Eros As Resistance

"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." — Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Fascism is consolidating power right in front of us—mass deportations, criminalized protest, healthcare stripped from millions, trans people erased from public life. And we're responding the way we know how, showing up and doing the work. But we're showing up to actions while dissociated, processing police violence while planning the next protest, holding collective grief and our own trauma and strategic planning all at once—and wondering why our bodies are screaming. The brutality is real, the pace is unsustainable, and nobody's coming to save us. We have to resource ourselves, but most of us don't know how to do that without it looking like retreat.

Here's what the state wants: activists running on fumes, burning out, leaving the movement. They want us fragmented, dysregulated, too exhausted to organize. They want us treating our bodies like ammunition we'll replace later—because that's a quick route to burnout, and burnout is how movements die. When we collapse, when we disappear, when we give up because we literally can't keep going—that's when they win. Not through police violence alone, but through the slower violence of exhaustion that makes us abandon the work before we ever reach the transformation we're fighting for.

But there's another way.

Audre Lorde taught us that the erotic is a renewable source of power—the deep yes in your body, the aliveness, the capacity for joy and pleasure that fascism tries to stamp out. When we reclaim the erotic, we're tapping into the force that makes resistance sustainable instead of suicidal. This is what makes my work different from both standard somatic trainings and sacred sexuality work that never names the fascism we're living under. Nervous system regulation is necessary, yes. Breathwork helps, absolutely. And pleasure practices can be transformative. But without explicitly connecting eros to political resistance—without that foundational understanding that our capacity for pleasure is contested territory under fascism, that reclaiming it is an act of defiance and the fuel that reminds us what we're fighting for—we're just maintaining ourselves to keep showing up to our own slow death. We're settling for endurance when what we actually need is aliveness rooted in why we're fighting: for a world where all bodies get to experience pleasure and joy.

So what does this look like in practice?

It looks like remembering that your body can feel pleasure even in the middle of crisis—that this is fuel, not frivolity. It looks like breathing into your belly and feeling the aliveness there before you walk into an organizing meeting, so you're grounded in sensation instead of just strategy floating three feet above your body. It looks like noticing when rage or grief wants to move through you and actually letting it instead of clenching everything tight to stay "professional," because professionalism is just another word for the dissociation that keeps us compliant. It looks like touching your own skin, feeling sunlight on your face, tasting food fully instead of eating while scrolling through the latest atrocity—small moments of erotic connection that remind you what you're fighting for. Bodies that can still feel. Communities that can still love each other. A world where pleasure belongs to everyone, not just those who can afford to buy their way out of suffering. It looks like pleasure as defiance, as proof that they haven't broken you, as the thing that lets you show up tomorrow and the day after that and keep showing up because you're not just surviving—you're building the world you want to live in.

Because a pleasured and pleasure-seeking body is part of the revolution.

This is the work I do through Embodied Eros for Activists and other offerings—helping activists build sustainable resistance practice rooted in pleasure, breath, and erotic embodiment. Not as self-care divorced from the struggle, but as the foundation that keeps us in the fight for the long haul.