Radical Pleasure: Sex and the End of Victimhood

Rachel Miles
Jeannina Perez
WST 3015
28 February 2010

In her article “Radical Pleasure: Sex and the End of Victimhood,” Aurora Levins Morales explains the value of actively reclaiming sex for survivors of sexual abuse and violence. Using her own experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, Morales assesses the defensive position regarding sex many survivors take and finds it lacking. Instead of helping the survivor form a strong individual identity, such a position actually traps survivors in another form of victimhood. In Morales’ understanding, only by reclaiming the erotic as it applies to sex and physical intimacy can survivors truly experience passion and freedom in all areas of their lives. For the individual to thrive, she suggests, s/he must move beyond the idea of being a victim, even a strong, surviving one; s/he must reject the fear of sexual passion instilled in them by their abusers in order to become a person of complete passion and fulfillment in every sense.

Morales begins her essay by discussing why strong, defensive survivorhood is so appealing. She recalls her own experiences being sexually abused as a child and the impact those experiences have had on her ability to now understand and embrace her mature sexuality. Morales acknowledges from the start that her abuse and resulting fear of her own sexuality are not her fault; rather, they are the fault of her abusers, the direct consequences of their attempts to “induce physical pleasure in [her] against [her] will,” allowing “them . . . to persuade [her] that [her] desires were dangerous” (Morales 283). Such a stance creates a sense of “wounded eroticism . . . that is honored in survivor culture” (284) because it provides survivors with a way to show that their abuse and violation have left drastic, lasting impressions. In a society where people are often skeptical of the validity of such reports of abuse, the wounded eroticism Morales describes acts for survivors as a visible scar, a way of proving not only that their experiences were true, but also that the survivors have lived beyond them.

In the next section, however, Morales challenges the idea that survivors have actually lived beyond their abuse. Perhaps survivorhood, she posits, is really another form of victimhood. Just as “victimhood absolves [survivors] from having to decide to have good lives . . . to face up to our own responsibility . . . for changing the world and ourselves” (284), the idea of survivorhood presents another “out” for survivors in that it prevents them from ever forming self-identities defined fully by themselves. “When we refuse healing for the sake of that rage,” Morales says, “we are remaking ourselves in the image of those who hurt us . . . becoming the embodiment of the wound” (284). Rather than strengthening and benefiting survivors, then, the defensive approach of survivorhood to sexuality inhibits them, preventing them from embracing all aspects of themselves as equally important and key to their identities.

Morales next connects this idea to of reclaiming sexuality to the power of the general erotic. She discusses the erotic here specifically in regards to physical, sexual intimacy, as her own experiences have taught her that an inability to accept sexuality as a viable erotic passion is one of the strongest obstacles survivors face in reclaiming and freeing themselves. For survivors, embracing their sexuality in all its dynamics, all its turgid unknowns, is essential if they ever wish to truly live beyond their past abuse. For the general population, celebrating and fully claiming our bodies allows us to recognize the ways society exploits and abuses them; from this recognition, we can work to counteract this exploitation, becoming full people of passion and finally finding in everything we do the “deep pleasure in living” (284) contained in the erotic.



Works Cited

Morales, Aurora Levins. “Radical Pleasure: Sex and the End of Victimhood.” Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. Ed. Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 283-284. Print