Sensuality and pleasure
To me, sensuality is the ability to both feel and express ourselves through our senses. Sensuality is therefore the prerequisite for the ability to sense pleasure.
By pleasure, I don’t necessarily mean sexual or ecstatic pleasure. I simply mean what feels good.
The ability to feel
However, in order to perceive that pleasure – or that which feels good – we have to be able to actually sense how we feel at the present moment. Only then can we either cherish the pleasure or perceive what we need to adjust so as to feel good. This can sometimes be the smallest things, such as a simple change in my posture, a sip of water, a deep breath or a little stretch. That’s what I mean by pleasure.
This pleasure is available to us every second. …If we take the time to notice what we need to feel good based on what is true and alive right now.
And that’s what it’s all about: To feel what is alive right now.
Sensing as a basic need
Sensing, perceiving, getting in touch with and entering into a relationship with everything that is right now. This is a basic need for all of us. Physically as well as emotionally and spiritually; both intra-psychically (with myself) and inter-psychically (with others).
After all, we are social beings. This is also shown by research in psychotherapy, which has shown that one of the most important so-called aspecific factors (regardless of different forms and methods of therapy) for successful therapy is the therapeutic relationship. Because wounds arise in relationships. And thus relationships are the place where they can heal best. This applies to inter-personal relationships, as well as for the relationship with myself (intra-personal), or my various “parts”, ego-states, inner-family members etc…
Connectedness with the whole
Perhaps this basic need of relating to life can be traced back to the fact that we are programmed to feel our connection with the whole, the organism of existence, and to recognize how interwoven we are with all of it. The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1962) illustrates this image by comparing our body in the world with the heart in a living being.
The Senses as a Doorway to the World
And how do we sense this connection between ourselves and the rest of existence? Through our senses. Through our perception (which is always embodied – the artificial separation of body and mind stems from the dualistic conditioning of our society; see below), an intimate, bodily connection with the world emerges that inevitably engages us in a vibrant, ongoing relationship with it, even if we are not aware of it (Grear, 2011).
This can be illustrated by the image of the newborn child: In the mother’s womb, we are still one with her body (unquestioned experience of oneness). Through birth, we experience a separation. The separation of the two bodies is delineated by the skin: the skin marks both the “border” to the other body, but also the doorway to it. The fact that the skin, our largest sensory organ, is the first to develop in a fetus (Rescio, 2019) underscores this notion.
In this sense, borders are the prerequisite for or maybe even just a different facet of authentic contact: I need to know / sense where I am standing to meet you where you are at.
And all our “borders” are equipped with senses. Thus the skin, like all other sensory organs, become the place where we get in touch with life, a gateway to the world.
So if sensing is so fundamental to us, why don’t we just do it?
Why we don’t sense
…Because in our fast-paced, cerebral, patriarchal and capitalist society, the opposite program is running which keeps us in a trance of numbness: Instead of inviting us to pause to feel what is, we are numbed by sensory overload and decoupled from feeling our basic need with the result that we externalize this need. In other words, we try to satisfy our underlying desire for connection with other things – mainly consumption and performance, lead by the induced ideal of harder-better-faster-stronger.
Mindful pleasure (in the sense mentioned above) thus degenerates into impulsive, excessive or even addictive consumption (of food, sex, substances, social media likes, etc.), while simultaneously our self-esteem – and thus our perceived right to exist – becomes tied to the condition of achieving more and more. The resulting performance and consumer society is therefore both created and maintained by this dynamic. Because if we “simply” lived in direct contact with our needs, savoured the full potential of our ability to enjoy the pleasure of life and recognized our unconditional value we would no longer adhere to the dictatorship of consuming and performing for the right to exist.
The Result of this Numbness-Trance: Disembodiment
The reason for this “disembodiment” – the disconnection from our basic needs, our senses and our ability to truly perceive pleasure – lies deeper than just capitalism.
It has its origins in the deep division of Western dualistic society.
Dualism is the opposite of monism or unity – a division in which a whole is separated into differently valued parts, in superior and inferior segments.
In the context discussed so far, this division refers to the division between body and mind. This is immortalized in the famous quote “Cogito ergo sum” – “I think, therefore I am” by Descartes (1641, as quoted in Grear, 2011). The human mind or reason (res cogitans) is regarded as the essence of the human being and as independent from the body (res extensa). In this view, the latter serves only as an object to be controlled, dominated and ultimately overcome by the mind (Grear, 2011; Wilde, 2003).
Division in Western society
The principle of this division can be found in our society on various levels: it is not only evident on an individual level, in the division between body and mind, but also in a discrepancy in how we as a society appraise certain values or characteristics. For example, arguments based on rationality, logic and reason are valued more highly than those based on emotion, intuition and sensation.
The same applies to dominance and control (“power over”, or the power of the blade that takes life [Eisler, 1987]) versus a sense of community, empathy or tolerance (“power with“, or the power of the chalice that gives life [Eisler, 1987]).
Humanity as the “summit of creation”
Furthermore, the principle of dualistic division is evident in our understanding of society or humanity as the “summit of creation”, which stands above nature and is therefore allowed to exploit it as a resource (analogous to the relationship between body and mind according to Descartes described above) instead of perceiving itself as the organic part of the ecosystem it is – with the result of the climate crisis in which we now find ourselves.
Godfather and Mother Earth
Interestingly, the dualism can also be seen in religion: while indigenous cultures often live in harmony with nature and “Mother Earth” – everything that is alive here and now – is worshipped as divine, the Abrahamic religions worship a male Godfather in heaven who promises us eternal life after the sinful life in the here and now.
Patriarchy
Last but not least, these dichotomies are then gendered in binary terms and assigned to men and women: Everything that is considered superior (e.g. mind over body, dominance and control over community and empathy, humanity and culture over nature) is assigned to the male gender and vice versa – and is ultimately reflected in the patriarchal structure of “dominant men” and “oppressed women” and other minorities.
The dualistic conditioning in Western society is thus extremely deep and multi-layered.
…And so are the hurdles we face when we try to satisfy our basic need — to be in touch with life = to sense what is alive right now.
Numbness
However, in addition to the social events that have led to our collective numbed trance, another challenge lies in the nature of numbness itself. To be numb is to feel nothing, to be anesthetized. And when do we use anesthetics? When we don’t want to feel pain. So we stay numb because the moment the anesthetic wears off, we start to feel what we didn’t want to feel.
The fact that we don’t want to feel pain is due to our tendency to evaluate experience/life itself dualistically, dividing it into positive feelings considered worth living and negative feelings considered not worth living.
In the case of traumatic experiences, numbing can be very useful, as the negative experience is too strong, too sudden, or too soon to be digested and integrated. In acute situations, numbing can therefore be a coping strategy. In the long term, however, the wound must heal (be digested and integrated), as the price of numbing is too high: desensitizing isn’t a selective process; thus, by denying the emotions we don’t want to feel, we also diminish our ability to fully experience the rest of our emotional palette.
Life is everything that is alive now
This is probably the most profound implication of a non-dualistic worldview: Life is everything that is alive right now – beyond good and evil, pleasant or unpleasant; it consists of pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, life and death. If we exclude one aspect of our experiences, we simultaneously cut ourselves off from all others and thus from our aliveness.
And that’s what it’s all about – aliveness.
This brings us to dance, specifically sensual dance.
Sensuality: pleasure through feeling and expression
As introduced at the beginning, I understand sensuality as the fusion of sensing and expressing pleasure. And what better way to embody this than in sensual dance?
Through it we can feel both external influences (e.g. music or another person’s body) and internal ones by focusing on khinesthetic pleasure, the pleasure that arises from the perception of our moving body; and we can express and communicate this through movement – again both with the inside (my body) and with the outside, thus enhancing the experience through feedback.
The saint and the whore
Now, unfortunately, it gets even more complex: sensuality naturally also has a sexual component. And in Western society, sexuality is also subject to the same dualistic division and is therefore seen as a “lower drive”, inherently incompatible with spirituality and the “higher senses”.
And even if the taboo around sexuality is supposedly loosening these days, it still manifests itself particularly in relation to women in the form of a deeply rooted double standard, namely the Madonna-whore complex: from this distorted perspective, a woman is either an intelligent, chaste and “respectable” woman, or a lascivious, erotic, “cheap” whore – she cannot be both at the same time.
And although some of us may have already overcome this belief on an individual level, it is still firmly anchored in the depths of the collective unconscious.
Feminism and emancipation
To this cultural imprint, which hinders the integration and freedom of our sexuality (e.g. through sensual dancing) especially for women, another one is added…
While feminism in general is indisputably fundamental to the recovery of our divided and sick (patriarchal) society (Eisler, 1980), it also contains currents that are not conducive to the emancipation of women from a sexological and holistic perspective. I am referring to a feminist perspective which – in contrast to other equally feminist viewpoints – understands sensual dance as pure self-objectification of women and a practice that serves only the male gaze. From this perspective, sensual dance thus represents an absolute perpetuation of the oppression of women (Gill, 2007).
And this is certainly partly true, because we live in a society in which women have been conditioned to define themselves and their worth through their appearance and desirability.
But what about the other part? The part where the woman herself experiences pleasure through sensual dancing? This is completely excluded in such an absolute (black and white) distribution. Quite apart from the fact that from a sexological perspective, being able to eroticize oneself, which includes perceiving oneself as a sexually desirable object for the other person, is a fundamental part of sexual self-confidence – regardless of gender (sexocorporel…).
“Cheap” AND empowered
From this perspective, such an absolute and judgmental position within feminism takes on a similar structure to the one it seeks to combat: a dualistic one. To put it bluntly, the only difference to the Madonna-whore complex is that the adjectives “respectable” and “cheap” are replaced with “empowered” and “self-objectifying”.
Viewed holistically, however, we are not black and white. Many norms, desires, aspirations, wishes, imprints, feelings, conditionings and needs coexist within us at the same time.
This is not to say that we do not need to critically question and work on our harmful imprints (e.g. that of women defining themselves and their value through their appearance and desirability and instrumentalizing sensual dance for this).
Quite the opposite.
I believe that it is fundamental for both our individual and collective social health (perhaps even for the survival of our species) that we address the driving forces that underlie them.
The way out
However, I propose a different way forward: Instead of fighting against something (e.g. patriarchy) through dualistic condemnation, we should fight for something (e.g. women’s empowerment) through integration.
In other words, it makes more sense to integrate the different facets as part of a multi-layered whole instead of condemning an overall picture on the basis of individual negatively evaluated aspects and thereby also rejecting the potential resources. In this way, access to the positive aspects is not denied and the “negative” influences can become milder and heal through acceptance.
The dancing woman
Applied to the example of the sensual dancing woman, this means that we loosen the moral corset (either “honorable” or “empowered” or “cheap” or “self-objectifying”) and allow her to strengthen her embodied perception of the entire fullness and depth of what is alive at the moment and thus gain access to the vastly underestimated resource of pleasure.
The American feminist Audre Lorde also refers to this resource in her essay “The Uses of the Erotic – The Erotic as Power” (1984) and describes it as the ability to experience the “fullness of […] depth of feeling” (Lorde 1984, p. 88), which leads to deep satisfaction, fulfillment and joie de vivre.
In her essay, she also explains how patriarchy – like any other form of oppression – maintains its own position of power by suppressing those sources of power and potential change within the culture of the oppressed – in this context, the resource of eroticism and sensuality:
“In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives” (Lorde, 1984, p. 88).
From duality to integration
And perhaps it will take us a long time, or perhaps we will never manage to get rid of all destructive social conditioning. But perhaps we can learn to live with them along the way, while at the same time fighting for more genuine equality with the help of the resource of pleasure or sensuality or eroticism – for example in the form of sensual dance and khinestetic pleasure.
In this way, we embody the overcoming of dualistic conditioning with our being.
With this embodied activism, which begins at the most intimate level and spreads like wildfire through limbic resonance, we can contribute from within to a world with more balance and wholeness.
– In this sense, I think it makes sense to dance sensually.
Sources
Desilets, Saida (o. D.). Three Keys to living a daring life. https://dareyourdesire.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Daring-Guidebook.pdf
Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Post-feminism media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies 10(2), 147–166. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1367549407075898
Grear, A. (2011). The vulnerable living order: human rights and the environment in a critical and philosophical perspective. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2(1), 23-44. https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2011.01.02
Lorde, A. (1984). The Uses of the Erotic – The Erotic as Power. In Lovaas, K. E., & Jenkins, M. M. (Eds.). (2007). Sexualities and communication in everyday life: A reader (pp. 87-91). Sage.
Wilde, M. H. (2003). Embodied knowledge in chronic illness and injury. Nursing inquiry, 10(3), 170-176. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00178.x
