Desire Is Resistance
The erotic, in its true form, is not soothing. It is subversive and in a world that rewards your submission, wanting is a revolutionary act.
The erotic has been domesticated, stripped of its danger, diluted into aesthetics, and sold back to us as self-care. We are told to awaken our “feminine energy,” to explore our “divine sensuality,” to reclaim pleasure through jade eggs, moonlit rituals, and softly lit mirrors. But make no mistake: this is not liberation. This is choreography.
What’s being sold as empowerment is often just a more seductive form of control. It’s not erotic reclamation. It’s erotic regulation wrapped in velvet, but still a cage.
Because the erotic, in its true form, is not soothing. It is subversive.
It does not aim to make you likable. It does not help you transcend your body. It is the part of you that remembers. The part that pulses before permission is granted. The part that interrupts performance with presence.
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As a somatic psychologist and certified sex therapist, I see what happens when this wildness is missing. I see women who have done everything “right”: the therapy, the books, the breathwork, the meditation retreats—women who can name every trauma, repeat all their triggers, and track the sensations inside their skin. Women who are fluent in knowing how to create safety inside themselves, but have no idea how to identify their longings.
It’s more common than we name. I remember one female client, let’s call her M., who said to me during a quiet moment in session, “I know how to stay regulated. But I don’t know how to stay present when I want something.” She could track her triggers with precision. She knew how to ground, how to soothe. But the moment pleasure stirred…subtle, tentative, her body went blank. “I don’t freeze,” she said. “I disappear.”
That wasn’t disconnection. It was discipline.
A highly intelligent form of dissociation. One that doesn’t look like collapse or chaos, but composure. The kind of discipline that gets wired into the body over years of learning that wanting too much, feeling too much, being too much all comes with consequences.
Because to be erotic in a world that trains women to perform care, compliance, and composure is to risk being punished. Or worse—ignored.nd composure is to risk being punished. Or worse, ignored. So the body adapts. It buries its instincts. It survives by silencing its own hunger. And eventually, the absence feels normal. Even safe.
As a clinician, I see it in the smallest moments. The flinch when a breath drops too far into the belly. The pause before speaking something that the mind says is “too much to share”. The way a client’s gaze breaks not because she doubts her truth, but because she is afraid that it might be doubted by someone else. These aren’t signs of ambivalence. They’re signs of a system that has learned to stay safe by staying small.
Especially when what rises is erotic.
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The uncomfortable truth is that much of what gets called healing is simply a more socially acceptable form of self-containment. It looks regulated, but it’s rehearsed. The body appears calm, but only because it’s been trained to suppress what might disrupt connection. The nervous system isn’t at ease; it’s obeying. And when healing becomes more about control rather than capacity. When this happens, what women are left with isn’t freedom. Its performance.
I see this often in women who appear outwardly connected to their sensuality, who speak the language of embodiment fluently, who lead others toward empowerment, who know exactly how desire is supposed to sound. But beneath the surface, something feels absent. The erotic is performative, not felt. Longing is curated, not lived.
Wanting only arises when someone else is watching. Without the gaze, there is nothing. This is not a failure of healing. It’s the cost of being trained to please.
Because erotic aliveness cannot be reclaimed through aesthetics or appearances. It must be risked. Felt. Lived through the body not as choreography, but as capacity. Not as a set of practices to perfect, but as a state we learn to stay with even when it is messy, sticky, icky and uncomfortable. Because what we’re talking about isn’t just sensuality, it’s physiology. And what disrupts eroticism is not a lack of effort, but a lack of access.
From a polyvagal lens, this is about access not achievement. Desire arises only when the body is anchored in enough safety to tolerate sensation. That means not just naming trauma, but building the capacity to stay with what follows. But safety alone is not the whole story. In depth psychological terms, the erotic is not merely sexual it is archetypal. It carries the force of what has been buried, what lives in the unconscious, what resists domestication. It is the instinctual bridge between the known and the unknown. The part of psyche that refuses obedience. The part that remembers what is sacred and what is insufferable.
But when a woman’s erotic instinct has been repeatedly overridden by violence, by expectation, by culture, by intergenerational patterns, by spiritual bypass, it retreats. It doesn’t vanish. It waits. It freezes. It goes quiet until the body is ready to feel again.
Too often, though, we misinterpret that silence. We call it low libido. We call it resistance. We call it dysregulation. But in my clinical work, I’ve come to understand something else: what looks like numbness is often the body protecting the last spark of aliveness it has left. And the work isn’t to rush in and reawaken it it’s to create the conditions where it feels safe enough to rise all on its own because it will rise again.
This is the paradox I witness again and again: the erotic isn’t missing it’s waiting. Waiting beneath the composure, beneath the high-functioning, beneath the practiced calm. We praise women for their stability without asking what it costs them to maintain it. We assume presence when, in truth, they’ve become skilled at appearing okay.
I’ve worked with so many women who carry this lived experience. Women who say, often in the quiet, confessional space of therapy, “I don’t think I’ve ever had sex where I stayed inside myself.” There’s rarely a singular moment they can point to. No overt harm. Just a slow, quiet conditioning of years of saying yes without checking whether their body was saying yes, or whether they were even in their body at all. Over time, presence gave way to performance. Consent became cooperation. And what looked like empowerment on the outside was, more often, high-functioning management of something that never truly felt safe.
What strikes me most is not just the content of what they share but how many women share it. How often it echoes, in nearly the exact words, across ages, professions, and identities. These aren’t isolated experiences. They are patterns. They are culture showing up in the body.
This isn’t uncommon. These women are not exceptions, they are the norm. Their stories echo not because they are repeating each other, but because they are all responding to the same cultural wound. Because our systems, psychological, therapeutic, and educational, were never designed to support erotic aliveness.
Psychotherapy still treats sexuality as a sidebar, something to refer out, something too charged or too specialized to hold within the core of the work. Most somatic trainings focus on regulation, not risk. They teach containment, not capacity. They invite calm, but rarely touch the politics of desire and longing, or what it means for a woman’s body to want more than what the world tells her she’s allowed to have.
Because aliveness in its raw form is not rewarded, it is managed. And when a woman’s erotic power cannot be commodified, it becomes too easy to dismiss it as dysregulation or frame its absence as success.
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Feminism asks: Who benefits from your silence?
Somatic feminism asks: Who benefits when your body forgets how to want?
Because the erotic isn’t here to make you more functional. It’s not here to help you become a more productive worker, a more desirable partner, sexier at Burning Man, or more magnetic on Instagram. It’s not here to polish your edges or elevate your brand. It’s here to remind you that you are alive and that aliveness is rarely tidy. It comes with contradiction, with ache, with truths that refuse to stay quiet just because it would be more convenient if they did.
That is why the erotic is dangerous. Because it threatens what was never built for your wholeness. Because it cannot be commodified.
The return of eros does not always feel graceful. Sometimes it feels like trembling in the arms of someone safe for the first time. Sometimes it’s sobbing on the kitchen floor. Sometimes it’s the first breath that fills your belly after years of breathing shallow. Sometimes it’s rage. Sometimes it’s silence. Sometimes it’s a long-awaited no.
And sometimes it’s joy raw, cellular joy that arrives not because you’ve achieved healing, but because your body finally trusts that it no longer has to abandon itself to be loved. So when your body pulses with longing, or resistance, or grief, when it speaks in ways that feel too inconvenient to name, do not reach for a practice to quiet it. Do not rush to regulate. Listen.
Because the erotic does not want to be witnessed. It wants to be inhabited. And if you let it, it will bring you back not to a more perfected self, but to the one who has been here all along—the one who learned to quiet her hunger in order to belong. The one whose desire never disappeared only became quiet, careful, patient, not gone. Just waiting. Not for words. But for space. For breath. For the kind of presence that does not ask for performance.
Because what’s most dangerous about the erotic is not how loud it is but how clearly it knows what it wants.
And once you feel that knowing in your body, performance will never be an option again.
If it made you think, I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments.
I remember clearly the day that I decided to leave my job because it was the day that I realized that I had forgotten how to feel pleasure of any kind in my life/body. The cost of being the "heart" of my community was that I had to give up on having any energy to meet my desires, which soon became a felt sense of not even desiring anything. At the end, it felt like the fire within me was going to be snuffed out. So I left and slept, and slept, and slept. Then cried, and cried and cried. Then one day I began craving one of my favourite cultural foods, so I ate it. Then I wanted to hear a favourite song of mine from my 20's, so I listened to it. Then I wanted to go for a walk in the sunshine, so I did. And I haven't looked back since. These days I ask & listen to what my body wants and if I'm able to I give it to her, right then, right there, no questions asked. And any weird comments or stares I receive, I just shrug it off and will sometimes say "don't knock it until you try it" always with a smile on my face.
This is a beautiful piece of writing, reminds me of John O Donohue who writes that ‘Desire is so often diminished’ - I'm fascinated by desire…so..thank you!