Politics & Power Quote by Susie Bright

Bright frames political awakening less as a thunderclap than as a current you step into and then realize it is carrying you somewhere. "Got more and more politically active" is intentionally incremental, almost mundane, refusing the mythology of the lone radical who springs fully formed from pure ideology. The engine here is experience: the self doesn’t arrive at feminism and sexual liberation as abstract platforms; it follows them the way you follow a path that keeps widening under your feet.

The phrasing "followed the course" is doing quiet rhetorical work. It suggests feminism and sexual liberation aren’t boutique identities or personal brands, but movements with direction, history, and momentum. Bright, a key figure in sex-positive feminism and queer erotica, is also nodding to the way sexual politics in the late 20th century often functioned as an entry point to everything else: workplace power, censorship, bodily autonomy, public health, and who gets to speak without being punished for it. Activism, in that era, wasn’t always a picket line; it was publishing, organizing, and insisting that desire belonged in the same conversation as rights.

There’s subtextual defiance in how casually she links feminism with sexual liberation, a pairing that has repeatedly been contested from within feminist circles. Bright makes it sound inevitable, like the logical next chapter, which is exactly the point: she’s normalizing a lineage many critics tried to sever. The sentence is also a self-portrait of politics as appetite for freedom, not merely a duty - a reminder that movements grow when they promise pleasure and agency, not just moral seriousness.