Essay: Living Audre Lorde’s “Erotic as Power”

If I had to name in a single sentence what moves me about Audre Lorde’s essay, Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power, it would be this:

The erotic is the felt knowledge of what makes life worth living—and once we reclaim it, we are ethically compelled to reorganize our work, our relationships, and our communities around that knowing.

That is my call to action.

The so-called “aliveness experiment” I’ve embarked on this year is not a baseless abstraction. It is an attempt to live inside that sentence—and to understand what it demands of me.

I have read this essay so many times that the pages no longer feel like someone else’s words written 40 years ago. They feel alive – drawing me in, drawing me out, again and again. The margins are dense with my handwriting—underlines layered on underlines, phrases circled three times like talismans. At one point I wrote, I’m going to end up underlining everything, which felt less like a joke than a confession.

This is not an essay I read once and understood. It is an essay that reveals deeper truths in each encounter.

Early on, Lorde names the erotic as a source of power and information, and my body responds before my mind does. Not indulgence. Not distraction. Not sex flattened into sensation. Power. Information.

I recognize immediately how thoroughly I have been trained to distrust this kind of knowing. To privilege what can be reasoned over what is felt. To treat sensation as suspect and emotional truth as something to be managed or explained away. I underline the passage where she writes: we have been warned against trusting the power that rises from our deepest, nonrational knowledge, and in the margin I write it out again in my own hand. I sear it into my memory.

What she is describing is pointedly familiar to me. It is the social milieu I have shrunk myself to fit inside.

To take the erotic seriously, then, is to make a first commitment: to trust deep feeling as a form of knowledge. To release the social conditioning that it’s a flighty feminine impulse and remember what it truly is: the original internal compass—an epistemology grounded in sensation, resonance, and response. The erotic is not a mood or a peak experience. In Lorde’s reckoning, it’s an internal sense of satisfaction that, once felt, coalesces as something we know we can return to. It teaches us what is possible.

And once we know what is possible, we can no longer pretend not to know.

There is a moment in the essay where Lorde describes women being “psychically milked” for this power, like ants maintaining colonies of aphids. I pause. In the margin I scrawl: Hmmm. Have women been colonized? And then, in a subsequent reading, I write next to it: Aha, yes.

The recognition lands low in my body as something already known.

I begin to see more clearly how aliveness has been managed, redirected, extracted. How vitality—emotional, relational, creative—has been siphoned into systems that do not return it. Lorde’s point is not simply that women have been denied power, but that we have been trained to fear the depth of our own feeling, and to accept a thinner, more controllable version of ourselves in its place for the benefit of the system.

Numbness, in this light, is not neutral. It is cultivated.

To reclaim the erotic is therefore not some superficial self-improvement remedy for midlife women. It is a refusal. A refusal of the flattening of experience. A refusal to live in a narrowed emotional range that makes life more manageable for some but less alive for all. This refusal is not a dramatic street protest, but a daily re-commitment that looks like choosing presence over productivity, honesty over coping, depth over convenience.

It also looks like grief—the grief of recognizing how much has been dulled, diverted, or lost. I am honestly so tired of the grief, but it continues to come in waves, for all those whose capacity for aliveness has been compromised. And this, I suppose, is how I know I am alive.

Again and again, Lorde insists that sensation is not enough. I circle the phrase an internal sense of satisfaction until I can almost no longer read the words. Internal. Sense. Satisfaction.

This is not about chasing intensity. It is about establishing a standard.

Once we have felt this depth of satisfaction—this alignment between what we are doing and what we feel to be true—we have no choice but to demand more of our lives. Not perfection, but congruence. Lorde is explicit: the erotic is not only a question of what we do, but of how fully we can feel in the doing.

This reorients everything.

Work is no longer simply a means of survival or achievement. It becomes a site of ethical inquiry. How often, Lorde asks, do we truly love our work—even at its most difficult? I star this line and write in the margin: This is what I’ve been looking for.

My dissatisfaction, I begin to see, is not personal failure. It is diagnostic. It reflects a deeper misalignment between the structures I have inhabited and the kind of aliveness I know is possible. Systems organized around profit, productivity, or endurance alone strip work of its erotic value—its life force, its meaning, its capacity to nourish, connect, and transform.

To live erotically, then, is to refuse to organize one’s life around system servitude disguised as stability.

This is where the essay becomes more pointed.

Lorde writes that once we recognize our capacity for joy, it becomes a lens through which we evaluate all of our endeavors, and we begin to demand lives that resonate with it. I underline this passage on three separate occasions and sound my alarm in the margin: Oh, God. And then, a grave responsibility not to settle.

Not to settle for the convenient, the conventionally expected, the merely safe.

This is the part that unsettles me most, for it removes the false comfort of not knowing (“ignorance is bliss” as they say). It makes compromise plainly visible, not as inevitability, but as choice.

What I know now is that the erotic does not simply offer pleasure, power and information, or deep satisfaction. It comes with obligation.

And I feel, as a tremulous flutter in my gut, some fear in this knowing. Fear of what I will no longer be able to tolerate once I trust it. Fear of what will have to change.

And yet this fear is not the final note.

Lorde insists that the erotic is also what makes connection possible. The sharing of erotic energy—physical, emotional, psychic, intellectual—creates a bridge between people. The need to share deep feeling is after all a human need.

Something in me settles here.

Because this is where the personal becomes political in a way that feels lived rather than a second wave feminist slogan. Not ideology, but practice.

If we cannot feel deeply, we cannot connect deeply. And if we cannot connect deeply, we cannot build anything together that is not brittle, extractive, or easily put aside.

Lorde calls this deep participation—a refusal to look away from what we feel, and a refusal to use one another as instruments of satisfaction. Instead, we share, witness, and remain present to the full range of experience, in ourselves and in each other.

I underline the passage where she writes that the erotic cannot be felt secondhand and write in the margin: this is the crux.

Because it is here that something shifts.

The erotic is not an escape from the world. It is what gives us the energy to engage it differently. It is what allows connection to deepen into solidarity, and shared experience into collective action.

This is the part that makes me pause, and then write—almost as a plea —I want that.

Not intensity for its own sake. Not feeling as a passing enactment. But a way of being with others, in which what is most alive in us becomes the ground for what we build together.

By the last page, I feel summoned.

If Thoreau’s call to “suck the marrow out of life” produces a visceral yes, Lorde’s essay produces something quieter and more momentous: recognition. A knowing that, once named, cannot be unnamed.

This is why the essay matters so much to me now.

It refutes the split I keep encountering—between aliveness and usefulness, between joy and responsibility, between inner life and collective change. It insists that the force that allows us to feel deeply is in fact the same force that can reorganize how we live and create and transform together.

Not as an ideal, but as a practice. One that is self-affirming, other-affirming, and life-affirming.

In a time when so much feels uncertain, fractured, and unmoored from what actually sustains us, this feels like an anchor. A form of grounded, actionable hope that arises from within and grows between us.

When I read the news and start to feel the sink of despair, I remind myself of the power of the erotic—the felt knowledge of what makes life worth living, that once reclaimed demands we reorganize our lives around that knowing and share it in deep participation with others, so that we have the collective force to change our world.

This is the call I am learning to live into.