pleasure activism - Making Love with God

Pleasuring the Change You Want to See in the World

At the end of our most recent Koinonia event, I shared that, for me, pleasure and revolution dance hand in hand. In that sense, I’m a drop in a river that has been flowing for longer than we can know, a river running through Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, first performed in 411 BC, which tells tall tales of the women of ancient Athens going on a sex strike to stop the Peloponnesian war – and also through the electrifying performance I watched on Zoom earlier this year by Estudio Jorōgumo shibari, a queer feminist collective practising “ropes for resistance” in Mexico. It’s part of why it feels possible, and even generative, to keep offering work that is oriented towards pleasure in these “interesting times” – because pleasure can be both a resource and a tool for change, and because the world we are changing towards must be one in which everyone has the permission and possibility to embrace their pleasure. …

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Sex Magic for Making Change

Change. I’m used to being surrounded by folks who want it in one form or another – from my coaching clients, to my close people who are creatives, activists, and/or magicians. But in this last year, that clarion call for change seems to have become universal, even as the changes each of us desire can appear vastly diverse. From global movements calling for long overdue shifts in how we treat our planet and each other, to the folks who just really want a hug Right Now, it seems so many of us want to be living through different stories, personally and collectively – and we’re struggling to know how to begin to tell them.

I’ll be honest: in the midst of all these “urgencies” (as Donna Haraway names them) it feels like a strange time to be talking about sex magic. In her introduction to my book, Igniting Intimacy: Sex Magic Rituals for Radical Living and Loving, Barbara Carrellas wrote: “[Sex] Magic is the art of transformation. It’s the ability to imagine an alternative existence and then create and sustain that existence.” But what does that mean at a time like this? How can we draw on sex magical practices in ways that feel like they have meaning in the face of personal and collective exhaustion, frustration, and grief – not to mention the sheer size and volume of change that is calling to be brought forth? …

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