Pleasure as Liberation

Y'all know life beats you down sometimes. You know the people, places, and things that you lean on to get you through. Your crew. Your girls. Your chosen family. Host Nubia Bennet shares the mic on this inaugural episode with two of her best friends, Minda Honey and Shauntrice Martin. Minda says you can't have pleasure without agency: "I think for women, particularly Black women, trans women, women who are marginalized in general, as we take more agency over our lives in general, it only makes sense that we would also take more agency when it comes to pleasure." Shauntrice talks about how social stereotypes have affected her relationships, delaying her journey toward pleasure. “As Black women, we’re taught you have to fit in this box or you’re too ghetto,” she says. "And so like, for a really long time, until my 30s, pleasure was just not even on the table." In this episode, we center the joy, pleasure and importance of close friendships between Black women. The conversation came at a particularly poignant time for Nubia herself, reflecting on the loss of someone in her own life who modeled the value of close friendships with women. "It just touched me deeply thinking about how much the practice of good, good, deep friendship contributes to joy, and how much your friends actually really mean."