How do you experience pleasure?
Do you allow it to enter your body and move within you freely?
Does it build inside you, gently erupting from your core in waves?
What signs let you know you’re in the thick of it? Do your toes curl? Do your eyes roll? Is it when your back blows?
Last week my partner and I attended Janelle Monáe's Age of Pleasure tour. We danced the night away at Radio City Music Hall, allowing Monáe's genre-blending voice to lead us into The Age of Pleasure.
The day after the album came out, I was in the Bronx getting ready to celebrate my partner and their twin’s birthday. It was a special Saturday in June, one where I got a few moments of alone time before the festivities began. While the rest of the family took time together downstairs, I stole a half hour to myself upstairs to shower and have my first listen of The Age of Pleasure.
Phenomenal is the only way to describe my experience listening to the album for the first time. The music seemed to carry me through my shower and to the bedroom where I lit an incense and moisturized. Keeping in line with the theme, I removed restrictions from myself. Tossed aside restraint in order to really live in the age of pleasure.
“Now, baby, I'm choosy
But me and you can f*ck in that jacuzzi
And we can make a scene,
Or better yet, we could make a movie”
Janelle Monáe, A Dry Red
Every breath, every slide, every brush against my thigh was intentional to allow myself unadulterated, unencumbered pleasure. "Black Sugar Beach," "Haute" and "Waterslide" became instant favorites. Between the horns on “Know Better” to the smooth sound of Grace Jones speaking French on “Ooh La La,” I allowed myself to exist in a space outside of car horns, late bills, and fears of failure. I allowed myself to exist in The Age of Pleasure. Eventually I returned to the rest of the family, all smiles and flushed cheeks, enthusiastically ready to celebrate.
Accessing pleasure isn’t easy for me. I know I’m not alone in this.
Lately I’ve been living in the space where my shoulders are constantly at my ears, and on a near daily basis I find myself searching for 5 things I can see, 4 things I can smell, 3 things I can hear, 2 things I can touch, and 1 thing I can taste. On the days when I forget to take my antianxities, I feel like James McAvoy in Wanted, fiendishly shoving extra pills down my throat just so I can breathe. Even after a few pages of Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown, I couldn’t relate. The book has been growing dust on my shelf for 4 years. I hate it here. It reeks of sulfur, stagnation, and a soldier’s obligation.
Janelle Monáe’s The Age of Pleasure is like sitting with a friend by the poolside; their music an outstretched arm inviting me to “dive in because the water feels fine.”
It was non-negotiable for my partner and I to attend the album’s tour when it was announced; we got our tickets within the week, going back home to New York City to let the pleasure wash all over us.
Leading up to the concert, I spent time trying to put myself in a mental space to be able to experience and receive all the pleasure that the tour would bring. I wrote more, journaled with intention. I listened to the music that makes me feel alive. I tried to be embodied, really living in every moment big and small. Each time my nervous system slowed down enough for me to delight in pleasure, I was sent into a tailspin by my own burdensome expectations of how I should use my time.
Shouldn’t I be working?
Shouldn’t I be fighting for a better tomorrow?
Shouldn’t I be doing something to offset the debt I’m in?
How can I rest when there are people in prison that need all the help they can get?
In this era of capitalism, in my experience in movement building, and with my various forms of childhood traumas, pleasure often seems just out of reach. So much of my life I’ve been trained to see forms of joy as either inaccessible to me as a poor person, irrelevant in the necessity to build power, or not afforded to me because of my own past experiences. Growing up in the United States, all of this makes sense. It wasn’t until 2022 that I recognized how often Puritanical values permeate my most intimate thoughts, even about pleasure. Wouldn’t I get too caught up in pleasure and ignore my life, my people, my responsibility?
I’m grateful for reminders of how wrong I am.
It’s a blessing to have been taught by Assata Shukur, who opened my heart to pleasure as a necessity to build new worlds and live a full life.
I think a lot about Assata, and the passage above. Prior to reading the book, I thought that all revolutionaries lived and died by the sword. Even as a teenager, I believed myself to be a soldier, a self-made machine ready to fight a war to win my freedom. There’s no time for fun while our Government tries to kill us. No time for pleasure while we fight for basic rights. Prior to Assata, I assumed that you would only get pleasure after the work was done. The gag is, the work is never done.
Reading that passage in Assata let me know that all my thinking up to that point had actually harmed me more than helped me. That form of thinking is a carrot on a stick into a grave.
I read her autobiography in 2020 and have been trying to live by that passage ever since. Similarly, I learned from another revolutionary about living.
Last year I read a biography of Ella Baker, an organizer of the Civil Rights Movement who helped to birth the Black Power Movement. Ella’s grandmother, Josephine “Bet” Ross, was an enslaved person who celebrated life to the fullest extent. Even under the most brutal conditions of enslavement, Bet would dance into the night with her friends and family as a reminder that life is worth living.
‘‘According to Ella, ‘[W]hen she [Bet] was of marriageable age… the mistress ordered her whipped, but the master, who was still her father, refused to have her whipped. . . But he did put her out on the farm and she even had to plow . .. she would plow all day and dance all night.’ She was defiant.’’
From Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical; Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby
When my mind keeps me from enjoying pleasure as if I’m an extra in Reefer Madness, I remind myself of Assata and Ella and Bet. Because of them, I can. Even on the days when it’s hard, I remind myself that I am more than this capitalist system that has a boot on my neck that reeks of archaic values from a religion that I don’t even call my own.
Despite my inability to fully allow pleasure to nest in me in the weeks leading up to the concert, I was able to allow some pieces of it to take over me in the days before the concert. I ate new and interesting food the day of the show, allowing myself the rare pleasure of enjoying new food. I smoked on the ride down, allowing myself some joy (and munchies) from New Haven to Grand Central. My wife and I stole kisses from each other in the mezzanine, removing our masks only to smooch or whisper sweet nothings into each other's ears. I allowed myself to be present even with aching feet, swollen lips, and a sore throat from yell-singing all night long.
“If I could f*ck me right here right now
I would do that.
Looking in the mirror at me my God,
like who dat.”
Janelle Monáe, Waterslide
In reality, this is the essence of The Age of Pleasure: experiencing pleasure in the present as you fight to live and survive in the long run. From their debut album, The ArchAndroid, through to their critically acclaimed third album, Dirty Computer, Monáe’s discography tells a futuristic story of people fighting for their survival. The Age of Pleasure is different in that the entire album focuses on pleasure, and the present. Those themes have been echoed through the country on this tour, and were certainly felt at Radio City Music Hall. The Age of Pleasure is “a safe oasis, for us by us” made of love and pleasure, experienced best when you’re being feeling embodied.
You, dear reader, deserve pleasure. Just like I do. Whether you’re in social movements, an artist, or you aren’t defined by “what you do,” you deserve pleasure. Even on your hardest days.
Without pleasure, the future won’t be anything worth creating.
I may not get it right, I may still live with my shoulders up to my ears and take daily antianxieties like they’re skittles, but I try every day to live with just a little more pleasure than I did the day before.
Perhaps this is an entry that should have stayed hidden between the red bindings of my journal.
But then I think to myself – what’s the pleasure in that?