From The COVID Archives.
When COVID first arrived I was living in Ontario and working as a worker/owner at Come As You Are. One of my roles at the co-op was writing newsletters for our readership. I recently stumbled upon this beautiful pleasure-full pep talk I wrote during those first uncertain weeks of the pandemic. My hope is to offer the same spirit to you, as someone who has made it this far into these unimaginable times - with an eye to pleasure, healing, and joy.
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As an online business, we’re fortunate enough to have the opportunity to continue to work during this Covid chapter, and while doing our work, we’ve noticed a shift in what you’re investing in. And through this shift, we have a confession: we have never been more in love with each and every one of you and your brilliant journeys than we have been over these last weeks.
This is because we see you investing in your curiosity. The number of times we receive orders for, like, a smorgasbord of lubricant sampler packs is unreal. The number of orders we’re receiving that are folks investing in educational books and DVDs (with maybe a length of rope or g-spot vibrator to supplement the learning) is exciting. The number of orders we’re receiving that include some of our less-mainstream gear - candles, floggers, speculums, e-stim toys, urethral sounds… so invigorating. The number of orders for copies of Pleasure Activism alone - beautiful.
Witnessing so many of you taking this challenging chapter and imagining how you want to harness it is inspiring. Witnessing so many of you making the choice to say ‘yes’ to pleasure is stunning. Witnessing your projects of expansion and healing and reclamation of your bodies breaks our hearts with so much damn love. Witnessing you as a community literally activating your bodies: inviting pleasure as a practice that transforms and transmutes.
This reminds us of the work of Joseph Kramer, Barbara Carrellas and others in the 90’s during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. That in the midst of a deeply dark and painful chapter, these brilliant queer activists turned to pleasure to heal. They turned to pleasure as a harm reductive strategy to minimize the impact of HIV/AIDS (which many of you are doing by opting to explore your own pleasure in your own spaces). And, they turned to pleasure because through pleasure we can come into relationship with our authentic power - that healing ourselves, building up our resiliency, integrity, and capacity through pleasure is powerful, and, well, pleasurable! Which, again, is echoed in what we’re witnessing is unfolding instinctively amongst so many of you.
Further, we’re deeply touched seeing how many of you are choosing to invest in your pleasure by also choosing to invest in DIY anti-capitalist / small-scale businesses. Seeing you spread your pleasure around - cultivating the multiplication and expansion of your pleasure by ensuring the survival and thriving of artists, visionaries, and tradespeople is nothing short of stunning.
As such, let’s team up and set an intention to collectively do what we can to take care of our grassroots infrastructure of makers and sex workers. We would like to donate 10% of the profits from the sale of *any* of our indie made goods to Maggie’s Covid fund - and we’ll match that donation. We will run this promotion until the end of April. This pandemic chapter is so dynamic and complex, it feels important to us to ensure that we can do whatever we can whenever we can to take care of our loves.
And, our loves are you: the folks that keep caring for us by writing us, investing in us, cheerleading us. Our loves are the makers that exist across the globe that labour tirelessly in unapologetic service to grassroots radical pleasure. And our loves are sex workers: folks doing hard and thankless work that have been disproportionately affected by this pandemic - and already disproportionately affected by the brutality of capitalism.
So, in closing, let’s remember that what we pay attention to grows. Wherever you are, whatever is alive and real for you during this unimaginable chapter, remember that your attention, your care - that is your power. May you find moments to pay attention to your self, your pleasure during this chapter where it is all too easy to forget that it is through darkness that we find our light.