The pursuits of pleasure can set us free. What if pleasure can become a communal ritual, a shared song, a birthright? What if the hard work that we need to reconstruct the very fabric of the world were rooted in pleasure?
Bodies longing for each other to be caressed, touched, and merged; nature seeking nature. An animal instinct running through the veins, boundaries dissolving into blood, sweat, and semen. Inner worlds unite through physicality. We are creatures born from pleasure. To be alive is an erotic affair.
There is a sea within us, ebbing and flowing, of pleasure and pain, desire and fulfilment. Nature lures us through our senses into the flow of life, ensuring survival. Human pleasures were closely entwined with the ecosystem; our very existence, desire, and sensuality served an ecological purpose. But in an extractive economy, pleasure has become a dangerously individual affair, socialised into a form of human domination over life and nature.
Psychologist Paul Bloom suggests that our beliefs, contexts, and cognitive processes shape our experience of pleasure. Our enjoyment is based on perceiving the essence of objects or experiences. This also implies that something can be considered pleasurable if it is perceived as such from the societal standards, even if it harms our bodies and well-being. When numbed out of our sensual self – through information, substances, and objects – our sensations of pleasure are manipulated as a form of control.
Our desires are contagious everywhere in the ecosystem; it is through desire that life persists against all odds. Feeding, flourishing and fabricating the very structure of natural cycles, but when these desires are decontextualised, we lose our connection with the Earth and self. It becomes a “source of social control by politicians, corporations and advisers”, writes psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Pleasure can be a source of control or liberation. If pleasure serves as a distraction, limiting existential queries and blinding connections with the community, it is devised for control. If pleasure brings harmony, justice, and peace, it becomes the force of liberation. Our personal joys, connections, creativity, and calmness are not separate from the well-being of Earth.
Philosopher Kate Soper invites us to views global warming as ‘an opportunity to advance beyond a mode of life that is not just environmentally disastrous but also in many respects unpleasurable, self-denying and too puritanically fixated on work and money-making, at the expense of the enjoyment that comes with having more time, doing more things for oneself, travelling more slowly and consuming less stuff.’ She writes, “Through its theft of time and energy, the work-and-spend culture deters development of free thinking and critical opposition.” The system that is extractive towards natural resources also extracts from human resources; in exploitative exchange, our pleasure and well-being become secondary. The vicious cycle of consumerism, alcoholism, and oppression feeds on each other.
The pursuits of pleasure can set us free. What if pleasure can become a communal ritual, a shared song, a birthright? What if the hard work that we need to reconstruct the very fabric of the world were rooted in pleasure? Social justice is desirable because it is pleasurable. In the words of Activist and Writer Adrienne Maree Brown “Pleasure Activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy…it must become an incredible pleasure to be able to be honest, expect to be whole, and to know that we are in a community that will hold us accountable and change with us.”
What if our sensual selves can be satisfied without the endless stream of more? We can begin by being curious. What desires are our own? What is borrowed? What is truly pleasurable? And in doing so, we might just find out that pleasure and purpose intertwine. The sensations of our body silently reciprocate the Earth’s. As the need rises, so does the proximity of fulfilment. What if pleasure can become the source of our highest good, guiding us to survival, to our sensual selves? In the age of the climate crisis, what if our pleasure can heal the world?
