Often, feeling sexual desire isn’t actually about sex alone. In fact, it’s often about other domains people don’t normally associate with sexuality or desire. These domains include safety, self-worth, self-acceptance, feeling entitled to pleasure, having a voice, pleasure positivity, financial freedom, having a sense of purpose, connection to others, feeling a sense of worthiness and agency related to their bodies, choices, and environments, and feeling empowered to shape their own identity.
Erotic Vitality and Power Domains
Erotic vitality means feeling fully alive. You do this first and foremost for yourself. Feeling vibrant and empowered to live and speak your truth in different domains helps counterbalance the forces in the world around you that may undermine your sense of agency. Erotic vitality emerges when you can relax, speak up, set boundaries, pursue joy and pleasure, cultivate fulfilling relationships, experience agency, and have energy.
This graph illustrates some key “non-sexual” areas that can feed into erotic vitality.
Mental and Physical Safety
To be able to experience desire, you need to feel relatively safe, both mentally and physically. Of course, there’s no such thing as absolute safety. But current or past trauma that interferes with your ability to feel safe in your own body can make it harder to experience desire. Sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism and other forms of prejudice continue to impact the way women, men and non-gender binary people are viewed. In order to feel erotically powerful, all individuals need to be able to find ways to feel safe.
Having a Voice
Having a voice is another way of saying, “You know who you are, what you need, and you advocate for yourself and your needs on a regular basis.” The problem is, if you don’t have a voice, it’s hard to express what you need in a way your partner can hear.
Pleasure Positivity
People can feel a lot of shame about receiving pleasure, experiencing pleasure, and prioritizing pleasure in their lives. This is particularly true for women. The taboo against pleasure may be compounded if you’re a person of color impacted daily by racism. The puritanical days when women lived to serve their husbands are officially behind us, but unofficially, women’s pleasure is still taboo.
Financial Freedom
How can you be free if you don’t have the means to create boundaries, take care of your own and your children’s health, or sustain and nourish your family? Financial freedom is a part of erotic power. If you’re operating within governmental systems that constrain your ability to benefit from resources that would support your ability to create more financial freedom for yourselves, it’s hard to cultivate certain aspects of erotic freedom that financial freedom supports, such as leisure time.
Sense of Purpose
When you feel vital, you feel alive. Living your life with a sense of purpose energizes you. You’re serving something bigger than yourself and your own needs. In order to connect with your true, unique sense of purpose, many women need to undo the social conditioning that has them believing their purpose is to care for others, or live up to a preconceived notion of femininity.
Agency
Having agency means knowing you have the right to be you. To feel erotic, you need to feel like you have the right to be you, to move in the direction you want to move in, to change things, and to impact and influence those around you.
Self-authored Identity
No one gets to tell you who you are. No one else gets to choose your pronouns, your style, your thoughts, your beliefs. Even the sexual and reproductive organs of the body you were born into don’t define you. You are the one who chooses your identity. Eroticism flows from a sense of personal power in all areas of your life, including the identity you create, and claim, in a world that may constantly try to usher you into categories that make you easier for others to understand, manage, and handle.
Worthiness
Worthiness relates to how in touch you feel with your own inalienable worth and value. This is something we’re all born with, and even when circumstances, limitations, or trauma leave us feeling “less than” others, we never actually lose our fundamental worthiness. Living from the awareness that our fundamental worthiness can’t be erased or diminished is a critical part of stepping into erotic power.
Connection to Others
Western cultures are founded on the delusion that we operate independently from one another as lone-wolves. In fact, we’re all interdependent. We’re never alone. To cultivate and deepen your experience of your own erotic power, interaction within a larger community is essential. A true community helps you unearth and live by your values, particularly counter-cultural ones. It keeps you on track as you repeatedly realign with your true needs, desire, and goals.
Honor Your Erotic Journey
How alive and empowered do you feel in each of the domains listed above? Can you develop more power and agency in the areas where you feel insecure or disempowered? Your challenges with experiencing sexual desire may be less about sex and more about your fundamental sense of yourself as someone who matters, is entitled, and has a voice.
Erotic vitality is your birthright. It’s yours to explore—for you.
