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Self-Love Is the Path to Self-Knowledge
“When’s the last time you made your pleasure a priority?”
That’s the question Jolie A. Doggett asks to kick off The Pleasure Principle on our sister publication ZORA, a collection of stories about solo sex, self-pleasure, and self-love. The project’s title is a nod to the iconic Janet Jackson song, and is especially timely in the era of Cardi B And Megan Thee Stallion’s unapologetic anthem to female pleasure, WAP.
But pleasuring oneself is not always a simple proposition. As Morgan Jerkins admits in a beautiful essay about the time she quit an orgasmic breathwork class: “I don’t know what it’s like to indulge and be fully invested in myself, to believe that I am my own universe unabashedly and decadently.”
It shouldn’t be that way. As the therapist and sexologist Shamyra Howard explains, self-love is a pathway to self-knowledge. Indeed, Howard says, in a society where women—especially women of color—are expected to sublimate our desires, “Every time you experience pleasure, you are inciting a revolution, you are experiencing a revolutionary act.”
