Pleasure Principles: Sex, Food, Bodies and Our Cultures Murder of Pleasure
It’s Eating Disorder Awareness Week 2022 and for another year I sit here imagining a world where sex, food and our bodies weren’t the warped topics of faux morality filled with our culture’s ill intent. It often feels for me, as a fat, non-binary/trans, queer person that pleasure has been swiftly murdered, buried under the floor boards of the basement and stay there as a reminder of what I’m not supposed to have and could be.
Our bodies exist in the world as the visual representation of our existence. That is such a naturally heavy burden for us each and yet it’s the reality of a body and our body experiences in the world. Our bodies feel sensations like water dripping off skin and the feeling of cake frosting on the tongue. It feels the hands of a lover as they caress your cheek and the way rain soaks your hair in a thunderstorm. The body experiences the world in all its painful glory and yet our culture would convince you that feeding it, pleasuring it, allowing it to feel the world is wrong.
How can the sweet juice of a strawberry on the tongue or the melted creaminess of chocolate be wrong? The tongue delights in the spice of cardamom and cinnamon or the lips pucker as the acid of lemon coats the mouth. These are each pleasurable experience that come from doing the thing our body relies on, feeding it, nurturing it with nutrients. As a biological being we need food to keep going and we need the sensory experience it offers in order to embrace feeding ourselves.
I often ponder how the pleasure of food and sex are so entwined and how our culture equally shames people for enjoying the pleasure of being in a body. We decided what kind if sex is “acceptable” and what is “deviant”, we don’t teach comprehensive sex education including the fact that you don’t need a partner to enjoy your body. Believe it or not masturbation is normal, healthy and necessary if you want to know what your body likes. And yet much like food we would encourage a restrictive relationship with the body and the pleasure we can experience being in it.
Who decided that sex was cisgender, heteronormative, sock on, lights off, missionary position, and traditionally only the partner with a penis experiences an orgasm or any kind of real pleasure? Re-read that, read it over and over and let that concept sink in. We are on this planet for what, 80+ years and in that time do we want pleasure to be selfish, to be uninteresting, to be flavorless mayonnaise and white bread? Of course not! We want chocolate and chili pepper and heightened senses. We want to feel the highs and lows of having a body, being in a body and experiencing every sensory experience our body brings.
I am reminded that our culture was founded on the puritanical ideas around bodies and sex which are so often damaging and exclusionary. As Jessica Valenti said in The Purity Myth, “For women [AFAB] especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you’ve never had sex, you’re a “good” (i.e. “moral) girl and therefore worthy of praise.” Virginity is strictly an assigned female at birth thing that involves heteronormative sex. This is not the only kind of sex or pleasure and yet it’s the only one sold to us and talked about. And why? Virginity by design is the transactionary idea of sex which is apparently fine when a young girl “gives” her virginity away but not when we talk about sex work and yet the transactionary nature is the same. And if that makes you uncomfortable that is ok! But examine why? Why does looking at sex the very our culture has asked us to make you uncomfortable? It could be because while sex can be transactionary pleasure and feeling pleasure is so much more complex than that.
What would the world be like if we embraced intuitive eating as a culture where we could respond to what our bodies actually wanted or needed? Or if we decided we would all function from a harm reduction model where we don’t judge people for having their vices and instead work together to reduce the harm a vice may cause and allow for increased pleasure of other things? I can see a much stronger sense of cultural empathy and an openness to experiencing the unique pleasure of living if we allowed this to happen. Naomi Wolf equally addresses these concepts in, The Beauty Myth, when she talks about how “Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen called them “vital lies,” and psychologist Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way on the social level that they do within families: “The collusion is maintained by directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repackaging its meaning in an acceptable format.” The costs of these social blind spots, he writes, are destructive communal illusions.”
We’ve repackaged pleasure as a very small thing, in a small box that can only be accessed in particular ways. Which leads me to the truth which is that we no longer have to enjoy pleasure in private if we choose not to. If you enjoy pizza eat it and eat it in public as sauce spills over the side of your mouth. If you want ice cream eat it and let it drip down your chin in all its melted glory. And if you want to experience pleasure from a partner, experiment, buy a toy, try something new even if you feel embarrassed. Your pleasure matters because your body matters because you are here and allowed to enjoy being here. We can resurrect our pleasure from under the floor boards and breathe new life into something that should have always lived.
You deserve to live a full life that encompasses all that being human has to offer and the pleasure of food and being in your body is actually at the epicenter of that and is integral to our survival as humans.