Life & Wisdom Quote by Audre Lorde

Lorde refuses the neat little boxes language tries to trap desire in. The opening, "I can't really define it", isn’t coyness; it’s a deliberate jailbreak from a culture that wants women, especially Black women, to explain themselves in categories that can be policed. The phrase "in sexual terms alone" is the pivot: she’s not disowning sex, she’s rejecting sex as the only admissible register for talking about pleasure, power, and connection. In Lorde’s hands, the erotic is bigger than bedroom choreography. It’s a source of knowledge, creative force, and self-possession.

The sly brilliance is in the double move: she expands the erotic beyond sex, then immediately refuses puritanism with "although our sexuality is so energizing". That "although" anticipates the predictable backlash - the idea that any praise of sexuality is indulgent, unserious, or politically suspect. Lorde cuts it off. Pleasure doesn’t need to be justified by productivity or respectability. It can be both energizing and worth enjoying on its own terms.

Context matters: Lorde wrote and spoke in an era when Black feminist and lesbian voices were routinely flattened - hypersexualized by racist myth, erased by mainstream feminism, and sanitized by political movements anxious about optics. The line reads like a manifesto against that squeeze. The subtext: stop treating women’s desire as either a threat or a marketing category. Treat it as a legitimate, generative power - and don’t apologize for taking joy in it.