The Intelligence of Pleasure: From Audre Lorde to the Body as a Site of Truth

By Barbara Wilde

Some ideas arrive too early for their time.

In 1978, Audre Lorde — Black feminist, poet, activist — wrote an essay that many publishers initially resisted. It was later included in her collection Sister Outsider, and it carried a title that, even today, still creates a certain discomfort: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.

Audre Lorde - 1978

To better understand the impact of this text, we need to situate it historically. Lorde was writing within the context of second-wave feminism, at a time when women were fighting for recognition, equality, and autonomy. Yet, even within feminist discourse, there was a tendency to privilege rationality, political strategy, and intellectual legitimacy, often distancing the body, and especially female pleasure, from the conversation.

At the same time, the erotic had been culturally reduced to pornography, something commercialised, objectified, and largely defined through a male gaze. Lorde intervenes exactly here.

She reclaims the erotic from both reduction and distortion, and she does something much more radical than it may initially appear: she reframes the erotic as a source of knowledge.

The Erotic Beyond Sexuality

When Lorde speaks of the erotic, she is not referring to sex in the narrow sense. She is pointing to a deeper, embodied experience, a form of intensity, of presence, of connection to what feels deeply right.

The erotic, in her words, is a resource within each of us that has been systematically suppressed, and this is where her work becomes profoundly relevant, even today.

Because what has historically been discouraged, particularly in women, is precisely this capacity to feel deeply and to trust that feeling.

What Happens When We Lose This Connection

In contemporary life, I can observe a recurring pattern. People are highly articulate about their lives. They can explain their choices, justify their relationships, and rationalise their decisions, but there is often a sense of disorientation. Something that does not fully align, I don’t think it is a lack of intelligence, but more a lack of connection, like if we’re not educated to connect with our body.

Because when the body is excluded from the process of knowing, what remains is partial. We rely on logic, on social structures, on external validation, and gradually, we move away from an internal sense of truth. This is not dramatic; it is subtle, and precisely for this reason, it is powerful.

Pleasure as a Form of Knowledge

This is where Lorde’s insight becomes almost disarmingly clear: pleasure is not trivial, it is not secondary, and it is not something to be managed or contained; besides, pleasure is informative.

It tells you that when something resonates with who you are, it signals alignment, and equally, its absence signals the opposite.

In my work, I often invite clients to observe something very simple: What happens in your body when you say yes to something that is not truly yours?

And what happens when you allow yourself to recognise it?

There is always a difference, a contraction, a hesitation or a loss of energy, And yet, most people have learned to override these signals in favour of what “makes sense.”

The Cultural Legacy of Disconnection

We cannot ignore the cultural dimension in which we live nowadays; Western epistemology has long privileged the mind over the body, thinking/reasoning over feeling, and control over experience.

Within this framework, the body becomes unreliable, and pleasure becomes suspicious.

Lorde’s work disrupts this hierarchy, as she proposes the perspective that the erotic, this deeply felt sense of aliveness, is not just valid, but essential. Not as an alternative to thought, but as its integration.

Because without the body, understanding remains abstract, detached, and ultimately, incomplete.

The Relational Dimension

Nowhere is this more evident than in relationships, where many people build their connections that are coherent on paper: shared values, compatible lifestyles, aligned goals, but something feels missing, like there is no depth, no vitality or no real sense of encounter.

This is often described as a lack of chemistry, but in Lorde’s sense, I would frame it differently: It is a lack of erotic presence.

That quality of being fully there, fully engaged, fully connected, without it, relationships become functional rather than alive.

Returning to the Body

This is why, in my coaching practice, I’m used to bringing the attention back to the body, not in a performative or abstract way, but as a concrete point of reference.

·       Where do you feel expansion?

·       Where do you feel the contraction?

·       What gives you energy?

·       What takes it away?

These are not simplistic questions; they are foundational, because they reintroduce a dimension of knowing that has been neglected and once this connection is restored, something shifts.

Choices become clearer, boundaries become more natural and above all, there is less negotiation of one’s own truth.

The Social Impact of Reclaiming the Erotic

What Lorde understood and what remains deeply relevant, is that her concept doesn’t limited to the personal, beside it is political, because a person who is in contact with their own sense of pleasure, alignment, and truth becomes less controllable, less manageable, less predictable, Less willing to accept structures that do not reflect them and also ess inclined to conform for the sake of belonging.

This is why the erotic has been historically marginalised, because it represents autonomy.

A Final Reflection

There is a form of intelligence that we are taught to develop by society and there is another form, quieter, embodied, often overlooked, that we are taught to ignore, in some cases to despise as a sin, and yet, it is precisely this second form that allows for coherence, which doesn't mean perfection, but coherence, and perhaps this is what Lorde was pointing to all along: When you reconnect with your capacity to feel, you do not lose clarity, instead you refine it.

Call to Action

If this resonates with you, this is the work I do.

✨ Book your free consultation at www.bwildecoaching.com✨ Or reach out directly — we begin from your experience, not from theory