It all begins with desire. Changing your life, changing the world, and experiencing days filled with dignity and pleasure can’t actually happen unless and until you allow desire to lead you.

There’s an incredible coach named Natalie Miller who says that desire is the energy of new beginning, the energy of origin. Think about that for a moment. Desire is a powerful, creative, generative force. 

And yet many of us have a hard time identifying what we want, nevermind allowing desire to lead us. That’s no mistake, and it’s not a personal failing. If you struggle to get in touch with your desire, that means the system is working.

Most of us have some awareness that something isn’t right with desire - maybe you notice the way advertising works to manufacture desires, or how media is structured to fracture attention.

Our societies work hard to condition us to tune out the honest, generative desires we feel rising up from our own flesh, and to supplant them with the desires they want us to have. 

To become a Slutty Activist, then, one of the most important things you must do is repair your relationship with desire. In the Dignified Hedonist framework, this is done in 3 steps: Reset What You Expect, Define Your Desires, and Shift Your Thinking.

Part of how our relationship with desire gets scrambled is through the process of forming values, attitudes, and beliefs about sex, relationships, and pleasure. 

Throughout your life, you’ve been given lots of messages about gender, sexual orientation, relationships, bodies, pleasure, sex, and more. Many of these messages were communicated when you were a child, at a time when you were vulnerable, relatively powerless, and long before your prefrontal cortex was fully developed. 

Many of the values, attitudes, and beliefs you were taught would have just been accepted at face value. Here’s the rub - many of these values, attitudes, and beliefs don’t serve you. In fact, they do the opposite - they actively make it harder for you to create the relationships you have been searching for and have the kinds of sexual experiences you dream of.

The way to transform your values, attitudes, and beliefs from obstacles into allies is to make them conscious and bring them into alignment with what you actually value.

Where are you right now, today, when it comes to noticing how your values, attitudes, and beliefs play out in the realm of your sexual and relational life?

Often, when people take their first steps into sex positive spaces, like going to workshops and support groups, they don’t have a conscious awareness of the values, attitudes, and beliefs that underpin their behaviors. 

They often think in broad generalizations, for example that men do this, women do that, and that’s just how it is. 

Before long, though, something starts to shift. Usually, when people come to work with me, they’ve got a suspicion that there might be much more to human sexual relationships beyond broad generalizations. 

While folks at this midway point still spend a lot of time thinking about what they “should” do in relationships, they also have a budding curiosity about why they have come to understand the world the way they do and a growing interest in finding answers.

Once you have Reset What You Expect and have gone through the process of consciously choosing your values, attitudes, and beliefs, it’s at that point that you stop giving a fuck about what you should do and start giving a fuck about what you want to do. 

When you know who you are and what you value, that matters more to you than some set of arbitrary rules.

By bringing your values, attitudes, and beliefs first into conscious awareness and then into alignment with who you are, you lay the groundwork required to accept your desires as they are.

Desire doesn’t want to be told it is wrong. It doesn’t want to be shamed or pushed away. Desire is the truth - YOUR truth. So, if desire is repeatedly ignored, it stops speaking loud enough for you to hear it. 

When you Reset What You Expect, you make it possible to hear the voice of your desire again. Once you can hear it, you need to learn to understand what it is saying.

Part of what keeps our desires invisible to us is that we are taught from an early age to feel shame about wanting. The exact flavor of that shame differs depending on your culture, your assigned gender, and your other intersections, but the resulting obscuring of desire is the same.

Put another way, the process of defining your desires is the beginning of releasing shame around sexuality.

In addition to shame, you likely grew up with the message that what you want isn’t that important and matters less than what other people want. In many ways, you were taught to take on the wants and desires of others, especially those with power like your parents, teachers, and older children, as if they were your own.

Disconnection from desire comes at a high cost. I’ve seen this disconnect show up in several different ways among my clients. 

You might worry about being ‘dominant’ enough, or you’ve had partners complain that you don’t take initiative

You might never get first messages on dating apps, and most of your first dates don’t turn into second dates.

You can start to feel resigned, like you must settle for people that are ok, but not really that exciting

You could even wind up spending months, maybe years, maybe… a lifetime frustrated about sex and relationships.

In order to Define Your Desires, you will go on a journey of discovery that ultimately allows you to articulate what you want in practical, concrete terms and then allow these desires to lead and motivate you.

Usually, when people first come to this work, they can easily tell me what they DON’T want, but struggle to say what they do want. If that’s you, you may not have even given much thought to what you do want because you just assumed it wasn’t important.

But once you make it safe for your desire to start speaking again, it starts off speaking in forceful abstraction.

Your desire may roar: “I want a girlfriend!” or “I want to be happy!” or “I want to have sex!” broad terms that point in a general direction without many specifics.

Or, you might be able to come up with some negatively phrased desires like “I want to stop being single” or “I want to stop being alone.”

It’s at this point that I take all of my clients through a process of cataloging their desires on three different levels - the individual, the relational, and the social. I ask a series of questions to help them consider their desires in depth and begin to flesh out their desires in detail.

I’m always reminded of this one client, let’s call him Dave, from early on in my career. We were working on defining his desires and I was walking him through these questions. While he was answering, the way he spoke was stilted, almost like there was a block in the pipeline from thought to speech.

“Dave,” I said, “I have an idea. How about we go through these questions again, from the top, but this time assume that anything you want is possible? Would you be open to that?”

He looked at me with a pained expression on his face. “I mean, sure, but I don’t see the point. No one is going to be interested so why bother?”

“That’s interesting. Tell me more - what is no one going to be interested in?”“You want to know what I really want, Sarah? I want to have dates where my girl and I eat pizza, play Counterstrike, and fuck.”

“Great,” I said to Dave, “that’s EXACTLY what you need to write in your online dating profile.”

He looked at me like I’d grown a 3rd head.

“Well, think of it this way - have you ever had anything like that on your profile before? Have you ever asked anyone you’re interested in if they want to have dates like that?”

“Well, no,” he started.

“So you actually have no data and no idea whether or not anyone would be interested. And there is one way you can find out.”

Dave did go on from that session to update his online dating profile with this description of what a perfect date would look like for him, along with some other specifics we nailed down together.

Two weeks later, he shared that he was getting way more responses to his profiles and been on a few dates with women who were gamers, but so far hadn’t really clicked with anyone.

“Keep going,” I said.

10 days later, my phone pinged with a text message that read:“You son of a bitch :)”

Dave met someone who was into Counterstrike, pizza, and, as it turned out, him. And the feeling was mutual. 

The impossible date had happened, and they were going to keep seeing each other.

That is the power in being able to directly and succinctly name your desires, with specifics. When you know what you want, it becomes much easier to find, or, rather, it becomes much easier to find other people who want to share the same experiences. 

When you know what you want, you will be far more motivated, too. Specificity generates tremendous energy because it makes your desire real, gives it shape in your imagination, and it is far more motivating to pursue something that feels real as opposed to something that feels impossible.

What would change for you if your desires for pleasure and connection were satisfied? How would the world change if all of our desires for pleasure and connection were satisfied?

Can you feel how powerful that idea is? I’m getting chills talking about it. 

A world where more and more of us are able to experience living out our authentic desires will be a more peaceful, more connected, and, frankly, more interesting and creative world.

Which is exactly why power doesn’t want you to connect with your desire, let alone live it. There will continue to be plenty of forces at work that continually try to sever you from your desire.

To secure your gains, then , you need to develop a resilience that allows you to remain connected to your desire even as the world tries to separate you from it.

The secret to doing so lies in recognizing your power to choose. This is simple, but by no means easy.

Many people, including me at one point, have externalized the locus of power in their relationship lives. Instead of being focused on what they want, they are concerned with fitting in, not making mistakes, and meeting perceived standards.

When you’re spending your energy and attention trying to figure out what other people think of you, that leaves less energy and attention for what you want. If you’re not careful, your desire will retreat back into silence.

The solution is to internalize the locus of power in your relationship life and focus on what helps you feel good and calm when you are in social situations with others. 

To put it another way, to truly Shift Your Thinking and protect your connection with desires, you must become intolerant of subjecting yourself to unnecessary internal pain.

Many people start out worrying a lot about whether or not they are normal in social situations, which is perfectly understandable given how most of us grow up. School is a setting where there is tremendous pressure to fit in and often a very high social cost to standing out. If you are neurodivergent - if you have ASD, ADHD, ADD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, anxiety, depression - you’re likely to have experienced even more othering in social groups when you were young. 

These experiences stick with us. At the same time, these experiences don’t have to define us. There is another way.

As you shift into focusing more on what you want from moment to moment, including in social situations, what happens first is usually that you are able to feel at ease around people you already know and trust, but you still feel some pressure and awkwardness around new people.

At this point, folks sometimes want to give up. They finally took the leap into the social realm and experiencing that awkwardness seems like a sign that things will never change. What they’re forgetting is that there is also ease in a place where there was once just constant rumination. It’s progress.

Ultimately, once you’ve shifted your thinking, your qualitative experience of social situations, including dates, will fundamentally change. When you are in social situations, you’ll check in with yourself about what you want from moment to moment. You’ll leave when you feel ready, instead of when you think it is ok to do so. You’ll feel at ease and no pressure.

By the way, when that shift happens, it won’t actually feel like much at all, because you’ll be expending way less energy than the rumination used to cost you. 

Hell, you might even feel a bit pissed off when you recongize what’s happened - it’s so unfair that when you were spending so much energy and making such a huge effort, the results were shit, and now when you feel like you’re doing fuck all, you’re having a fantastic time.

And that’s the big secret about desire: when you allow desire to lead, everything requires less effort.

I was tempted to say that everything becomes easier, but that’s not exactly true. When you allow desire to lead, you allow yourself to be led by truth. Truth is powerful. You living your truth is powerful.

Some people don’t like to see us powerful.

When you adopt desire as your compass, it has a tendency to shake up your existing relationships. You might discover that your values, your real, actual values, don’t match up with some of the people in your life.

Some people who are close to you might reject you. And let me tell you, rejection of your authentic self hurts a lot more than rejection of a front that you put up.

And at the same time, when those folks show their true colors, it makes space for people who want to connect with the real you and want to share experiences with you because they are driven by desire, not because they “should” out of obligation or inertia.

So, while the process of becoming desire-led isn’t necessarily easier, at least not at first, it definitely will bring a lot more ease to being in the world as you.

Authentic, desire-led relationships are a lot less work. Much of the time, they are generative - being among people who are with you for you has this tendency to make you feel really alive.

When your relationships are supportive and generate, rather than drain, your energy, guess what?

That leaves you with more energy to engage with the world.

That leaves you with more energy for masturbation, for maintaining multiple relationships (sexual, romantic, or platonic), for community organizing, for protesting, for going on strike.

That leaves you with more energy for supporting and showing up for others.

Which leaves them, in turn, with more energy for masturbation, relationships, organizing, protesting, and striking.

Can you see what a powerful virtuous cycle we set in motion when we decide to become desire-led? 

If you can agree that we need a new beginning in our world, desire is what will take us there.

Come join me?