neural pathways accumulate over time and they can override previous negative experiences.

At the same time, our body stores memories and sometimes even when you’re engaging in pleasurable, safe, and consensual sex, a painful memory can arise and now your mind and body no longer feels safe. This is called an activation but is commonly referred to as a “trigger”. We choose the word activation because the word “trigger” can have a connotation to gun violence and the word activation more accurately describes the stress response in your nervous system (flight, fight, or freeze) that is activated. When this happens your mind and body relive the memory and this can be scary, uncomfortable, and frustrating because we get it, you simply want to enjoy sex. However, activations during sex are not uncommon and if this happens, here’s what you can do.

Adapted from (adm) “I WANT YOU, BUT I’M TRIGGERED” in Pleasure Activism

1. Stop

   Pause what you are doing. If you can speak, say, “Wait, stop, I need a moment.” If you can’t speak, remove your partner’s hands from your body and step away, holding your hands up. If that is too much, just fully withdraw your body from contact. If you know from past experiences that you have some triggers, it can help to name this up front and let your person know what they can do if you get triggered. This is also a good thing to ask a new lover: “Is there anything I might do that could trigger you?” Or, “If anything I’m doing doesn’t work for you, please say ‘stop’ or hold up your hands.”

2. Take Time to Recover

   Let your breath return to normal, however long that takes. Notice if you are caught in a memory or if you are actually feeling unsafe in the present moment. Again, if you can speak, say “Something is coming up from my past, I need a moment.” If you can’t speak, closing your eyes can help you to establish a boundary around your attention and keep it on your own well-being and breath.

3. Decide What to Share

   You are not obligated to disclose your past trauma. Sharing the details of it in or right after the moment of activation may not be appropriate for the connection or the moment or your healing. Or it might be exactly right. Some options: “I want to share more about my history of trauma with you but not right now.” Intimacy, yes, but I need time. This might include, “I’d like to continue— but can you avoid [if the activation is a physical place or activity, name it as an emerging boundary]?” “Are you open to hearing about what’s coming up for me right now?” Hearing about other people’s trauma can be hard, even re-traumatizing for people. It can also be a swift transition from heavy petting to deep sharing. The connection may not be about that kind of depth, even if something is coming up in that moment. “I am feeling like myself again. I don’t want to talk about it. I would like to keep making out, if you’re down.” Sometimes the activation is familiar, and once it passes I just want to keep going, not move into a big process moment. “Something is coming up for me‚ I’m not ready to share it, I think I [you] need to head home.”

4. Let Your Body Follow Your Words/Desires

   If you want to leave or want your lover to go— make those moves. If you have a friend who can come and get you, call them up. You don’t need to drive when your system is taken over by trauma. If you want to continue the encounter and your lover is still game, start slow. Move within the boundaries you need. But it’s really important to know that you deserve pleasure. Experiences where you can be activated and recover, which usually come after doing healing work at a somatic and/ or therapeutic level, help to reset your system to know that you can enjoy the connections you choose to and reclaim your freedom and pleasure inside of spaces absent of harm.

There are a lot of different ways we can incorporate pleasure in our healing journey and we hope we’ve sparked some ideas. As a reminder, you are exactly where you need to be. Healing is a nonlinear process and the wide range of emotions, even when they are conflicting, are valid.

Resources:

Pleasure Activism is available at the healing library if you’re resonating with this message. If you were activated and would like to talk to a Care Advocate, you can schedule a Care Advocate Appointment. You can also talk to a therapist or counselor for additional support (you can find more information about therapy in the following section). Lastly, journaling about this part of your journey and documenting any activations that arise can also be really helpful.