Speaking UP for Our Pleasure

We may be late to the party but we’ve just found the writer, facilitator, healer, and social justice activist extraordinaire adrienne maree brown and we are devouring everything she’s written about sex, pleasure and relationships. The entire “Pleasure Dome” series is 🔥 and specifically her piece about vocalizing consent is helping me get my whole 👏🏿 entire 👏🏿 life 👏🏿. Get in on this.

Her particular gift of perfectly capturing the nuances and complexities of consent is – in a word – gold. And, she does so across all sorts of sexual encounters. How do we say no? How do we vocalize that we’re not feeling “it” anymore even if earlier it felt good? adrienne has more answers than Miss Cleo!

adrienne offers great examples of how and why we don’t speak up during sex, whether it be out of self-preservation or learned politeness. “Our silence has protected us against potential violence, an unfortunately common response of patriarchy and/or other kinds of power when met with rejection,” adrienne writes.  “Our silence protects us from being rejected. Our silence upholds social norms that teach us that it’s more important to be polite than to be honest, even when discussing our own flesh.”

Though many of us were taught not to speak up, by a society that wants to silence us, our families who want to protect us, or the patriarchy that doesn’t respect us, adrienne reiterates that, “silence will not get us to a place of power over our bodies. And it will not get us the pleasure we want.”

She also clarifies that good sex doesn’t just mean saying no when we don’t want sex, but also learning how to vocalize when and what we do what.

“Part of liberating our desires from the rape culture and patriarchy we’re swimming in is reclaiming our right to communicate,” she writes. “We must learn to say, sign, or type the truth in real time about what our bodies actually want and need, and what we don’t want. We must become verbose lovers, especially in the realm of consent, feedback, and direction.”

Can we scream that from every rooftop? Let’s embrace our right to live the beautiful and sensual lives that we all deserve.

We could literally quote the whole piece, but trust us, you want to read it for yourself because it is a balm of love and truth.