Pleasure

Power was easy. I want to begin there, because it is the most useful thing I learned this season, and I did not learn it gracefully.

When I built the first issue of this magazine, the work moved. I wrote the letter in an afternoon. I sent the invitations and the pieces came back — on time, fully formed, from people with real lives and real demands on them. A dancer wrote about returning to the stage at fifty-seven. A chef wrote about Washington Heights. A theater director wrote the truest thing I have read about what resilience costs. Nobody had to be chased. The issue assembled itself with the quiet efficiency of something the culture already knows how to want.

Then I said the word pleasure, and everything stopped.

Deadlines passed. Photographs took weeks. Writers who had turned in Power without a second thought went silent, or apologized, or sent me something that was clearly about something else. I found myself pulling this issue into the world by force — which is, I want you to appreciate, the least pleasurable way to make anything about pleasure. For a while I thought this was a failure of planning. Mine, or theirs.

It was not. It was the finding.

Power lives in the masculine. Pleasure lives in the feminine. And we are all so much more fluent in the first.

I say masculine and feminine and I do not mean men and women. I mean two grammars of being. One moves outward — it takes position, it acquires, it exerts, it is legible as seriousness. We have all been trained in it since we were girls, because it was the only dialect the room accepted. We know how to talk about power because we have spent our lives negotiating for it.

The other grammar is receptive. It opens. It allows. It says: I will let this in, I will let this be good, I will not immediately convert this gift into productivity to justify having received it. And that one — that one we barely speak at all. Ask a woman who has done the work, built the life, survived the thing, what she wants, and watch her hesitate. Not because she doesn't know. Because to say it out loud is to admit she is allowed to want it.

So of course the issue was hard. I was asking people to write in their second language.

What came back, once it came, was extraordinary — and almost all of it arrived by the same road. Every single contributor, without conferring, went through the wound to get to the joy.

Dejah Gomez writes that she could not know the depth of pleasure she knows now without first having known profound pain, and that pleasure is therefore not the reward for healing but the evidence that healing has begun. Chanel Rose writes about four years living out of a suitcase, and what she was actually looking for when she thought she was looking for an outfit. Darrylnn Thomas writes about an ordinary Tuesday in New Orleans that turned out to be the beginning of one of the great loves of her life, and how she'd whisper only two words to her younger self at that table: pay attention.

None of them wrote about indulgence. Not one. What they wrote about was the specific, hard-won capacity to receive — which is only ever built by people who have been through something that closed them.

There is a version of my body I can locate in old photographs — the shoulders slightly raised, the neck drawn down into the collarbone, taking up marginally less room than I was entitled to. I did not feel myself doing it. A photographer had to tell me. I have since seen the same posture in my aunts, in women I admire, in women running institutions. We call it composure. It is fear, and it has been living in our bodies so long that we mistook it for our shape.

Pleasure asks that body to open, and the body — being loyal, being a good and faithful guard — says no. That is the whole difficulty. Not laziness, not indulgence, not frivolity. Fear, doing its job.

Which means that a woman who lets herself have this — the long meal, the colour she loves, the touch she wants, the afternoon that produces nothing — is not being self-indulgent. She is doing the harder thing. She is overriding a survival mechanism that has kept her safe and small for a very long time.

That is not indulgence. That is insurgency.

Issue 02 arrives on the summer solstice — the longest day, the most light we are given all year. It seemed the only honest date for it. The light does not last. That is not an argument for hurrying. It is an argument for being here while it is here.

So take the long way through this issue. Read it slowly. Notice what your body does when someone tells you that you are allowed.