The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, by Audre Lorde

“There are many types of power: those that are usable and those that are not, the acknowledged and the unknown. The erotic is a resource that lives within ourselves, grounded on a deeply feminine and spiritual plane, and firmly rooted in the power of our unspoken and yet unacknowledged feelings. To perpetuate itself, all oppression must corrupt or distort the sources of power inherent in the culture of oppressed people, sources from which the energy for change can spring. In the case of women, this translated into the suppression of the erotic as a source of power and information in our lives.

We have been taught to distrust this resource, which has been maligned, insulted and devalued by Western society. On the one hand, the superficiality of the erotic was promoted as a symbol of female inferiority; on the other hand, women were made to suffer and feel contemptible and suspicious by virtue of their existence. From there it is a short step to the false belief that only by suppressing the erotic from our lives and consciousness can we be truly strong. But such strength is illusory, because it is disguised in the context of male models of power.

As women, we have been wary of this power that emanates from our deepest, most irrational knowledge. All our lives we've been warned against it by the masculine world, who value its depth enough to keep us around so we can exercise it for the benefit of men, but at the same time fear it too much to even consider the possibility of experiencing it. for themselves. So the women are kept in a distant/inferior position to be psychologically milked, much in the same way that ants maintain colonies of aphids that provide life-sustaining nourishment for their masters. But the erotic offers a source of invigorating and provocative strength to the woman who is not afraid of its revelation, nor succumbs to the belief that sensations are enough.

The erotic has often been vilified by men, and used against women. It has been taken as a confused, trivial, psychotic and plasticized feeling. This is why we have so often moved away from exploring and considering the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct negation of the power of the erotic, since it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

The erotic is a place between the incipient awareness of our own being and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an intimate sense of satisfaction which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire to. Because once we have experienced the fullness of that depth of feeling and recognized its power, we cannot, in our honor and self-respect, demand less of ourselves.

It is never easy to demand the most of ourselves, our lives, our work. Striving for excellence is to go beyond the mediocrity encouraged by our society. But succumbing to the fear of feeling and working on the edge is a luxury that only those without aspirations can afford, and these people are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies. But the intimate demand for excellence that we learn from the erotic cannot be bad. understood as demanding the impossible neither from ourselves nor from others. Such a requirement incapacitates everyone in the process. Because the erotic is not about what we do; it's about how keenly and fully we can feel while doing. And once we know the size of our capacity to feel this sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, we can then observe which of our vital desires brings us closer to that fullness.

The purpose of everything we do is to make our lives, and our children's lives, richer and more viable. By celebrating the erotic in all of our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision – a long-awaited bed that I gratefully lay down on and from which I rise empowered. Obviously, such empowered women are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from almost all the most vital areas of our lives besides sex. And the neglect of the satisfactions and erotic foundations of our praxis translates into disaffection for much of what we do. For example, how often do we really love our work even when we struggle with it?

The greatest horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need by excluding the psychic and emotional components of it - the greatest horror of that system is that it deprives our work of its erotic value, its erotic power, and robs life of its interest and fullness. Such a system reduces work to a model of needs, a duty for which we earn our bread or forgetting ourselves and those we love. But this is the same as blinding a painter and telling her to improve her work, and even if she likes to paint. This is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

As women, we need to look for ways that our world can be really different. What I'm talking about here is the need to reassess the quality of all aspects of our lives and our work, and how we move through and to them. The word erotic itself comes from the Greek eros, the personification of love in all its aspects – born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. So, when I speak of the erotic, I am pronouncing it as a declaration of the vital force of women, of that strengthened creative energy, whose knowledge and use we are now returning to in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of such attempts, it has become recurrent to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, seeing them as contradictory or antithetical. “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, an arms dealer who meditates?”. In the same way, we have tried to separate the spiritual from the erotic, and so we have reduced the spiritual to a world of insipid affections, of the ascetic who wants to feel nothingness. But nothing is further from the truth. Because the ascetic position is one of the greatest fear, the most extreme immobility.

The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the dominating obsession. And it is not one based on self-discipline, but on selflessness. The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is equally false, resulting from a careless attention to our erotic knowledge. Because the bridge that connects them is formed by the erotic – the sensual –, those physical, emotional and psychic expressions of what is deepest, strongest and richest within each of us, to be shared: the passions of love, in their deeper meanings.

Beyond the shallow, the much-used expression “makes me feel good” recognizes the power of the erotic as legitimate knowledge, for what it means is the first and most powerful guide that leads to any understanding. And understanding is nothing more than a lap that justly shelters, and gives meaning to, that wisdom born from the deepest. And the erotic is the nourishment and packaging of all our deepest wisdom. The erotic, for me, comes in many ways, and the first is by providing the power that comes from intensely sharing any pursuit with another person. The sharing of jouissance, be it physical, emotional, psychic or intellectual, builds a bridge between those who share, and this bridge can be the basis for understanding what is not shared, while reducing the fear of their differences.

Another important way in which the erotic operates is by frankly and courageously expanding my capacity for cum. Just as my body expands with the music, expanding in response to it, listening to its deep rhythms, everything I feel also expands into erotically satisfying experience, whether dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining a idea. This shared self-connection is an indicator of the enjoyment I know myself capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And this profound and irreplaceable wisdom of my capacity for enjoyment confronts me with the demand that I live my whole life knowing that this satisfaction is possible, and does not need to be called marriage, or god, or life after death.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, if at all. Because once we begin to feel intensely all aspects of our lives, we begin to expect from ourselves, and from our vital desires, that we are in tune with that enjoyment that we know ourselves capable of experiencing. Our erotic wisdom empowers us, it becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, which leads us to examine them honestly in terms of their relative meanings in our lives. And this is a great responsibility, arising from within each one of us, not to settle for what is convenient, with what is false, conveniently assumed or merely safe.
During World War II, we bought hermetically sealed plastic jars with clear margarine inside, which came with a small, dense capsule of yellow coloring, placed like a topaz on the outside of the clear package. We'd leave the margarine in the sun for a while to soften it, and then we'd stick the little capsule in the soft pale margarine mass. Then, taking the wrapper carefully between our fingers, we rocked it carefully back and forth several times until the color was completely spread all over the margarine pot, coloring it perfectly.

The erotic is this core within me. When released from its intense, constricting envelope, it flows through my life, coloring it with the kind of energy that amplifies and sensitizes and empowers all my experience. We were created to fear the yes within us, our deepest desires. But when we learn to identify them, those that don't improve our future lose their power and can be changed. The fear of our desires keeps them suspicious and indiscriminately powerful, since to suppress any truth is to endow it with an unbearable force. The fear that we will not be able to grow beyond whatever distortions we may find in ourselves is what keeps us docile, loyal and obedient, defined by what comes from outside, and which leads us to accept many aspects of the oppression we suffer for to be women. When we live outside of ourselves, and by that I mean we live by foreign directives only, rather than our inner wisdom and needs, when we live far from those erotic tracks within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien ways. , and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone individual ones.

But when we begin to live from the inside out, connected to the power of the erotic within us and allowing that power to fill and inspire our ways of acting with the world around us, then we begin to be responsible for ourselves in the deepest sense. deep. For it is when we begin to identify our deepest feelings that we give up satisfying ourselves with suffering and self-denial, and the dullness that so often seems to be the only alternative to it in our society. Our acts against oppression become whole with being, motivated and empowered from within.

In contact with the erotic, I rebel against accepting weakening and all states of my being that are not my own, that have been imposed on me, such as resignation, despair, self-annihilation, depression, self-denial. And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a garden fence and writing a poem, but it is only one of quantity. And there is, as far as I can see, no difference between writing a wonderful poem and moving in sunlight next to the body of a woman I love.

This brings me to one last consideration about the erotic. Sharing the power of each person's feelings is different from using someone else's feelings as tissue paper. When we are not aware of our experiences, erotic or otherwise, we are not sharing, but using the feelings of those who participate with us in the experience. And using someone without their consent is abuse.

To be used, our erotic feeling has to be identified. The need to share in depth of feeling is a human need. But in the European-American tradition, this need is satisfied with certain illicit erotic encounters. Such occasions are almost always characterized by a lack of mutual attention, by the pretense of calling them what they are not, be it religion, or frenzy, mob violence, or playing doctor. And this crooked call to need and action gives rise to that distortion that results in pornography and obscenity – the abuse of feeling.

When we do not pay attention to the importance of the erotic in the development and nourishment of our power, or when we do not pay attention to ourselves in the satisfaction of our erotic needs when interacting with others, we are using ourselves as objects of satisfaction, instead of sharing our enjoyment in the satisfaction, instead of establishing connections between our similarities and our differences. If we refuse to be aware of what we are always feeling, however comfortable that may seem, we are depriving ourselves of part of the experience and allowing ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, the absurd.

The erotic cannot be felt in our absence. As a Black Lesbian Feminist, I have a particular feeling, understanding, and wisdom for those sisters with whom I have intensely danced, joked, or even fought. And this intense participation in a shared experience is often the precedent for carrying out joint actions that would not have been possible before. But women who continue to act exclusively under the norms of the European-American male tradition cannot easily share this erotic burden. I know it was not accessible to me when I was trying to adapt my consciousness to this way of life and sensation. Only now do I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the electric charge of the erotic without dissimulation, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange.

Recognizing the power of the erotic in our lives can give us the energy needed to make genuine changes in our world, rather than merely setting up a change of characters in the same boring drama. For not only do we tap our deepest creative source, but we do what is feminine and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.”

Original Article: Use of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, in: LORDE, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984. p. 53-59.

Translation made by Tatiana Nascimento dos Santos – December 2009, taken from the Zine “Selected Texts by Audre Lorde”.