Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power
By Audre Lorde,
Summer 1989
THERE ARE MANY KINDS OF POWER, used and unused, acknowledged or
otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply
female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or
unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must
corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the
oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a
suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information
within our lives.
We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and
devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has
been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have
been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its
existence.
It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the
suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly
strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context
of male models of power.
As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our
deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives
by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women
around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same
depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women
are maintained at a distant/ inferior position to be psychically milked, much
the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving
substance for their masters.
But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the
woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that
sensation is enough.
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has
been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.
For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and
consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it
with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the
power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling.
Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and
the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to
which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having
experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in
honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from
our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of
our society. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a
luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do
not wish to guide their own destinies.
This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the
erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor
from others. Such a demand incapaci- tates everyone in the process. For the
erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely
and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are
capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then
observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.
The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of
our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in
all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision - a longed-for bed
which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.
OF COURSE, WOMEN SO EMPOWERED are dangerous. So we are taught to separate
the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the
lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in
our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we
truly love our work even at its most difficult?
The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit
rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the
exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal
horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its
erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a
travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for
ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and
then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is
not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.
As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly
different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of
all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and
through them.
The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification
of love in all its aspects - born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and
harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the
lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of
which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our
work, our lives.
There are frequent attempts to equate porn('graphy and eroticism, two
diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has
become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the
political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. "What do you
mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gun-runner?" the same way, we
have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the
spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to
feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position
is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility. The severe abstinence of
the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline
but of self-abnegation.
The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false,
resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge
which connects them is formed by the erotic - the sensual - those physical,
emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest
within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.
Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, "It feels right to
me," acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for
what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any
understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or
clarify, that knowledge, deeply horn. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid
of all our deepest knowledge.
THE EROTIC FUNCTIONS FOR ME IN several ways, and the first is in
providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another
person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or
intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for
understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat
of their difference.
Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the
open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches
to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every
level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience,
whether it is dancing, building a book- case, writing a poem, examining an
idea.
That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself
to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep
and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of
my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is
possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.
This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to
the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel
deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from
our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know
ourselves to be capable of Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens
through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to
evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our
lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us,
not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor
the merely safe.
During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored
margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz
just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a
while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside
the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine.
Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and
forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag
of margarine, thoroughly coloring it.
I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its
intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind
of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.
WE HAVE BEEN RAISED TO FEAR THE yes within ourselves, our deepest
cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose
their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and
indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength
beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we
may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally
defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.
When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives
only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from
those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by
external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is
not based on human need, let alone an individual's. But when we begin to live
from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves,
and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world
around us,. then we begin to be responisible to our selves in the deepest
sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up,
of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and selfnegation, and with the
numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our
acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from
within.
In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness,
or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as
resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.
And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a
back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me,
no difference-between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the
body of a woman I love.
This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the
power of each other's feelings is different from using another's feelings as we
would use a kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or
otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who
participate in the experience with us. And use without the consent of the used
is abuse.
In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need
for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the european-american
tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic
comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a
simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a
religion, a fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of
the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography
and obscenity - the abuse of feeling.
When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development
and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy
our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of
satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make
connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious
of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to
deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to
the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.
The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have
a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom
I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This deep participation has often
been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before.
But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to
operate under an exclusively european-american male tradition. I know it was
not available to me when I was trying to adapt my consciousness to this mode of
living and sensation.
Only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to
risk sharing the erotic's electrical charge without having to look away, and
without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that
exchange. Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the
energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling
for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.
For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do
that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal,
and anti-erotic society.
Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde is the author of
numerous books of poetry and essays. She is an outspoken critic of racism,
sexism, classism, and other systems of domination, as well as a prolific
creator of nest, cultural possibilities. This essay was originally delivered as
a speech in 1978 at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women,
Mount Holyoke College, and has become a feminist classic of sorts.