A quote from Audre Lord’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (link goes to a PDF version). She did what Sylvia Path couldn’t: be a poet, rather than just write poetry. Audre died of cancer a while back and said “my silence didn’t save me and it won’t save you either.” Her thoughts on the erotic are important for feminism and society, I think.

A quote about the Erotic as power:

As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibility within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain a colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

I’ll keep this short but read the essay. It’s profound.