There is a chapter early on in I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself that I suspect is going to be the make-or-break one for readers. Like, you are either going to love it, or you will tire of my thinking on the page and leave it.
In it, I’m sitting in my favorite parc in Paris, contemplating what enjoyment means for me: “How do I intend to to enjoy myself. What does enjoyment mean? What does it mean for me? Not just temporary enjoyment, like a massage. But as a thesis.”
To be clear, I will take the temporary enjoyment of a massage literally any day of the week. But what I’m struggling with there, and what I think women generally struggle with, is how do we define pleasure? And how do we access it?
I return again and again to this quote from Sarah Schulman, in a piece responding to the Dobbs decision: “Men have had almost exclusive control of how women are represented since forever, and today women creators and gatekeepers consciously or unconsciously replicate those distortions in order to stay in the game.”
This applies to pleasure too. We are largely conditioned to think of pleasure as something primarily connected to sex. Which, I certainly hope the sex you are having is pleasurable. And there is plenty of pleasurable sex in this book. But there is also so much more to how we enjoy ourselves, and I think it can be a challenge to articulate, in part because any pleasure we take outside of men either needs to be justified or is mocked. Silly or selfish.
In recents months there has been another rash of, more people should be married, articles. This time from progressive men. Nick Kristof did a whole column on it that, among other things, neglected to note the stats that say unmarried women with no kids are the happiest. When the women commenters pointed this out, his response was something along the lines of “I’m a romantic.” (Which I think speaks to the disservice so-called romance stories do to women.) The previous week Ezra Klein did an episode on plummeting birthrates. He was really puzzling over why birthrates are dropping even in places where comprehensive child care is available (hi, Sweden). The most telling moment, to me, was when he name-checked Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa as places with high birth rates as evidence of children as acts optimism but not, for instance, lack of birth control access, among other things, which his guest Jennifer Sciubba was, to my great relief, quick to point out.
It’s always notable to me that so often for men the solution to the very complicated problems plaguing the world is that women should marry more. Not that we might consider changing infrastructure or policy. But in addition to that, I always find myself wanting to holler at these pieces that maybe one of the reasons for these dropping rates is simply that women are leading more enjoyable lives. Like do you really think if you went back 75 years and told women they had the option not to have 10 children they might be like YES, THANK YOU.
And, to take us full circle, one of the reasons this is never considered is that we don’t have accurate language or narratives around women and pleasure. Any number of early readers of ENJOY have told me they find the food to be the true source of pleasure in my tale. Many say it’s the friendships. I often think it’s my bike. (Plus the friendships and the food). The point is. Pleasure is varied and doesn’t always, or even often, require nudity. But I’m not sure how often we see that represented out in the world. Also: We don’t take it seriously.
I’ve been reminded during the past few weeks of gearing up for the launch of ENJOY how much I enjoy being in conversation. Doing WILDER last year was such an overwhelming endeavor, I stepped away from podcasts for a bit. But I really do enjoy actually talking through all of this with other smart women. If there’s one thing we all came out of the pandemic with it’s the desire to enjoy things more.
To that end. I’m launching a series of conversations around pleasure. Big, small, guilty, out of reach. This is a work in progress, so we’ll see where it takes us. There’s a possibility it will eventually get moved to paid subscribers, or turn into a full blown podcast, or just become a regular Q&A feature. Or all of the above. The world is our very pleasurable oyster.
To kick it off, I asked my friend Jo Piazza to come have a quick convo with me about about what pleasure means for her and the challenges of having to say it out loud. And it is challenging…those pauses aren’t glitches! That said, this is my first time using the podcast feature, and hopefully it will get smoother as we go. Lastly, for those wondering, this is the backstory on the mouth tape.
Good Decisions: I did Ruthie Ackerman’s High Five newsletter this week.
I was also having a particularly good hair day so I attempted to make a insta vid about the book.
Introducing: Conversations on Pleasure