Unabashed ravishment, whether from binge eating or drug use, makes those of us who strive for autonomous individuality deeply uncomfortable. In June 2024, an independent advisory panel for the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, in part because of this discomfort.
One of the problems cited by the panel was that the researchers running the trials for the therapy didn’t report “adverse events.” Adverse events are defined as an unexpected, undesired, or negative effect of a drug or other type of treatment. In this case, the unreported adverse events concerned when or if study participants experienced “euphoria.”
Let that sink in for a moment. A study participant experiencing euphoria while on a drug whose street name is “ecstasy” was an undesired or negative outcome. Euphoria, in and of itself, was an adverse event, due to the fact that euphoria threatens to overcome the self-control of individuals, which, according to the FDA, is a highly likely pathway to addiction, which is considered “abuse.”
Thoreau denigrated the debauchery of butter-eating and coffee-drinking and now the FDA pathologizes euphoria.
Our discomfort with pleasure goes back a long way. The philosopher Henry David Thoreau denigrated the debauchery of butter-eating and coffee-drinking and now the FDA pathologizes euphoria. But where has this condemnation gotten us? Reviling the addicted, the euphoric, has only led to catastrophic drug wars and devastating interpersonal damage. All this endlessly recycled judgment calls for a pleasure crusade.
In 2019, the Black feminist, queer activist, writer, social justice mediator and enchanting singer adrienne maree brown published a manifesto called Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. For brown, pleasure activism asks us to learn from our own pleasure, instead of pushing it away and feeling unworthy of it. Embracing pleasure doesn’t mean we have to ignore the harms of the world, whether those harms are caused by corporations or powerful intoxicating and toxicating substances, like fentanyl or meth, lead or petroleum. On the contrary, celebrating pleasure helps determine “how to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have.” Seeing pleasure as part of that liberatory work insists that we shouldn’t—and can’t—wait to feel good until after the revolution.
And why shouldn’t pleasure permeate the everyday, even within massive inequality? In Pleasure Activism, brown reprints the poet Audre Lorde’s essay The Uses of the Erotic, in which she uses margarine, that petro-chemical proletarian substance par excellence, to describe how her erotic force suffused and strengthened what she brought to the world with others:
During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, un- colored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while, to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it. I find the erotic such a kernel in myself. 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’s and brown’s calls for pleasure are fierce, because they insist on seeking strength and stability, and they refuse to shame the pleasure-seeker.
Lorde’s pleasure-practice of suffusing processed margarine with color—written in the “we”—describes pleasures that are affordable due to unregulated corporate vice, which means these pleasures animate relationships with opulent delight. Why shame those who partake in the pleasures abundantly available to everyone?
Lorde’s and brown’s calls for pleasure are fierce, because they insist on seeking strength and stability through intensive and excessive pleasurable connection, and they refuse to shame the pleasure-seeker.
Anti-pleasure elites and mainstream health experts take their pleasure in disdaining the rest of us for our ravishments, as they demand we maintain our self-control. And, of course, the bulk of their vitriol is reserved for the working classes and people of color. So for instance, while the Aztecs reserved the oblivion of drunkenness for the overlords and esteemed drunkenness as a state that facilitated speech with the gods, now that intoxication is available to anyone, it’s considered vulgar.
And that seems to be precisely the problem for those who seek to distinguish, and separate themselves from those of us avowedly dependent on others and our cheap pleasures. With oblivion and excess abundantly available to the tacky-ass masses, it’s the discerning self-controlled individuals who can forsake ravishment to maintain the pleasures of making invidious distinctions between themselves and others. Euphoria has lost its cachet, left to the mindless gobbling rabble.
Adrienne maree brown faces off against that bloodless respectability and the austerity mandates, which tell us that if we are oppressed and suffering we can’t possibly experience pleasure. Pleasure activism provides a powerful model for what we could all experience, instead of pathologizing pleasure-seeking as only a response to violent histories and impoverished circumstances. In fact, pleasure can be a powerful response to these histories and circumstances, because it defies the soul-crushing violence often intended to snuff out the groups of people who historically have resisted domination. Living addicted in pleasure is a glorious response to this deeply imperfect world, even as we seek to change it.
This article is excerpted from IN PRAISE OF ADDICTION: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World © 2026 by Elizabeth F. S. Roberts. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Photograph (cropped) by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
