Pleasure activism: A radical reimagining of self-care

Does modern life make you too stressed to find joyful moments? Reclaiming pleasure, in all its forms, could be the missing piece of your self-care puzzle

Think about the last time you gave yourself permission to rest, to savour something you love, or to feel joy without guilt. How often does that happen in your life? For many of us, pleasure is the first thing to slip away when life gets busy or overwhelming. It can feel indulgent, even selfish, to prioritise joy when the world is full of challenges.

But, what if pleasure wasn’t a luxury, but a necessity? Or more than that – an imperative? That is the the central idea in adrienne maree brown’s (who chooses not to capitalise her name) transformative book, Pleasure Activism, which argues that centring joy is not only good for our wellbeing, but essential for creating social change. Rather than treating pleasure as an ‘extra’, brown invites us to see it as a source of strength, resilience, and connection. In adrienne’s own words: “Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.”

Why we deny pleasure

Pleasure can be tricky for me. Growing up, I experienced quite extreme homophobic bullying. By the time I was 17, I was already recognised as a campaigner in LGBTQIA+ rights, but that came with repetitive cycles of depression, burnout, and self-harm. As a queer, disabled woman, I’ve found that repression, self-denial, and necessary suffering are not just things I might inflict on myself, but are expected – demanded, even – by society, and as an adult, I’ve rallied against the notion that to have an existence like mine must be sad.

For others, religious and cultural messaging may position pleasure as sinful, creating guilt around self-care. Trauma responses can make pleasure feel unsafe, triggering anxiety during good moments. For marginalised identities, pleasure can feel too risky, because it requires dangerous vulnerability. Those with perfectionist tendencies often withhold enjoyment until they’ve met impossibly high standards. Recognising all of these as learned survival responses, not character flaws, can initiate the process of reclaiming joy.

Why pleasure matters

While self-care language has gone mainstream, embracing pleasure still feels taboo. Yet research shows positive emotions are particularly protective during stress – a 2019 study in Affective Science found they can dampen negative reactions and speed up recovery from difficult events. Similarly, reviews of emotional repression, such as a 2019 article in the International Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, suggest that denying pleasurable and positive feelings can weaken immune function, and is associated with poorer mental and physical health outcomes.

We often associate wellness with practices that are functional, such as exercise, therapy, nutrition, and meditation. These are all important, but they can sometimes feel like another set of obligations. Pleasure, on the other hand, does not ask you to achieve anything. It simply asks you to notice what feels truly good – and let yourself experience it.

What does pleasure activism look like?

Allowing yourself to have pleasure might mean lingering over a meal with friends rather than rushing through it, putting on music and dancing in your kitchen, or turning off mobile notifications and soaking up some fresh air. These might sound small, but they are acts of resistance in a culture that constantly tells us to optimise, produce, and endure – no matter what. The prioritisation of pleasure, therefore, is a prioritisation of wellbeing.

Pleasure can also reconnect us with our bodies. For people whose relationship with their body has been shaped by shame, trauma, or oppression, this can be especially powerful. To experience your body as a source of joy, rather than a site of pain or scrutiny, can feel alien at first – but ultimately healing. Through touch, movement, creativity, or rest, pleasure allows us to reframe the body as something worth caring for, not because of how it looks or performs, but because of how it feels or even, if feeling is too much, exists. Working with pleasure in the body can be particularly difficult for some, so working with a trained professional or somatic therapist is advised if you’re concerned.

Challenging the narrative

Of course, connecting with pleasure isn’t always easy in a world that seems to directly shame the act itself. Pleasure activism directly resists this idea, reclaiming pleasure in all its forms as a source of strength, creativity, and solidarity.

In that sense, every moment of unapologetic joy becomes an act of defiance. When we experience collective joy, we create resilience and challenge the narrative that pleasure must be earned individually, or consumed privately.

For me, embracing pleasure activism has meant learning to soften, rest, and allow joy, even when the world feels heavy. Especially when the world feels heavy. It has meant finding fuel in laughter, intimacy, and rest – fuel that makes it possible to keep going.

I am still not perfect at it, but I keep trying. It took years of conditioning to distance myself from pleasure, it would be unrealistic to assume that would heal overnight.

By paying attention to pleasure, we nurture not only our personal wellbeing, but also the conditions for collective wellbeing. Pleasure is not the opposite of resistance, it’s what makes resistance sustainable and, therefore, possible. And in fraught times, that may be the most radical lesson of all.