The Human Shift: Part V — The Denial of Female Pleasure

How the World Tried to Erase the Most Sovereign Power of the Feminine

There is a kind of power that terrifies every system built on control.

A power that cannot be legislated, contained, domesticated, moralized, or shamed into silence.

A power that rises from the body like instinct, like knowing, like truth unfurling from the marrow.

Pleasure.

Not the performative, not the commodified, not the porn-scripted, not the pleasing of others, not the fragmented kind women are taught to offer.

But the ancient, internal, sovereign pleasure that once pulsed at the centre of the feminine sacred — the pleasure that made women ungovernable.

Because a woman in her pleasure does not betray herself.

A woman in her pleasure does not obey.

A woman rooted in her own desire cannot be controlled, and a system that depends on her smallness knows this.

It has always known this.

Before the split, before empire, before morality was weaponized against the body, pleasure was considered holy.

Pleasure was guidance.

Pleasure was intelligence.

Pleasure was a way of listening to the world.

It was how the feminine communed with the divine.

There were temples where women entered their pleasure as a form of prayer.

There were cultures where a woman’s ecstasy was understood as an opening in the veil between the seen and unseen.

There were lineages where pleasure was taught from mother to daughter the way others teach language — as something essential to life.

And then the sky changed.

The goddess was removed.

The sacred became rewritten through the lens of fear.

And the first thing patriarchal cultures did was not to control women’s bodies —

but to extinguish their pleasure.

Because pleasure is the seat of feminine sovereignty.

It tells a woman where she is meant to go, what she cannot tolerate, whose touch she refuses, what she desires, and what she will rise for.

Pleasure clarifies.

Pleasure awakens.

Pleasure animates the truth she carries in her bones.

A culture that fears feminine power must first teach women to fear pleasure.

So they told her her desire was dangerous.

They told her her longing was sinful.

They told her her erotic nature was shameful.

They told her her body was a trap.

They told her pleasure belonged to men.

They told her her pleasure didn’t matter.

They told her her pleasure was too much, too loud, too wild.

They told her wanting was wrong.

They told her hunger was unbecoming.

They told her autonomy was rebellion.

They told her that to be good, she must sever herself from the deepest well of her own knowing.

So she learned to leave her body.

Long before a woman is sexually active, she learns that touch may not be safe.

Long before she feels her first desire, she learns that desire has a cost.

Long before she enters adulthood, she knows — without being told — to shrink her radiance, protect her softness, hide her longing, and swallow her pleasure.

She learns that pleasure is not hers.

She learns to dissociate from her own sensation.

She learns to perform pleasure for others.

She learns to silence the pulse in her womb, the yes rising through her hips, the wisdom living in her breath.

She learns to live in halves — the woman the world will accept, and the woman she is when no one is watching.

And in this learned exile, her nervous system begins to mistake safety for numbness.

But the wound does not belong only to women.

The denial of female pleasure reshaped men too.

Men were taught to seek conquest over connection, performance over presence, release over intimacy.

Men were socialized into sexual scripts that taught them dominance where they longed for closeness, and fear where they longed for tenderness.

Men were conditioned to equate pleasure with ego rather than embodiment, and were never taught the language of attunement — not because they lacked the capacity, but because culture stole the education.

Men learned to fear what they could not control.

And nothing is less controllable than a woman in her pleasure.

In the absence of feminine sovereignty, men were left with distorted desire — desire without intimacy, arousal without emotion, longing without safety.

They longed for a feminine they simultaneously feared, because the world taught them to fear the feminine that cannot be owned.

From this wound comes the architecture of harm:

purity culture, slut-shaming, victim-blaming, violence, sexual repression, hypersexualization, the policing of women’s bodies, the fear of women in power, the discomfort with embodied leadership.

From this wound comes the crisis inside relationships:

men who want closeness but do not know how to access it,

women who want desire but do not know how to inhabit it,

couples who meet each other wearing masks their ancestors built to survive.

From this wound comes the internal collapse inside women:

the not-knowing-what-they-want,

the fear of taking up space,

the suspicion of pleasure,

the tightening in the throat,

the shrinking in the hips,

the inability to follow the soft voice inside that has always been their truest guide.

The denial of female pleasure is not a sexual wound.

It is a spiritual one.

It is a political one.

It is a collective one.

It is the wound that keeps women from themselves and keeps men from the feminine within them.

And yet — pleasure persists.

Pleasure remembers.

Pleasure waits beneath the shame, patient, alive, whispering softly through the body:

I am still here.

I have always been here.

Come home.

To reclaim pleasure is not indulgence.

It is reclamation.

To reclaim pleasure is not rebellion.

It is remembering.

To reclaim pleasure is not sin.

It is sovereignty.

To reclaim pleasure is not immorality.

It is returning to the truth that the world feared so much it tried to erase it.

A woman in her pleasure is a woman who cannot be controlled.

A woman in her pleasure is a woman who has come back into her power.

A woman in her pleasure is a woman who remembers she belongs to herself.

And she is the beginning of the world we are building next.

In Part VI, we enter the place this wound naturally leads —

the architecture of violence,

the ways a world that fears feminine sovereignty justifies harm,

and what it takes to unwind systems that have been built on the suppression of the feminine for thousands of years.

But for now, let this truth settle in your body:

Pleasure is not the enemy of the sacred.

Pleasure is the sacred —

the doorway through which the feminine remembers herself whole again.