I've been thinking about the importance of pleasure.
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I've been thinking about the importance of pleasure and the curse of the pleasure police.
Sigmund Freud is cited (probably inaccurately) as the originator of the phrase, If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother, so I’ll follow his lead and credit my mother for my life-long devotion to pleasure.
In the mid-1950s, when our working-class family of seven was chronically short of cash, she came home from her temp job as a secretary one Friday with a new pair of shiny brown alligator shoes because, as she insisted, she liked them and therefore deserved them. Two Fridays later, she arrived with a purse that matched the shoes, and with the same explanation. As our circumstances improved so did her consumption of pleasure: she liked good Scotch, over-poured; on Friday evenings she laid out poached salmon and good wines for our entire clan; and she leaned into each week’s conversations with us and our children as if we’d just returned from a long foreign adventure.
My mother and father in the 1940s.
From the day I was born until the day she died at 84, she treated me as if the sun rose each morning when I opened my eyes. I got my height and my ample hips from her, my emotional intensity, my eagerness to express and defend my position, however credible or incredible. And she taught me to love pleasure. As a teenager, I’d market with her, and when we returned home she’d bake me a peach pie with graham cracker crust and a layer of whipped cream, bring it into the living room where I was lazing away a Saturday afternoon, hand me the pie and a fork and instruct me not to tell my four younger siblings because the pie was all for me.
I am her rightful heir as a connoisseur of pleasure. Food, wine, the feel of skin on skin; kissable friends, ecstatic faith, loud laughter; contentious conversations about politics, religion and sex (the three topics we’re not supposed to talk about in proper company, yet the three most interesting subjects in the world). I take pleasure in ample amounts whenever, wherever, however I find it.
Still, the pleasure police lurk.
We recently spent a luscious evening of food and wine with a couple we’re very close with. Caesar salad, linguini with shrimp, roasted chicken breast, and through the evening at least four bottles of wine, two red and two white. They stayed long into the evening, each of us delighting in the pleasures of the meal, the company, and the intimate conversation, all of which Covid had robbed us of for more than a year.
Later, lying in bed after cleaning up the kitchen, Becky read to me from her current copy of Prevention magazine, a health resource that seems aimed, as most health and fitness resources do, at preventing pleasure. The article said that eating one hot dog will take 36 minutes off my life. Which must have meant that at dinner, I had sacrificed days or more of my life to the rich meal, the wine, and the cheese cake we had for dessert.
Rombauer Chardonnay.
Frankly, I’d rather take my cues from Jesus of Nazareth, whom his morally rigid opponents accused of being a glutton and a wine-bibber, a friend of sinners and the irreligious. (Whatever your faith or non-faith, don’t you just love this about him?) I don’t want some prude counting my drinks or my calories, even if they consider me a glutton and a wine-bibber (and also, I hope, a friend of sinners and the irreligious).
But all this about pleasure concerns more than wine and food.
Extensive research confirms what our instincts tell us: with newborns, you can feed and change them and coo to them, but if you don’t touch them they will die. So we press them to our chests – heartbeat to heartbeat – and rub their backs to put them to sleep (sometimes right beside us), and hug them until that age when they either say or imply, strongly, Don’t touch me. So we stop touching our adolescents and start worrying that someone else might be: say, their puppy-love friend, or a stranger at a party, or – God forbid – a predatory older person.
That’s when our country’s early colonizing settlers, who first brought us their judgmental God and their Puritan suspicions about touch and sex, speak again through our parental concerns and infect our children’s pleasure with the same fear that haunts us. So we teach them what we have learned: that distance, physical and emotional, makes us safer.
Sadly, too many of us live at this distance from one another for the remainder of our lives. Certainly Covid hasn’t helped. It has imposed distance on our relationships in ways antithetical to our nature; we are creatures who crave face to face contact and the solace of human touch. Like most of you, we spent the better part of a year never touching our children or grandchildren, never hugging and kissing our friends, because pre-vaccine touch was potentially lethal.
But it’s more than Covid.
Once they are naked in the Garden together, the ancient tale tells us that Adam knew Eve, and she became the mother of Cain and Abel. Adam knew Eve: that’s what touch does. From holding hands to making love, from sensual delight to passion that sets your hair on fire, touch allows us to know one another in ways that no other experience of relating can match.
I can feel myself getting edgy now as I write to you about touching one another. The mere mention of it mobilizes the pleasure police. For millennia, we’ve been persuaded that our bodies are danger zones and not the sacred and life-bearing playgrounds for which they were created, as if that view of sensual pleasure as shameful and dangerous, which lingers still from those Pilgrims, makes us nervous about these conversations: perhaps there is indeed something dark and sinister in our sensuality that we don’t understand and dare not celebrate.
[As an aside, I wonder if our culture’s pornography and sensual advertising and crude comedy, all of which distort and commercialize sex, have their origins in this cultural repression about the natural pleasures of sex. If you insist that sex is a dark and sinister force in us, it will leak into our culture in these dark and sinister ways.]
But there’s more to say. Decades ago, people I love paid an awful price for my pleasurable indiscretions. So it is not solely in my surroundings that the pleasure police lurk; there’s a major cohort of them huddled in my own conscience, scrutinizing me for the slightest urge toward sexual contact.
For me, and I’d guess for most of you, this chronic policing of pleasure is rooted in our distrust of our bodies. We’re filled with natural appetites, any one of which, but especially our need for touch, might ignite our own destruction. Our internal and external policing of the pleasures of food and drink are mild tremors compared to the way the earth shakes when we talk about the pleasures of touching one another.
One of my great surprises over five decades as a counsellor is how little is said, even in the most intimate relationships, about how each of us views our body, and what we enjoy and don’t enjoy in touching. As Genesis reminds us, these pleasurable intimacies are an important way in which we come to know both our partners and ourselves. We need more touch than the pleasure police would ever allow.
Pleasure is complicated, and we need more and more practice at it. In the meantime, we should find whatever pleasure we can and celebrate these moments.