Nearly two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Epicurus said, “Pleasure is the first good, it is the beginning of every choice.”

It is a timeless fact that human beings are wired for pleasure. Planet Earth is a paradise of sensual experience. We are the living inheritors of this place of immense splendor, each one of us miracles, living stardust, the universe experiencing itself.

And within that experience of itself, the universe is clearly having quite a sexual experience within this human experience of ours. The capacity we have for sexual pleasure, for erotic imagination, for fantasy and all sorts of sexual creativing is tremendous.

Given these facts, you have to stop and ask yourself what the fuck is going on that so many people are so discontent. Why is there so much unpleasurable sex in the world? Why, in a species as hypersocial as ours, are there so many lonely people?

Why indeed.

Since we’re asking why, why is it that there have been so many violent repressions of sexuality and sexual pleasure throughout history? Why are sexualites outside of a very narrow box repressed and vilified?

We’ve spoken before about another long-standing fact: within organized societies, one way power seeks to exert control over a population is to control sexuality. One of the ways that is done is to make sex about reproduction and attempt to divorce it from pleasure.

The reason for that, as I see it, is simple.

Pleasure is like concentrated motivation. We are animals driven by dopamine, and nothing fires up the reward centers of our brain quite like experiences of pleasure.

That’s true of all of our experiences of pleasure. So why this special focus on sexual pleasure?

Any guesses?

In sexual pleasure, we are in a state of highly rewarding connection. It’s free, or as free as anything can be within capitalism. It feels good in a way that can become sustainable and sustaining. Sexual pleasure is generative. It can lift you and your partners up and over the general fracas.

In that togetherness, you can form bonds. In that togetherness, you can discover love and loving. In that togetherness, you can create networks of support free from the power hierarchies that dictate every other aspect of life.

That is why there is such a clampdown on sexual pleasure. It contains within the possibility to draw us together in a way where we become impossible to divide.

One way that the world tries to steer us away from the power potential of sexual pleasure is to try and turn it into a means to another end. If they can make us desire sex not for the pleasure of the experience, but as a means to validation or identity, then they defang pleasure. They sideline it so that it is no longer a threat.

The work of a Slutty Activist, then is to make pleasure the goal of their sexual experiences, from one night stands through to long standing relationships. This is simple, but by no means easy. 

In the Dignified Hedonist framework, this is done in 3 steps: Date Yourself, Prime for Pleasure, and Savor Your Sensuality.

One of the most common ways people are robbed of experiencing pleasure within their sexual relationships is through making pleasure contingent on feeling desired by others. 

Remember, is sex is about validation, rather than pleasure, you would expect the good feeling to flow from validation.

Just like in other instances where we are looking to others for fulfillment, this is an exercise in externalizing your power and setting yourself up for disappointment. You cannot control the behavior of others, including whether or not they desire you.

When you externalize power over your pleasure and make it dependent on the desire of others, this comes at a cost. First and foremost, you don’t feel worthy of desire and you’re unable to notice when others desire you. You tend to focus on the wrong things to try to become attractive to others. 

What’s worse, even when you are desired by others, you wind up treating those declarations of desire as suspicious. Left unchecked, you slowly begin withdrawing from dating or relationships because it begins to feel impossible that you could ever experience satisfaction.

This problem is exacerbated by a culture that is constantly telling you all the ways you are undesirable (so that they can sell you shit and keep you down) as well as all the ways that certain others are undesirable, in order to reinforce structures of oppression. 

The way out of this quagmire is to cultivate desire for yourself.

It’s interesting how much of a reaction suggesting people cultivate desire for themselves provokes. Some clever people say something like, “Sarah, I thought you said it’s important to embrace our desires. Well, I desire to be desired, damn it!”

Fair point. To which I say - there is nothing wrong with wanting to be desired.

What causes problems is when receiving the desire of others becomes the only way for you to experience pleasure within your relationships. You want receiving desire to be like a cherry on the cake, not the main meal from which you are drawing all of your nutrition.

Folks who are heavily dependent on the desire of others for their own pleasure often  struggle. If this is you, you might find it hard to imagine ever having sex with someone, because you just don’t think people could see you that way or, if you’re in a relationship, you might worry a lot about your partner’s past partners or that your partner will cheat on you.

Let me tell you - when you’re in that place, it is a very unsexy and decidedly non-pleasurable place to be. I have worked with clients that have been caught in this trap for years, sometimes decades. 

Breaking that mold is hard. When you begin to separate your partner’s desire from your ability to experience pleasure, sometimes what happens is sex feels a bit meh for a while. You might believe your partner will desire you, but only if you’re perfect or if you do the right things. You likely put a lot of energy into trying to become desirable to your partners or to others, but the effects are minimal.

At least when you were yearning to feel desired by them, there was always a sexually tense energy you could lean on. Isn’t that what arousal is supposed to feel like? It’s profoundly sad that many people confuse the anxiety of sexual insecurity with the thumping life force of arousal, but that’s a story for another day. 

The reason this is such a trap is simple: until you believe that you are desirable, it is hard to recognize desire for you in others. Until you desire yourself, you will always doubt the desire you receive.

Dating Yourself is how you become desirable. Just like when you Defined Your Desires, this is a process where you take self-desire from an abstract concept and make it concrete through definition, details, and action. When you have cultivated desire for yourself, you just know you’re desirable, and you don’t worry about it. You treat yourself well and make time to enjoy things that are pleasurable for you. 

Distinguishing being desired and pleasure as two separate phenomena is the essential first step toward unlocking your full pleasure potential. 

Taking back your power to generate pleasure for yourself, independent of your so called desirability, is a foundational step in becoming an extraordinary lover for others. 

This exercise is as important for the empowerment as it is for going through the process of discovering that most of what the world has told you about desirability is bullshit, and smelling bullshit is an important skill.

The sad truth is that the world is full of terrible information and shitty advice about sex and relationships. Most of this information is fear-based, erotophobic, and leans on stereotypes.

This includes a lot of the mainstream information about pleasure. You’d be forgiven for thinking that extraordinary sex stems from knowing a bunch of positions or reading top ten lists about the best ways to play with genitals.

Here’s the thing - sexual pleasure is never a one-size-fits-all deal. There’s no one position or combination of moves that will reliably drive every human being wild with passion and pleasure. 

Which I know is a real disappointment for some people. Wouldn’t it just be easier if you just knew what to do, and it was the same every time?

Big hint - you’re likely becoming a Slutty Activist if hearing me say that, even if it resonated with some part of your brain also made you feel immensely sad.

Instead of looking for some fool-proof way to be sexual that guarantees pleasure, a much better bet is to learn how human bodies areprimed for pleasure and make this the bedrock of your sexual expression. By learning the basic principles of how pleasure is generated, you can become a highly adaptable, creative lover.

If you’re right at the beginning of your journey into co-creating real, carnal pleasure, it’s possible that most of your sex education up to this point came from porn or things you heard from your peers. 

You might worry about whether you’re manly enough, feminine enough, if your penis is big enough, if your pussy is tight enough, if you’re dominant enough, if you’re being too assertive, or any number of other worries that have more to do with social indoctrination than they do with how humans actually experience pleasure. You may secretly worry about being found out as unknowledgeable, too knowledgeable, inexperienced, or over experienced.

I’m hoping by now that you can see where concerns like these will get in the way of having the experiences of pleasure you crave.

To get started on becoming more knowledgeable about pleasure, you might read some books, listen to some podcasts, or watch some YouTube videos made by sex educators. At this point, you’ll have some idea about what makes for good sex, though you won’t really be sure why certain things work or what to do if someone says they don’t.

That’s where you have everything to gain by Priming for Pleasure, your own pleasure and the pleasure of others, by understanding the basics of human pleasure physiology and some tried and true techniques you can use to work with that physiology to create pleasure. When you combine this knowledge with sexual communication skills, so much becomes possible.

You become flexible, adaptable, and confident in your ability to experience pleasure and share pleasure with others. You know how the body is innervated and how to communicate about safer sex. You become like a ninja where sexual pleasure is concerned. More than likely, you also go on to own a collection of good lubes and sex toys, too.

On this journey, one thing you realize is that, however much pleasure you are currently speaking, you somehow always have the ability to experience more.

It can take time to build up the capacity to experience more and more pleasure. It’s not necessarily something that happens overnight. 

And at the same time, it is striking when you realize that there is potentially so much more waiting for you in terms of your embodied, physical experience. This is an even more powerful realization if you started out experiencing very little pleasure, or if you’d never experienced an orgasm previously.

The way you can continue to expand your capacity for pleasure and discover new sources of pleasure is through practices that allow you to conscious and deliberately Savor Your Sensuality.

If you’re like most people, you probably feel disconnected from your body sometimes, or maybe even all the time. Sometimes, you might even feel resentful of your body.

We explored in depth how powerfully disembodiment facilitates fascism in episode 5. If you haven’t listened to it yet, go back and check it out.

One powerful way to repair your relationship and connection with your body is by making time every day to experience pleasure through the senses.

I think it’s pretty damning evidence that I’ve had not one, not two, but at least 7 clients that I can think of who’ve said, at the beginning of our work together, some version of “I feel like my body is like a tumor on my brain.”

If that resonates, I’d hazard to guess you might feel let down by your body. You might worry you are too short, too tall, too fat, too skinny, too freckly, too hairy, too hairless, not muscular enough, too muscular – and see it as something that gets in the way. 

What’s more, you might hate dancing because it feels awkward. Touch probably feels awkward, too. In a context where you don’t really feel your body, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Because those are things that you do with and through your body.

Here’s the rub: sex is something that takes place with and through your body, too. That is why sensual presence in the body helps determine just how much pleasure you can feel.

Once someone has realized that disconnecting from their body is something they want to change, very often a flurry of activity follows. If that’s you, you might have taken some dance classes, joined a contact improv group, or attended a tantra festival. And, all of these activities made a real difference to your relationship with your body! You’re most likely a bit puzzled over how to bring the magic you feel in those settings into your everyday life.

Most of the time, what you need to make that shift from workshop junkie to a consistent sensual presence is daily practice. Integrating sensual awareness in your life take a lot of attention at first. It starts out feeling like work. Then it becomes a habit. 

And, at some point, you realize that your sensuality is as natural to you as breathing air or drinking water. You are engaging in regular sensual awareness without even trying. It doesn’t take effort anymore. You feel present in your body, in some ways it’s like you ARE your body. You know how to tap into sensual pleasure at any time, and feel excited about all you can continue to explore throughout your life thanks to your sensuality.

In many ways, what is true of being Desire-Led and Sex-Forward is true of being Pleasure-Focused, too.

Ultimately, focusing on pleasure, co-conspiring with your partners to generate pleasure together, requires way less effort than trying to use sex as a means to validation.

When you start making this shift, it certainly doesn’t feel easy at first, though the great thing about pleasure is that once you start multiplying it, pleasure is highly, highly motivating. 

That’s why we talk about Slutty Activism’s ability to change the world through pleasure, because pleasure is what will get us there. Pleasure is what will keep us going in face of the inevitable set back and backlash that are inherent to the project of liberation in our world.

Because, friend, this is going to be a long fight. It’s been going on since before we were born and will continue after we perish. It’s a struggle that has taken many forms.

Today, we are dealing with its fruits this century - neo-fascism, climate catastrophe, the roll back of rights and freedoms.

I believe we have many reasons to be optimistic. I do not believe the future is set in stone. I do believe humanity’s tomorrow can be different than today.

And I believe the genesis of a kinder, more compassionate world that prioritizes human wellbeing and dignity will have its genesis in our collective experiences of pleasure and connection.

In a world that wants you to be perpetually discontent, that says you aren’t deserving, that seeks to keep you down and strip you of your power, pleasure is a radical act of resistance.

As a Slutty Activist equipped with pleasure skills that enable you to be an extraordinary lover, the impact of the pleasure you generate with your partners doesn’t stop with you. It can’t.

In those moments of co-conspiring and play, abandon and delight, you are able to taste real freedom together. Not a manufactured freedom. Not a partial freedom. Not a freedom from. Rather, you create experiences of freedom to and you allow each other to inhabit that space of pleasure as you are in this moment.

That is the kind of freedom we’ve been waiting for.

So, what do you say, come join me?