'Pleasure Activism' Is The Excuse You Need To Have More Sex This Year

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. 

To make her case, brown pulls heavily on the essays of Audre Lorde, the late queer feminist who wrote that caring for ourselves in the midst of political turmoil is “not self-indulgence, [it’s] self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.”

We know that sex, or otherwise feeling more embodied, is a time-tested stress reliever. Touch, whether you’re touching your partner or touching yourself, releases feel-good hormones like endorphins, oxytocin, and dopamine that work to reduce anxiety and boost your mood. 

But accessing your own pleasure reverberates outside yourself, too. As brown argues in her book, you won’t have the energy to push for change if all you do is work and worry.

The goal, she writes, is to “create more room for joy, wholeness and aliveness (and less room for oppression, repression, self-denial and necessary suffering).”That’s what’s going to sustain you through the next four years, not (just) stewing in your negative reaction to any foreseeable attacks on your community. 

Pleasure should be for all of us, not just a privileged few or those who are hyper-productive

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.

During the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis, when institutional responses were marked by homophobia and inaction, individuals and queer organizations developed harm-reduction practices like safer sex programs, centering pleasure as a mobilizing factor, Bujan told HuffPost. 

“Rather than suppressing sex, sex workers and community activists embraced pleasure to foster prevention and care,” he said. 

“You can also look at disability justice activists who have challenged societal norms by staging performances featuring disabled individuals who narrate their lives as sexual, desirable, and desiring beings.”

Bujan pointed to Sins Invalid, a queer, people of color-led performance collective formed in 2005 whose work explores themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body. 

Nicole Davis, a therapist and the clinical director at the Gender & Sexuality Therapy Center in New York City, thinks pleasure is all the more crucial for “everyone who isn’t a straight, cis, white, Christian, assigned male at birth person,” as the right wing takes power in D.C. 

“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.” 

We know that pleasure, even non-sexual pleasure, is political because some people’s pleasure is encouraged, valued and protected, while others’ pleasure is shamed, criminalized or policed, says Sami Schalk, a professor of gender and women’s studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I think about how many times the police are called on people who are experiencing pleasure in public ― sleeping on a bench in the sun, BBQing, listening to loud music ― simply because other people don’t take pleasure in it,” she said.

“If no one is being harmed, why are we so inclined to police and stop pleasure we don’t share or understand?′ she asked. “Learning to value pleasure of all sorts beyond your own is important.”

As brown writes in her book, the more privileged among us default to pleasure, believing its their birthright and no one else’s. 

Gabes Torres, a mental health practitioner and community organizer, believes that stepping into our desires and sense of being alive undermines the idea that pleasure is only for a select few, or for those who run themselves ragged to keep things going. 

“Whenever I am numb, I find it hard to say or do anything when someone or something is hurting me,” she said. “This is one of the objectives of an oppressive, capitalist status quo: It wants us to operate like machines without feelings, thoughts, boundaries, and preferences.”

“To come come alive again and have the capacity to feel is threatening to the status quo, because we are no longer desensitized from its systemic and societal injuries,” she said. 

In a time when so many are locked into a scarcity mindset, pleasure is self-generative — the ultimate renewable resource. 

How to tap into pleasure activism for yourself 

You don’t need to be in a relationship to get into pleasure activism. Solo sex can serve as a grounding, powerful self-care practice, arguably even more than partnered sex can, said Kate Balestrieri, a psychologist and founder of Modern Intimacy.

″[Masturbation] offers a safe space to explore desire, self-love, and body confidence, reinforcing that pleasure doesn’t have to be reliant on external factors,” Balestrieri said. 

“In times where much feels out of our control, focusing on sexual or sensual pleasure is a way to affirm that your body, sensations, and joy are defined by you and belong to you.”

Pleasure isn’t confined to sex, either ― that’s why brown referred to it as “pleasure activism” and not “erotic activism.” Living an erotic life is about cultivating pleasure for its own sake, about feeling alive through all the senses.

Of course, as brown stresses in her book, moderation is key here. It’s pleasure activism, not pleasure gluttony.

“The idea is not to be in a heady state of ecstasy at all times but rather to learn how to sense when something is good for you, to be able to feel what enough is,” she writes. 

Tapping into pleasure activism also doesn’t mean you tune out to the world around you. We need to remain informed citizens, especially now. 

But placing pleasure on a pedestal ― or at least making a little more room for it in your life while you’re staying informed and affecting change ― is never a bad idea. 

“To make a commitment to pleasure is to insist that we are not just cogs in a wheel, tools for labor, or resilience machines,” Balestrieri said. “Instead, we are human beings who inherently deserve beauty, intimacy, and sensory fulfillment, regardless of external oppression or demands.”