I Like the Erotic and the Porn: Looking Back at Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic”

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea Plaid

I feel like I can’t call myself a “good” Black feminist if I’m not down with Audre Lorde. I feel fake if I don’t raise my fist or give an “Amen!” when another Black feminist or a feminist of color says/writes/puts on a t-shirt, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Then I add “sex-positive” to the “Black feminist” descriptor–I try to be of “do-you-with-lots-of-latex-lube-and-consent” crew–and then I feel like Audre and I don’t see sexing it up the same way, especially around ideas of what’s erotic and what’s pornography.

So, I sat down and reconsidered her essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”

But first, some background about me: I came to feminist theory, as bell hooks says, to explain the pain of my surviving rape at the age of five. I needed an answer to the pain of someone feeling entitled to override my bodily integrity, my being able to sexually consent. I also looked at my late father’s porn at a very early age, too. My mom said a “good Black woman” didn’t have sex before she was engaged and the “facts of life” were explained via her old nursing books or when a biological event (like my first period), a TV show, or a book mentioning sex precipitated the discussion by her.

Something had to give—or synthesize.

The feminism I studied said I have that right to say yes to sex–though what that sex was, at the time, fraught with, to put it delicately, tension. The owner of the feminist bookstore where I worked was a staunch follower of the late Andrea Dworkin: deeply believed that anti-porn legislation was necessary because all porn exploited women; any sexual relations with men was tantamount to at least sleeping with the enemy and at worst rape; wearing nail polish was a manifestation of a woman bending to The Patriarchy. Yet I knew that hooks, Susie Bright, Lisa Jones, and Wendy Chapkis weren’t saying this –if nothing else, they were saying 1) that men can be—and should be–a part of women’s liberation, 2) fucking them–as well as whomever else I wish—didn’t make me a “bad” feminist, and 3) porn and erotica were OK as vehicles to explore sexual expressions. Yep, I witnessed the feminist porn wars…and I wiped my brow when the pro-porn side won.

Now, some context on this essay: Lorde presented this in 1978, the middle of the Second Wave of feminism and in the midst of arguments on whether pornography was a tool to oppress women. She tries to redirect the argument by redefining what erotic and pornography are.

…comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects – born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

The erotic is a measure between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

[T]he erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

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