Making space for pleasure and eroticism in your life can be downright revolutionary.

If you’re bracing for a rough 2025 ― and given the current political and economic climate (not to mention the actual climate), who isn’t? ― there’s one thing you might want to start prioritizing: Sex, and pleasure in all its various forms.

Take that long, luxuriant cat nap. Order the cheese fries. Go dancing for the first time since your 20s. Take up painting and make beautiful things, knowing that change happens with creation more than consumption.

And definitely have more sex — and actually love your body, rather than looking at it as a personal project in constant need of fixing.

These actions may seem small or only really beneficial to you, but in times of great uncertainty and political upheaval, self-indulgences like these can have an outsize impact on the world.

As writer and activist adrienne maree brown argues in her 2019 book, “Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good,” making space for pleasure and eroticism in your life can be downright revolutionary.

To make her case, brown pulls heavily on the essays of Audre Lorde, the late queer feminist who wrote that caring for ourselves in the midst of political turmoil is “not self-indulgence, [it’s] self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.”

We know that sex, or otherwise feeling more embodied, is a time-tested stress reliever. Touch, whether you’re touching your partner or touching yourself, releases feel-good hormones like endorphins, oxytocin, and dopamine that work to reduce anxiety and boost your mood.

But accessing your own pleasure reverberates outside yourself, too. As brown argues in her book, you won’t have the energy to push for change if all you do is work and worry.

The goal, she writes, is to “create more room for joy, wholeness and aliveness (and less room for oppression, repression, self-denial and necessary suffering).”That’s what’s going to sustain you through the next four years, not (just) stewing in your negative reaction to any foreseeable attacks on your community.

“By tapping into the........

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