Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Jodie. I’ve learned I love pleasure and can notice what pleasures me and create it. Adrienne is a pleasure extrovert and Dani is a pleasure introvert. They both have pleasure superpowers. And I think I vacillate somewhere between them. We celebrate each other’s pleasure. Adrienne is so good at naming all of the things to strive for. She gives me stretch goals. I’ve learned to create spaces that bring me infinite pleasure. I love my apartment. I created a collection of little tiny antique frames with all of the people I most love in them, and they are all around the house. There is currently a picture of us woes in Vancouver making our woe sign being transposed onto a six-by-six piece of wood that’s going to go in all our houses. It will be in my bedroom. And this super sweet precious little glass antique frame that has a pic of Bel in it. They are in my bedroom. At the foot of my bed, by the window, with all of the precious things. I get to see them when I first wake up. That is so much pleasure. The woes vibranium mugs arrive this week. It gives me great pleasure to imagine sipping tea apart but together. I feel like my woes taught me to live, love, travel well. Dani. Our relationships have deepened my appreciation of the set and setting approach to pleasure. I think it’s typically used with regard to drug use, but for me it has a broader application. My ability to take risks, stop worrying, relax, enjoy, and accept pleasure is connected to whether I feel safe in and trust the environment (setting) and whether I’m in a good state of mind (mind-set) that will allow me to embrace whatever’s going on. Because I trust you two and, because I know that our spidey senses are pretty much aligned, we often create ideal environments wherever we go—in each other’s homes, on vacation, whatever. And, again, because we’re aligned and I don’t have a ton of defenses up or concerns rolling through my head when we’re together, my mind-set tends to be really positive when I’m around you both. Our relationships have reminded me to prioritize pleasure, even when I don’t feel like I have time for it or necessarily “deserve” it. You two remind me that my pleasure matters.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  You mix with actors and ballet-girls, and make friends with them. Your dressing-room is large and private and warm - for you are really expected to change and make-up in it, not arrive, breathless, at the stage door, having buttoned on your costume in your brougham. You are handed lines to speak, and you speak them, steps to take, and you take them, costumes to wear - the most wonderful costumes you ever saw in your life, costumes of fur and satin and velvet - and you wear them, then pass them back to the wardrobe-mistress and let her worry about mending them and keeping them neat. The crowds you have to play before are the kindest, gayest crowds there ever were: you will hurl all manner of nonsense at them and they will shriek with laughter, merely because it is Christmas and they are determined to be jolly. It is like a holiday from real life - except that you are paid twenty pounds a week, if you are as lucky as we were then, to enjoy it. The Cinderella in which we played that year was a particularly splendid one. The title role was taken by Dolly Arnold - a lovely girl with a voice like a linnet’s, and a waist so slim her trademark was to wear a necklace as a belt. It was rather odd to see Kitty spooning with her upon the stage, kissing her while the clock showed a minute-to-midnight - though it was odder still, perhaps, to think that no one in the audience called out Toms! now, or even appeared to think it: they only cheered when the Prince and Cinderella were united at the end, and drawn on stage, by half-a-dozen pygmy horses, in their wedding-car. Aside from Dolly Arnold, there were other stars - artistes whose turns I had once paid to watch and clap at, at the Canterbury Palace of Varieties. It made me feel very green, to have to work with them and talk to them as equals. I had only ever sung and danced, before, at Kitty’s side; now, of course, I had to act - to walk on stage with a hunting retinue and say, ‘My lords, where is Prince Casimir, our master?’; to slap my thigh and make terrible puns; to kneel before Cinderella with a velvet cushion, and place the slipper of glass upon her tiny foot - then lead the crowd in three rousing cheers when it was found to fit it. If you have ever seen a panto at the Brit, you will know how marvellous they are.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I identify as a Black mixed person in the particular racial construct of this country at this time. I understand that race is a social construct, not a biological one—and in this life I experience a lot of pleasure in being Black. I love Black girl magic, Black joy, Black love, and work toward Black liberation. I feel unapologetic glee at the ways in which we subvert white supremacy, dominate culture, and “coolness,” often inviting people to the pleasures we have constructed from dreams and thin air. And … I understand this to be temporary—that there were, among my ancestors, feelings of love to be of tribes whose names I will never know or from nations no longer on any maps. In the future, there may be a time when the term “Black” feels to my nibblings’ nibblings the way the terms “Negro” or “Quadroon” sound to me now;2 perhaps these future nibblings will invent new terminology indicating some way of understanding themselves that I cannot comprehend. There may be a time beyond these borders, beyond these racial constructs, beyond this planet even. I feel humble in the face of all that time. And, in this time, it’s a gift to be Black. Similarly, I am learning that much of how we experience and practice gender is a social construct—and I love the particular pleasures of being a woman. I love being of women who transform the brutal conditions we survive, who are upending rape culture, knowing we are inferior to no one, weaving our suffering into a fierce togetherness, into homes, chosen families, radical sisterhood, and tomorrows. And I’m a woman with some boy in me and haven’t found the language for that. I know it is a privilege to feel aligned with the gender assignment I was given at birth. I love the bodies I was born from and with. And I love the wildly diverse spectrum of bodies I have gotten to hold, kiss, doula, and love in my lifetime. I imagine there have been periods in my ancestry when gender was held very differently, maybe didn’t matter so much, or was less binary. And I imagine there will be a future with a multitude of widely known and understood genders. In this moment, I get to be part of the expansion of possible genders that can live and love safely on this planet.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "'And now you must take my place. You must make me feel what you felt. You will now be active and I passive; but we must try another position, for it is really tiresome to stand after all the fatigue we have undergone.' "'And what am I to do, for you know I am quite a novice?' "'Sit down there,' he replied, pointing to a stool constructed for the purpose, 'I'll ride on you whilst you impale me as if I were a woman. It is a mode of locomotion of which the ladies are so fond that they put it into practice whenever they get the slightest chance. My mother actually rode a gentleman under my very eyes. I was in the parlour when a friend happened to call, and had I been sent out suspicions might have been aroused, so I was made to believe that I was a very naughty little boy, and I was put in a corner with my face to the wall. Moreover, she told me that if I cried or turned round she'd put me to bed; but if I were good she'd give me a cake. I obeyed for one or two minutes, but after that, hearing an unusual rustle, and a loud breathing and panting, I saw what I could not understand at the time, but what was clear to me many years afterwards.' "He sighed, shrugged his shoulders, then smiled and added,—'Well, sit down there.' "I did as I was bidden. He first knelt down to say his prayers to Priapus—which was, after all, a more dainty bit to kiss than the old Pope's gouty toe—and having bathed and tickled the little god with his tongue, he got a-straddle over me. As he had already lost his maidenhood long ago, my rod entered far more easily in him than his had done in me, nor did I give him the pain that I had felt, although my tool is of no mean size. "He stretched his hole open, the tip entered, he moved a little, half the phallus was plunged in; he pressed down, lifted himself up, then came down again; after one or two strokes the whole turgid column was lodged within his body. When he was well impaled he put his arms round my neck, and hugged and kissed me. "'Do you regret having given yourself to me?' he asked, pressing me convulsively as if afraid to lose me. "My penis, which seemed to wish to give its own answer, wriggled within his body. I looked deep into his eyes. "'Do you think it would have been pleasanter to be now lying in the slush of the river?' "He shuddered and kissed me, then eagerly,—'How can you think of such horrible things just now; it is real blasphemy to the Mysian god.'

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I started this blog the night Beyoncé’s self-titled album came out.2 I didn’t know her album was coming, and Beyoncé didn’t know she was unleashing a soundtrack to this moment of my life. That convergence was so special that I had to pause writing this and spend two months learning the “Flawless” dance and wondering, among other things, exactly what kind of feminism I am interested in. I decided that I am interested in a sexual, complex, whole person, imperfect feminism, one full of mothers, single people, married people, and poly people, sex workers. Women who make quality work and create systems to liberate their creativity. Women as powerful as Tina Turner and other survivors of domestic violence. Women who like to submit, talk dirty, shock even themselves. Women who like to dominate, operate outside of gender norms, women willing to disagree and sit in discomfort and hold their power and their ground, women willing to grow and learn in public. It is in that spirit that I return to this blog entry. Here goes: I don’t talk about sex enough here! Anyone who knows me in real life knows that the sensual, sexual, erotic perspective is a primary lens through which I see the world. Yet I struggle with how to integrate that self with the one here who speaks about transformation, babies, grief, growth. But the link is all in the body as a practice ground for transformation.3 I had a dream the other night. I boarded a train for a cross-country journey with my friend Evans, which is important only because he is a sexy beast. I was quickly recruited for a burlesque show, and I auditioned in a clear plastic belt and little else. The person running the auditions said, “To do this job you have to l.o.v.e. love your body!” And I responded, “Oh, I do. I do love my body. I love my body!” I woke up murmuring this to myself. (Note: can you see how the lyrics “I woke up like this: flawless” struck me with joy?) Now, that’s an awesome dream outside of any analysis. But it is particularly awesome when you understand that my focus for personal transformation for the last few years (roughly thirty-plus years or so) has been learning to love my body or, more precisely, falling in love with myself through the terrain of my body. This dream made me feel that my focus is restructuring and healing me at the level of my subconscious … if I understand anything about the mysterious realm of dreams.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  amb. I feel like from Jodie I have learned that it is worthwhile to invest in the quality version of the thing you actually need. Like a perfect omelet pan. Or an anti-Zionist home bubbly water machine. Like the pleasures of aiming for perfection in how home feels. And that if you want the ocean, you should go to the ocean. And from Dani I have learned a lot about the pleasures of care, of family. The love and care she brought to her aunt through her cancer, finding ways to ease her pain and focus on her joy … and the pleasure of motherhood, the absolute massive love I get to witness Dani give in how she cares for keeping the world clean and healthy for her child, it’s amazing. Also the pleasure of being effortlessly fly, I have relaxed so much more into my fashion by witnessing the breezy Dani ways. AMB. We are also committed to making the best life we can for our next generation of nibblings and babies. Can you talk about what this space makes possible for your parenting/auntie work? Jodie. I fell in love with my first nibbling by love before they were born, and I was committed to Noah from the jump. Noah was ten when I first met adrienne, and our friendship provided a space where I could share the shape and meaning of this relationship. Noah has always been a source of joy, inspiration, and wonder. Adrienne and my first bio nibblings were born within a month of each other—one of our many life parallels. Sharing that phase of our lives has been incredibly validating. Woedom honors my role in all of my families, and that acceptance is like sunshine and water to the beautiful garden that is my network of intimacy and relationships. amb. Yes, and it has helped to have this other familial space in which to check in around stuff—to understand especially around boundaries of auntiehood. We are lucky that our nibblings are being raised by people who we are mostly aligned with in terms of their choices. And then Dani, watching Dani choose and move toward her child. All of us falling in love with her before she existed. Jodie. Watching Dani choose motherhood and be blessed with her child has been one of my greatest joys. Having Dani’s back and supporting her dignity amidst the demands of parenting is a privilege. Watching her daughter grow and cheering on her best life is a gift from the gods. Dani’s an incredible mother, and I am so grateful that she is writing about how we raise liberated Black children in these times.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I’d be remiss not to mention nipple hierarchy: Nipples with smaller or lighter areolas are considered more attractive than those with the darker, larger areolas—which often come with Black and Brown bodies, and with breastfeeding. Large and/or dark nipples are for fetish, not for beaches or titillating. It has to be said that disdain for the dark nipple feels connected to ancestral mammy memories.11 What mental calisthenics it took to apply white supremacy to navigating bodies of Black and Brown people! So it is in the face of all this complex history that I claim my/our nipples as an extension of the pleasure system in my/our bodies, directly correlating and turning up my pleasure. It was women lovers who first slowed things down to the pace of worship at my breasts, moving past my own haste to get to business, my sense of constant scarcity as a young fat Black lover who, for a long time, thought I was lucky when someone spent any time on my body. I remember the sensation that everything was connected, the first time I asked a lover to stay at my breast a little longer, the first orgasm I had from nipple stimulation alone. I began to understand a new map of nerves threading through my system, the interconnection of desire and delight threaded through the body. As far as I can tell from conversations with people of all genders, this pleasure is only numbed by our lack of belief in its existence! Now I want all people with nipples to have a chance at the nipple glory I regularly experience. Here are some steps: Touch yourself! Slow, soft, flicker, pinch, graze. Notice what produces sensation.12 Ask lovers to spend an entire session on your breasts/chest. Same thing: approach it with curiosity and try lots of different kinds of touch. Give and receive feedback. Start soft and build up sensation, pressure, pace. Use toys. I’m a fan of the Jimmy Jane form 2, which I have repurposed as a splurge of a vibrating nipple clamp. Nipple clamps are also great, just applying a consistent pressure that increases as nipples grow in arousal. Nip Pulls are also cool, using suction to increase blood flow to the nipples for heightened sensation (apply wet for best suction). Constrict the rest of the body to focus only on nipples. Hot and Heavy Homework Your pleasure assignment this week is to discover or upgrade the pleasure relationship you have with your nipples.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I stared, then felt my cheeks grow red; but he only meant, of course, the act: ‘I hear you’re working the halls together; and are quite a pair, by all accounts.’Now I smiled. ‘How did you find that out? I am very quiet about it with my family.’‘I read the Era, don’t I? “Kitty Butler and Nan King”. I know a stage-name when I see one ...’I laughed, ‘Oh, isn’t it funny, Tony? Isn’t it just the most marvellous thing? We are in Cinderella at the minute, at the Brit. Kitty’s the Prince, and I’m Dandini. I have to speak, sing, dance, slap my thigh, the works, in velvet breeches. And the crowd go mad for it!’He smiled at my pleasure - it was lovely to be allowed to be pleased with myself, at last! - then shook his head. ‘Your folks, from what I’ve heard them say, don’t know the half of it. Why don’t you have them up to see you on the stage? Why the big secret?’I shrugged, then hesitated; then, ‘Alice doesn’t care for Kitty ...’ I said.‘And you and Kitty: you’re still in her pocket? You’re still struck with her like you always was?’ I nodded. He sniffed. ‘Then, she’s a lucky girl ...’He seemed only to be flirting again; but I had the queerest impression, too, that he knew more than he was letting on - and didn’t care a fig about it. I answered, ‘I’m the lucky one,’ and held his gaze.He tapped with his pen again upon his blotter. ‘Maybe.’ Then he winked.I stayed at the Palace until it became rather obvious that Tony had other business to get on with, then took my leave of him. Once outside, I stood again before the foyer doors, reluctant to resign the reek of beer and grease-paint and confront the altogether different scents of Whitstable, our Parlour and our home. It had been good to talk of Kitty - so good that, seated at the supper-table later, between silent Alice and nasty Rhoda with her tiny, flashing sapphire, I missed her all the more. I was due to spend another day with them, but now I thought I could not face it. I said, as we started on our puddings, that I had changed my mind and would take the morning, rather than the evening train tomorrow - that I had remembered things that I must do at the theatre, that I shouldn’t put off till Thursday.They didn’t seem surprised, though Father said it was a shame.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The content I’ve had the honor of creating includes two adult films (Tight Places: A Drop of Color; Hella Brown: Real Sex in the City), countless erotic art pieces, and a book (Never Let the Odds Stop You), as well as being the keeper of the Feelmore trademark, which make the legacy of the erotic much more necessary and sacred. As the content will always live, past my point on earth, I am honored to leave the world a fresh perspective that no one else should own, my body [of work]. amb. Something I love about you that I’ve witnessed as your success has grown is that you really hold the sacred in the center of your life, often thanking God for things that happen, holding Feelmore as a sacred space. Can you speak about the role of the sacred, and of faith, in your pursuit of pleasure? Nenna. Faith is important. I would venture to say that all who are self-employed are tapping into some kind of faith or spiritual practice. When I first moved into Feelmore, I cleaned out the entire place. The previous business had been there more than twenty years. Everyone believes something even if it’s in themselves. I am grateful that I get to talk, within, to something I believe is greater than me. Ego doesn’t serve my business or me … why give it power? I look to give power to that which empowers me at all times. amb. Tell me about a moment of power that has happened in the store (I know I’ve had a few). Nenna. Opening the door is a true moment of power. Tracing my pockets to find the key that holds the door to my life captive. Ever so gently, I place the tip of the key, guided by my index finder, into the hole. Turning the key gently and hearing the sound that it makes when it frees the door lets me know that the idea I had of Feelmore has been proved. Power comes in many forms, but this daily ritual gives me a moment of pleasure. Ownership of the body is something that many are familiar with, but to own one’s own body … be it mind, work, ideas. But truly the body is a power point. Bodyminds ReimaginedA Conversation with Sami Schalk Sami is the author of Bodyminds Reimagined: Disability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction.38 She also teaches at the University of Wisconsin, where three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of Black feminism and science fiction have her back. amb. Tell me how you became who you are, so interested in bodies.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Mai’a. I have a natural and crafted talent for giving and receiving pleasure. I like having sex without having all the emotional labor involved. I like practicing my craft. It feels like writing a good poem or dancing to a song you know by heart. It feels good to be good at something. Holiday. I engage in it because I love pleasure and exploring different types and ways to please myself, be pleased, please others, and learn others. And having many different types of sexual partners and different situations that lead to those sexual partnerships is a huge learning opportunity for me as it relates to my identities, to my sense of safety, to being validated. Having casual sex is like a human experiment of desire. Leah. I grew up in a family with two parents who had an utterly miserable, abusive relationship that both of them felt they couldn’t leave. Part of my resistance was to be like, fuck that, I’m never doing that. Marriage is a prison of death. I wanted to have sex with lots of people and be in different kinds of loverships with some of them. I also am a neurodiverse hermit warrior queen who loves and needs lots of time to myself and “TOTAL SEXUAL AUTONOMY.” After a childhood and young adulthood filled with parental, sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, a ton of bullying, sexual assault at school, and very little permitted autonomy (I wasn’t allowed to shut the door to my room or take a shower by myself for years), having casual sex was incredibly healing because I needed some huge built-in boundaries after not being allowed any. It was a place to have intense, contained intimacy and magic. amb. What is the best thing about casual sex? Leah. The feeling of autonomy and control. The ability to explore and learn about myself. Being sexual and getting up and leaving afterward. How it was liberating to me as a brown femme survivor to be, like, I get to have wildly uncontained sexuality. Casual sex makes me feel connected to a lineage of queer sex radicalism, public sex and non-married/committed sex, which I feel is getting lost. It felt radical to articulate that sex can just be about pleasure, it doesn’t have to be about Commitment, Marriage, and the Family. I loved my rituals of getting ready, adornment, going out, and walking and feeling sensual in my body. Also, small talk bores me, and I think you can learn a lot about someone by fucking them!

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Within movement there are significant small pleasures too. I have been facilitating Black liberation work a lot more in the past few years, and one group has developed a practice of celebrating a decision with music—actually putting on a nineties R&B song and singing it together all the way through to cement the decision in our bodies and cells. It makes me thrill when it’s time for a decision, to feel our aliveness and laughter and nostalgia and power. The work should, as often as possible given the obstacles we’re facing, be a pleasure. I am completing this book in the spot in my house where I meditate, an old couch at the foot of my bed. Out the window is a defunct streetlight, a grassy concrete lot, some nondescript square buildings in the housing complex next door, and snippets of Detroit’s skyline. I feel the pleasure of attention liberation as I sit here. The early morning sounds and sights of the city flow by, but louder than that are the birds who are my closest neighbors. They gather on the lightpost and the mysterious wires slung from here to there, sometimes singular, sometimes as a flock landing at the same time. They are loud in the morning, wild. There are two black squirrels who scurry along the thicker lines, and the birds float up to let them pass, then return, settling feathers, chattering, busy. In the time of writing this book, my mind has often been as busy as these birds—I have navigated the scarcity that comes with being punished by the IRS, wondered how I was going to pay my rent, get groceries, travel outside of work. I have been working on old, deep trauma that doesn’t even have a language yet. I have wrestled with body image and weight gain. I have fallen near and far and out of and again into love. I have cursed cancer and grieved for strangers and friends. I have danced with my depression in the face of personal and global apocalypse. I have wondered how committed I can be to a nation that never planned for me to be more than a slave. I have felt movements fracture and tremble under the pressures of this time. And I have felt more joy, connection, satisfaction—more pleasure—during this time than any other in my life.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Michi, aka sister selva, the 2015 Queen of the Texas Burlesque Festival and winner of the Thursday Audience Choice Award, has spread her seedlings all over the stages of New York City—from Joe’s Pub, to CIUSA, (Le) Poisson Rouge, the Joyce Theater, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Sesame Street, and all over the blocks, avenues, and impassioned dance floors. A student of acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine, she loves exploring the many branches of healing that are rooted in self-love, community love, and justice for all people, creatures, and Mother Nature herself. The sisters were asked to write about radical burlesque as a tool for liberation and working together as sisters. But they weren’t at all sure how to functionally write together (sisters!), so instead they just sat down and had a conversation about these topics. Sister/Sister on Burlesque Una. Why do we do burlesque/how is it liberatory? Okay, I want to start off our convo by answering the question I just asked. Both. Haha. Una. We know the road to liberation for all peoples is a long one and something we might not see in our lifetimes. I feel like burlesque creates moments of liberation, moments of experience. Burlesque gives us space to feel all emotions and to recharge together, in our bodies together, not just online but viscerally together. It’s about finding freedom onstage, in my own body, while others watch and experience. It’s not just about rehearsing the revolution, it’s about creating cracks that show our bodies that we can experience freedom, we do. Sometimes that happens while we’re onstage, sometimes it happens while we’re dancing on the dance floor, no one else looking but us. These moments and experiences can be public or private, or private in a public setting, but more important is that they happen. For us to be fully present in our bodies, where we want nothing else but to be right there letting the divine speak through and of us. Where we want nothing of the audience but to witness and hope/know that their own freedom is wrapped in ours and the freer we each are, the more present and fully embodied we are to work for our collective liberation, toppling down borders, prisons, and all other systems that cause violence and keep our people from being free. All while we take off our clothes, showing some titties, ass, and armpit hair. Michi. Yeah! I feel like, in general, what we are doing when we are creating is envisioning or practicing for the world we want. So to have those moments on stage where we and the audience are living in, inhabiting a different world, where that is our reality, gives us a physical memory of it to be able to have the strength to keep working for it, for the world we want to live in.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Pleasure activism acts from an analysis that pleasure is a natural, safe, and liberated part of life—and that we can offer each other tools and education to make sure sex, desire, drugs, connection, and other pleasures aren’t life-threatening or harming but life-enriching. Pleasure activism includes work and life lived in the realms of satisfaction, joy, and erotic aliveness that bring about social and political change. Ultimately, pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet. Pleasure Principles What you pay attention to grows. This will be familiar to those who have read Emergent Strategy. Actually, all the emergent strategy principles also apply here! (Insert eggplant emoji). Tune into happiness, what satisfies you, what brings you joy. We become what we practice. I learned this through studying somatics! In his book The Leadership Dojo, Richard Strozzi-Heckler shares that “300 repetitions produce body memory … [and] 3,000 repetitions creates embodiment.”12 Yes is the way. When it was time to move to Detroit, when it was time to leave my last job, when it was time to pick up a meditation practice, time to swim, time to eat healthier, I knew because it gave me pleasure when I made and lived into the decision. Now I am letting that guide my choices for how I organize and for what I am aiming toward with my work—pleasure in the processes of my existence and states of my being. Yes is a future. When I feel pleasure, I know I am on the right track. Puerto Rican pleasure elder Idelisse Malave shared with me that her pleasure principle is “If it pleases me, I will.” When I am happy, it is good for the world.13 The deepest pleasure comes from riding the line between commitment and detachment.14 Commit yourself fully to the process, the journey, to bringing the best you can bring. Detach yourself from ego and outcomes. Make justice and liberation feel good. Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice. Moderation is key.15 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. Related: pleasure is not money. Pleasure is not even related to money, at least not in a positive way. Having resources to buy unlimited amounts of pleasure leads to excess, and excess totally destroys the spiritual experience of pleasure. A Word on Excess

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  She is back, radiant with happiness and contentment. “Well, has everything gone as you wished?” I asked tenderly, kissing her hand. “Yes, dear heart,” she replied, “and we shall leave to-night. Help me pack my trunks.” * * * * * Toward evening she asked me to go to the post-office and mail her letters myself. I took her carriage, and was back within an hour. “Mistress has asked for you,” said the negress, with a grin, as I ascended the wide marble stairs. “Has anyone been here?” “No one,” she replied, crouching down on the steps like a black cat. I slowly passed through the drawing-room, and then stood before her bedroom door. Why does my heart beat so? Am I not perfectly happy? Opening the door softly, I draw back the portiere. Wanda is lying on the ottoman, and does not seem to notice me. How beautiful she looks, in her silver-gray dress, which fits closely, and while displaying in tell-tale fashion her splendid figure, leaves her wonderful bust and arms bare. Her hair is interwoven with, and held up by a black velvet ribbon. A mighty fire is burning in the fire-place, the hanging lamp casts a reddish glow, and the whole room is as if drowned in blood. “Wanda,” I said at last. “Oh Severin,” she cried out joyously. “I have been impatiently waiting for you.” She leaped up, and folded me in her arms. She sat down again on the rich cushions and tried to draw me down to her side, but I softly slid down to her feet and placed my head in her lap. “Do you know I am very much in love with you to-day?” she whispered, brushing a few stray hairs from my forehead and kissing my eyes. “How beautiful your eyes are, I have always loved them as the best of you, but to-day they fairly intoxicate me. I am all—” She extended her magnificent limbs and tenderly looked at me from beneath her red lashes. “And you—you are cold—you hold me like a block of wood; wait, I’ll stir you with the fire of love,” she said, and again clung fawningly and caressingly to my lips. “I no longer please you; I suppose I’ll have to be cruel to you again, evidently I have been too kind to you to-day. Do you know, you little fool, what I shall do, I shall whip you for a while—” “But child—” “I want to.” “Wanda!” “Come, let me bind you,” she continued, and ran gaily through the room. “I want to see you very much in love, do you understand? Here are the ropes. I wonder if I can still do it?” She began with fettering my feet and then she tied my hands behind my back, pinioning my arms like those of a prisoner. “So,” she said, with gay eagerness. “Can you still move?” “No.” “Fine—”

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  True pleasure—joy, happiness and satisfaction—has been the force that helps us move beyond the constant struggle, that helps us live and generate futures beyond this dystopic present, futures worthy of our miraculous lives. Pleasure—embodied, connected pleasure—is one of the ways we know when we are free. That we are always free. That we always have the power to co-create the world. Pleasure helps us move through the times that are unfair, through grief and loneliness, through the terror of genocide, or days when the demands are just overwhelming. Pleasure heals the places where our hearts and spirit get wounded. Pleasure reminds us that even in the dark, we are alive. Pleasure is a medicine for the suffering that is absolutely promised in life. Pulling the essays and interviews together has been medicinal for me, and I hope that something in here helps with your own liberation. As I was writing this book, I tuned into the ways we are explicitly practicing pleasure as a species, even in this apocalyptic time. There is the explicit pleasure organizing and activism documented in these pages, and then there are the ways pleasure just comes through, the beautiful moments of historically oppressed people engaging in radical acts of public pleasure. Landing home from a long work trip, both exhausted and invigorated by the work for Black liberation, I was moving through the underground tunnel at Detroit Metropolitan Airport when I saw an airport worker running after two others, all young Black men. They were laughing like kids playing tag, leaping, darting, moving around people and rolling luggage like dancers. A few months later I was chasing one of my nibblings around a sprayground—those places in cities where the ground is full of fountains that you can run through and step on and splash in. There was a Black teenage girl in a striped bikini who positioned herself right over one of the strongest sprays. The light was settling to late afternoon sun, the water was making rainbows everywhere, her eyes were closed, face calm, smiling, arms hanging to her sides, palms wide and forward facing as if she were receiving a blessing. It took me a second to realize that she was pleasuring herself. She kept calling out to a bunch of younger kids who seemed to be her siblings, “This water is the best place, this is the best feeling!” They ignored her, preferring to risk the water tunnels. She didn’t move, and everyone gave her her space. A while later I realized that she was a teenage mom, that an older woman on the bench surrounded by stroller and diaper bag and piles of kid clothes was the girl’s mother, watching a quiet infant while the girl played in the water. Something about this felt especially tender, like a moment I wanted to protect—the safety and freedom that young mother had in that moment to feel pleasure. I want to live in communities designed around that.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I met Alta Starr and Idelisse Malave when they were at the Ford Foundation and Tides Foundation, respectively, so I initially knew them as funders who were working to shift the relationship between movements and philanthropy. Once they left those jobs, I was excited to discover that Alta was a gifted poet and Idelisse an incredible visual artist. Both have gone on to do organizational development and coaching work in addition to their creative work. They are both committed to lives of pleasure and have taught me a lot about pleasure as we age. amb. Hello, my loves. I imagine us sitting together at a dining room table. On the table, there is a bottle of good red wine and a bottle of Macallan 18 Year. And maybe an elegant vaporizer with some OG Kush for me. It’s sunset, we have a view over Harlem, and I am so excited to have this time with you. First, what is your choice from the gifts on the table? And how did you learn to love that particular delight? Ide. The good red wine! Definitely an acquired taste, and now a luscious pleasure. The first time I tasted wine was when I was nine and playing at a friend’s house. It was some Jewish holiday, and her parents had Manischewitz. Looked like grape juice to us, and we helped ourselves. Certainly as sweet as Welch’s. No wonder I had to acquire a taste for the “real” stuff. Alta. The sunset. Your faces. Your eyes. Nature—trees, sunrises and sunsets, animals—has always opened my heart and made me feel good. And feeling good makes me feel affectionate and see and feel the expression of life, in those I’m with, especially when we got that soul-kindred thing working. amb. Okay, good. Enjoy. Now can you each tell me what feels most important for people to know about who you are? Alta. One of my teachers in grad school called me a “disciple of joy.” For the purposes of this conversation, that’s enough. Ide. Perfect, Alta! Then, I’m a joyful old bitch committed to being fully herself. amb. What has been the greatest pleasure of your life?

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  1. As often happens in the Talmud, we overhear the rabbis arguing about the proper interpretation of Torah. 2. The passage attributes tremendous authority to the rabbis, but not to any individual rabbi: it’s not individual rabbis and their personalities that matter, but Israel’s common enterprise of studying Torah, as represented by rabbinic discussion— indeed this discussion is nothing less than oral Torah. 3. The rabbis “defeat God” not by defying him, but by appealing to written Torah. 4. God laughs in delight that his children have defeated him this way: the story pictures God as a gracious father (not a legalistic judge) and shows the playfulness (not literalism) of rabbinic exegesis. 5. In such texts (called Haggadot, the “lore” or “legends” of the rabbis) God once again is present in stories—unlike Mishnah (with its focus on Halakhot or legal rulings). 6. The playfulness of these stories demonstrates the interpretive freedom of Rabbinic Midrash: the rabbis feel free make up funny stories about God! 7. These stories do not have the weight of the Scriptural narratives, and they constantly point to the written Torah as the fundamental authority—yet they are themselves part of oral Torah, and have decisively formed Jewish conceptions of God. V. God, Torah and Israel’s Place in the Universe A. Study of Torah is for the rabbis what contemplation of the form of Wisdom is for the Platonists: it is what we were made for, what the creation is all about. B. Yet there is a difference: study of Torah is not an activity of pure intellect, but is always embodied in practices of memorization, discussion, and recitation in the religious life of a particular people, Israel. C. Study and obedience to Torah is how Israel loves her God—how Israel and her God take joy in one another. D. Torah study is not just for sages and rabbis, but is an obligation of all adult Israelites: which is why the central event of Jewish coming-of-age (bar-mitzvah) is the young person’s recitation of Torah in the synagogue. ©1999 The Teaching Company. 45 E. It is as if, when the Torah scroll is read aloud in synagogue the meaning of the universe is being fulfilled. Essential Reading: Cohen, Everyman’s Talmud, chapters 1–4. Supplemental Reading: Neusner, ed., The Mishnah esp. Abot (pp. 672–688). Neusner, What is Midrash? esp. Part III. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, pp.419–428. Questions to Consider: 1. Jewish-Christian relations have often gone terribly wrong. Do you think there are intellectual reasons for this—specific philosophical and religious misunderstandings (as opposed to mere racism and other forms of ignorance)? 2. In what respects is the philosophy of “the Judaism of the dual Torah” the same as that of the Scriptures of Israel? How do they differ? Is the one a continuous development from the other, or a break from it? ©1999 The Teaching Company. 46 Lecture Ten Church Fathers—The Logos Made Flesh

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Charles then roused me somewhat out of this ecstatic distraction, with a complaint softly murmured, amidst a crowd of kisses, at the position, not so favourable to his desires, in which I received his urgent insistance for admission, where that insistance was alone so engrossing a pleasure, that it made me inconsistently suffer a much dearer one to be kept out; but how sweet to correct such a mistake! My thighs, now obedient to the intimations of love and nature, gladly disclose, and with a ready submission, resign up the soft gateway to the entrance of pleasure: I see, I feel the delicious velvet tip!... he enters me might and main, with... oh! my pen drops from here in the extasy now present to my faithful memory! Description too deserts me, and delivers over a task, above its strength of wing, to the imagination: but it must be an imagination exalted by such a flame as mine that can do justice to that sweetest, noblest of all sensations, that hailed and accompanied the stiff insinuation all the way up, till it was at the end of its penetration, sending up, through my eyes, the sparks of the love-fire that ran all over me and blazed in every vein and every pore of me; a system incarnate of joy all over. I had now totally taken in love’s true arrow from the point up to the feather, in that part, where making no new wound, the lips or the original one of nature, which had owed its first breathing to this dear instrument, clung, as if sensible of gratitude, in eager suction round it, whilst all its inwards embraced it tenderly, with a warmth of gust, a compressive energy, that gave it, in its way, the heartiest welcome in nature; every fibre there gathering tight round it, and straining ambitiously to come in for its share of the blissful touch. As we were giving them a few moments pause to the the delectations of the senses, in dwelling with the highest relish on this intimatest point of re-union, and chewing the cud of enjoyment, the impatience natural to the pleasure soon drove us into action. Then began the driving tumult on his side, and the responsive heaves on mine, which kept me up to him; whilst, as our joys grew too great for utterance, the organs of our voices, voluptuously intermixing, became organs of the touch... how delicious!... how poignantly luscious!... And now! now I felt, to the heart of me! I felt the prodigious keen edge, with which love, presiding over this act, points the pleasure: love! that may be styled the Attic salt of enjoyment; and indeed, without it, the joy, great as it is, is still a vulgar one, whether in a king or a beggar; for it is, undoubtedly, love alone that refines, ennobles, and exalts it.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  They came, I suppose, as much for the sun as for the socialism. They spread blankets between the stalls and tents, and ate their lunches there, and lay with their sweethearts and babies, and threw sticks for their dogs. But I saw them listening, too, to the speakers at the stalls - sometimes nodding, sometimes arguing, sometimes frowning over a pamphlet, or placing their name upon a list, or fishing pennies from their pockets, to give to some cause. As I stood and looked, I saw a woman pass by with children at her skirts - it was Mrs Fryer, the poor needlewoman whom Florence and I had visited in the autumn. When I called to her, she came smiling up to me. ‘I got my place in the union, after all,’ she said. ‘Your pal persuaded me to it ...’ We stood chatting for a moment — her children had toffee-apples, and held one up for Cyril to lick. Then there came a blast of music, and people shuffled and murmured and craned their necks, and we stood together, lifting the children high, and watched the Workers’ Pageant - a procession of men and women dressed in all the costumes of all the trades, carrying union banners and flags and flowers. It took quite half-an-hour for the pageant to pass; and when it had done so the people put their fingers to their lips, and whistled and cheered and clapped. Mrs Fryer wept, because her neighbour’s eldest daughter was walking in the line, dressed as a match-girl. I wished that Florence were with me, and kept looking for her damson-coloured suit and her daisy, but - though I saw just about every other unionist who had ever passed through our parlour — I did not see her once. When I found her at last, she was in the speakers’ tent: she had spent all afternoon there, listening to the lectures. ‘Have you heard?’ she said when she saw me. ‘There’s a rumour that Eleanor Marx is coming: I daren’t leave the tent, for fear of missing her address!’ It turned out she had eaten nothing since breakfast: I went off to buy her a packet of whelks from a stall, and a cup of ginger ale. When I returned I found Ralph beside her, sweating, still pulling at his collar, and paler than ever. Every seat in the tent was taken, and there were people standing, besides. It was stiflingly hot, and the heat was making everyone restless and cross. One speaker had recently made an unpopular point, and been booed from the platform. ‘They won’t boo you, Ralph,’ I said; but when I saw that he was really miserable, I took his arm, left the baby with Florence, and led him from his seat into the cooler air outside. ‘Come on, come and have a fag with me.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] In 559 BCE Cyrus, a minor member of the Persian Achaemenid family, became king of Anshan in southern Iran.116 Twenty years later, after a series of spectacular victories in Media, Anatolia, and Asia Minor, he invaded the Babylonian empire and astonishingly, without fighting a single battle, was greeted by the population as a liberator. Cyrus was now the master of the largest empire the world had yet seen. At its fullest extent, it would control the whole of the eastern Mediterranean, from what is now Libya and Turkey in the west to Afghanistan in the east. For centuries to come, any ruler who aspired to world rule would try to replicate Cyrus’s achievement.117 But he was not only a pivotal figure in the politics of the region: he also modeled a more benign form of empire. Cyrus’s victory proclamation claimed that when he arrived in Babylonia, “all the people … of Sumer and Akkad, nobles and governors, bowed down before him and kissed his feet, rejoicing over his kingship, and their faces shone.”118 Why such enthusiasm for a foreign invader? Ten years earlier, shortly after Cyrus had conquered Media, the Babylonian author of the poem “The Dream of Nabonidus” had given him a divine role.119 Media had been a threat to Babylon, and Marduk, the poet said, had appeared in a dream to Nabonidus (r. 556–539), the last Babylonian king, to assure him that he was still controlling events and had chosen Cyrus to solve the Median problem. But ten years later the Babylonian Empire was in decline. Nabonidus, engaged in conquests abroad, had been absent from Babylon for several years and had incurred the wrath of the priesthood by failing to perform the Akitu ritual. During this ceremony all Babylonian kings had to swear not “to rain blows on the cheeks of the protected citizen,” but Nabonidus had imposed forced labor on the freemen of the empire. Disaffected priests announced that the gods had abrogated his rule and abandoned the city. When Cyrus marched on Babylonia, these priests almost certainly helped him to write his victory speech, which explained that when the people of Babylon had cried out in anguish to Marduk, the god had chosen Cyrus as their champion: He took the hand of Cyrus, king of the city of Anshan, and called him by name, proclaiming him aloud for the kingship over all of everything.… He ordered that he should go to Babylon. He had him take the road to [Babylon], and like a friend and companion, he walked at his side.… He had him enter without fighting or battle, right into Shuanna; he saved his city Babylon from hardship. He handed over to him Nabonidus, the king who did not fear him.120 Ritual and mythology, crucial as they were to kingship, did not always endorse state tyranny. Nabonidus was in effect deposed by the priestly establishment for his excessive violence and oppression.