Sanai Sudlow

The Role of Eroticism

Last year being called erotic would have been something I would run fast away from. The most exciting part is I do not know why. Maybe I would run in fear that I would be perceived as overly promiscuous. Perhaps I would run because that placed me in another alternative society category. Maybe I would just not want to be that kind of woman. Labeling myself as erotic, in the past, felt like throwing myself into a room of undesirable women and locking the door. I was terrified of being someone no longer desired by a specific demographic I unintentionally tried to remain desirable to. At the time, I didn’t know the world’s true meaning.

I am what some people call passionate. I can’t like something or someone. I can’t even love them. Many call it obsessive, but it is beyond that. When I lust after something, it consumes every aspect of my life. It intrudes on my every waking and sleeping thought. It somehow finds its way into my reality, completely throwing me off balance. I dissociate, I shift, and I become a whole new person. It is hyper fixation.

The highest and lowest I’ve ever felt in my nineteen years of living have all come from peak moments of my hyper fixation. Similarly, Audre Lorde explains the bliss of kneading margarine. “When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience” (Lorde 90).

When I had a therapist, she told me feeling such intensity was fixable. She told me it was unhealthy to become obsessed with things that were not my reality. She told me it would make me insufferable to the public if I allowed something like a celebrity or a book to alter my entire being. She told me I would lose myself in a world of fantasy. She was right in one way and so close-minded in another. I lost friends, became distant from family, and even struggled with myself for a long time because of my desires. I never understood what was wrong with enjoying the simple things in life, like one’s imagination. After reading The Use of the Erotic by Audre Lorde, my questions were answered, there was nothing wrong with it.

The uncontrollable feeling of being completely engulfed by infatuation is my erotic. Though I love many things in life, the sense of completeness and joy comes when my mind is elsewhere, anywhere but here. It is best described as Lorde explaining why being erotic is feared:

“Our erotic knowledge empowers us and becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe” (Lorde 90)

It scares the oppressors to know that women are capable and aware of alternative realities. I embody my feminine inner desires when I am hyper-fixated in an intangible and unrealistic world. There are no limits to what I can say, do, feel, and touch—my feminine desire to touch my body from another perspective. The female desire to hear me speak, moan, and cry, come alive.

Only a month ago, I was lost in that feeling. Not being able to put my feelings into words was a level of confusion I did not consent to. Hearing the black, feminist, and lesbian meanings of eroticism cleared all my chaos. It was the missing puzzle piece of my internal conflict. Not only could I label this intense feeling, but I could also deconstruct the idea that my desires were inherently inappropriate and wrong to feel. Reading this article opened up a whole new realm of possibilities in the journey of knowing myself. I started looking at myself in the mirror with admiration instead of disgust.

Whenever I feel myself tingling from pleasure as my mind clings to something new, I do not shy away from the intenseness but lean into it. Understanding the role of eroticism in my life introduced me to the depth of my mind, body, and soul. For the first time, I could sit with myself and analyze the meaning of sensuality and seduction outside of sex. Beauty in sensuality comes from simple things like nature or food.

A seduction comes from the love of painting or making music. Someone can feel seduced when watching, writing a story, or listening to an audio that captivates me. There can be intimacy between the things I hold dear and myself. When I am aroused in ways that do not involve sex, those feelings are not strange but valid and familiar. Understanding the role of eroticism is knowing that everyone has their own version, whether they have found it or not. Being erotic is a woman’s label. It is made for and criminalized to discourage and demote women.” We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within Western society. On the one hand, the superficial erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence” (Lorde 88). To be erotic out loud is courageous. To be labeled as such in society against your will is dangerous. I have never heard of a man being called erotic.

When a football player is at his peak of adrenaline, feeling this intense sense of pleasure and satisfaction or fullness, he is just excited or passionate. That is his erotic. For some reason being erotic has been feminized in a way that only benefits the male ego.

Every woman in my family can relate to this feeling. My mother, grandmother, aunts, and cousins are not yet in touch with their eroticism, but they are actively living in it. Running off in a corner to indulge in guilty pleasure when they think no one sees. Hiding big smiles and cheerfulness when around others because they are embarrassed. Every time I catch them, I ask myself why they are embarrassed. How can society have shamed women for being emotional, being so much that my mother can’t be beyond blissful because of something she enjoys?

I hope to reconstruct the meaning of being erotic and introduce positive ways to embrace and identify as an erotic being. One at a time, from household to household, it is possible to flip the definition of the erotic. We can reintroduce the concept to older generations of women who were probably shamed into hiding their own erotic cravings in fear of being misconstrued into something it is not. We can reintroduce the erotic to ourselves, through ourselves.

Works of Reference

Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic As Power,” Sister Outsider, 2007.

Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, Aunt Lute Books, 2006.

I have always been quite passionate. My mother used to call me Femme dramatique, which means “dramatic girl” in Haitian Creole. Unfortunately, this intensity was only admired when I was younger. As I grew older and more mature, I was suddenly expected to make myself or rather my affection smaller. Sitting on a Zoom call with a therapist, I was bombarded with everything wrong with my passion. It was “too forward,” “overwhelming,” “unrealistic,” and “not necessary.” I had no choice but to internalize these accusations and work on solutions to a problem I wasn’t aware of having.

This occurs too often in the Mental Health System, especially those with marginalized identities. Because the history of psychiatry is built on the suffering of those deemed “different,” the practices of professionals in the field are outdated and harmful. It is routine to push our backs against the walls and encourage us to submit to a level of normality created by the straight white man. This system has enabled generations of abuse and restraint that must be dismembered from the ground up. Deep down, I have always felt this way, and reading Audre Lorde’s work was my saving grace.

After having the privilege to digest her words, I embarked on a journey that focused on rewriting and reteaching what it means to be sensual/erotic. More specifically, teaching myself how to live without shame of my interests and how my body processes them. During this trek, I discovered my femininity and humanity through lenses that have not been polluted by patriarchy and societal standards. I am inspired to inaugurate that same voyage for others, and the first step was sharing my story.

Sanai Sudlow was born and raised in Harlem, New York. She is an undergraduate student attending the University at Buffalo majoring in Psychology and a minor in Counseling. Her primary focus is child development and adolescent mental health. She plans on working in educational environments that aid underserved children. In her free time, Sanai enjoys writing fictional stories and journaling. She has just begun her publishing journey as she wrote an article for her school’s paper this last spring.