Good Sex as Food for the Revolution
A guest post by Dr. Candice Nicole Hargons
One of the best books of 2025 is coming out next week.
Dr. Candice Nicole Hargons’ Good Sex won’t just improve your sex life, it will show you how good sex can make the world a better place – for real. I loved this book.
Candice has generously written this guest post. Amelia and I will be back later this week with thoughts on what we’ve learned about Burnout since we wrote that book together. –Emily
You will not be able to control everything that happens politically in the next four years. You may not be able to control much, as billionaires enact their intersectionally oppressive, power hungry fantasies as governance.
You will see things: policies, practices, judicial and extrajudicial violence unfold and harm your community, state, the United States, and other parts of the world.
You will want to do something about it, because that is who you are. You don’t want to be the person who tells the next generation you looked away and did nothing. You aren’t built like that, and yet you have seen your previous efforts eradicated, challenged, punished, snuffed out. Maybe you are, like I am, weathered.
Where you can always practice, and where the practice is essential and evergreen – not disposable as we’ve seen corporations treat DEI initiatives, is in intimate relationships.
Now is the time for us to focus on intimate justice. Sexual liberation is one aspect of that.
I'm not saying social justice is out, and intimate justice is in, like an episode of Project Runway. Social justice will always be worthy of our efforts. Yet, some of us need a bit more grounding in our intimate lives before we exhaust ourselves with burnout from resistance efforts to systemic and structural intersectional oppression. Intimate justice is what you can handle right now.
According to Shatema Threadcraft, the intimate spaces in life, including sex, have been overlooked as sites of liberation. As a sex researcher and licensed psychologist who has been a therapist for people involved in externally focused liberation movements, I’ve too frequently worked with activists who are on the front lines exercising their right to protest, but scared to negotiate condom use or disclose a sexual fantasy at home.
What intimate justice looks like on any given day in your sexual life: the ability to speak with affirmation, care, honesty, a love ethic - shout out to bell hooks - with your intimate partners. The ability to resist all the social messages, I call them cultural recipes, you have been inundated with that suggest you aren’t inherently worthy of (not entitled to, that’s a different beast) what you desire. The courage to ask for the thing that pleases you. The care to invite, rather than demand, your partner to participate in a sexual experience. The emotional regulation to accept a no, not now, not this way. Intimate justice looks like reciprocity - not equality (you do me, so I do you), but erotic equity.
Good sex is such an awesome playground in this area. In my forthcoming book, Good Sex: Stories, Science, and Strategies for Sexual Liberation, I share how the ingredients for good sex, sexual seasonings if you will, should be available and accessible to all of us. We may not all want the same thing, but we are worthy of access. We get to use these ingredients to make our sexual menus good to and for everyone involved, as intentionally as a chef curated meal. In the world, heterosexism, ableism, classism, ageism, racism, etc. exist, but you can resist their imprint in your sex life. That’s intimate justice.
Good sex can be solo or partnered. Intimate justice in solo sex can be about your relationship with, or your connection to, you. It’s compassion toward your body and its ever-evolving features. It’s tenderness with your sexual traumas. It’s mindful masturbation for relaxation and stress reduction. It’s your opportunity to treat yourself to solo sexual liberation.
Now is the time for us to focus on the areas within our domain, where we have agency and autonomy, discretion, and right relationships. Now is the time to enjoy the health promoting, life nourishing benefits of a good sex life in the face of so much potential fear and pain. Because if you continue to struggle in your intimate life, you will likely have gaps that undercut your social justice and external liberation movement contributions.
We all benefit from the focus on intimate justice in 2025 and beyond, so that when we are intimately resourced and well, sexually and otherwise, we can extend our efforts toward the change making, transformation, and liberation our society and systems require.
— Dr. Candice Nicole Hargons
Hargons describes science, history, and cultural diversity I haven’t read about anywhere else! And she does it through the lens of sexual liberation, offering readers a multitude of paths to exploring what “good sex” means to them. This book is a celebration of every reader’s journey toward their truest, most satisfied sexual selves. But Good Sex won’t just improve your sex life, it will show you how good sex can make the world a better place - for real. –Emily Nagoski, author of NYT Best Selling Come as You Are, Burnout, and Come Together
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