In Praise of Pleasure Activism

If you don’t allow yourself to fully experience pleasure, including in your sexual and erotic life, you won’t be ready to address the coming right-wing onslaught.

Unlike on my Musings from a Curious Mind newsletter page, here I don’t typically refer specifically to a single source of information as inspiration for a post. However, I’m going to do that here and recommend you read Brittany Wong’s excellent “'Pleasure Activism' Is The Excuse You Need To Have More Sex This Year.”

It's common knowledge among people who read my writings elsewhere that I’m a political animal. Historically, I’ve been deeply engaged in politics and the community and activist organizing that influences those politics. In the spirit of this newsletter, I’m going to suggest you engage in an important form of activism – seeking out pleasure, including sexual and erotic varieties.

The gist of Wong’s article is that if you want to affect change in our world, make sure to create enough pleasure in your life including any sex or erotic activities that make you feel erotically whole.

If you’re bracing for a rough 2025 ― and given the current political and economic climate (not to mention the actual climate), who isn’t? ― there’s one thing you might want to start prioritizing: Sex, and pleasure in all its various forms.

Take that long, luxuriant cat nap. Order the cheese fries. Go dancing for the first time since your 20s. Take up painting and make beautiful things, knowing that change happens with creation more than consumption.

And definitely have more sex — and actually love your body, rather than looking at it as a personal project in constant need of fixing.

I’m writing this from Maui, Hawaii. To say I’m experiencing pleasure is an understatement. The beauty here is astonishing. The slow pace of the island immediately decompresses me and inevitably helps me feel joy more fully. Last night before I fell asleep, I engaged in some solo sex and it relaxed me yet further, and I slept like a rock.

These moments of pleasure, sexual and otherwise, are vitally important if I’m to continue doing the other work I want to do to attempt to make my communities and the world better places. Without rest, relaxation, and enough pleasure in our lives, we won’t have the stamina or capability to be activists and bring about change.

These actions may seem small or only really beneficial to you, but in times of great uncertainty and political upheaval, self-indulgences like these can have an outsize impact on the world.

Also, as a gay man, claiming my right to the consensual sex I want and deserve is an act of defiance in the face of the right-wing efforts now poised to decimate the rights of LGBTQ people and anyone who enjoys anything but the most basic of heteronormative procreative sex.

While pleasure is important for everyone, pleasure activism has historically been a marginalized people’s form of resistance and self-care, according to Ivan Bujan, who specializes in gender studies and queer theory and currently teaches at DePaul University and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

“Pleasure has been a means of individual fulfillment but also as a space for community creation and healing,” Bujan said.

My take on this is nicely summed up in this statement by Nicole Davis, a therapist and the clinical director at the Gender & Sexuality Therapy Center in New York City.

“Leaning into pleasure, finding ways to experience joy, [and] celebrating ourselves and our communities are all ways of stepping out and telling those folks that they cannot win,” she said. “It’s saying, we’re here and we will be here, and they are going to have to bear witness to our refusal to succumb.”

Davis believes that pleasure is especially crucial for “everyone who isn’t a straight, cis, white, Christian, assigned male at birth person” as Trump and his extremist right-wing minions take power in our country.

Wong suggests ways you can tap into pleasure activism yourself. As I mentioned above, I engaged in some of that pleasure activism myself last night before going to sleep.

I recommend you read Wong’s article. It’s not long, but it discusses a factor in activism and social change that’s rarely talked about. If we don’t claim the pleasure and sexual satisfaction we rightfully deserve, we won’t have the strength to affect the change we want.

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