{ "article": { "title" : "Pleasure through Pressure is not Liberation", "author" : "Vanessa Cuccia", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/pleasure-through-pressure-not-liberation", "date" : "2025-03-21 16:25:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/6E1A4430-4.jpg", "excerpt" : "Pleasure used to be taboo. Now it’s an expectation. Neither brings us freedom.", "content" : "Pleasure used to be taboo. Now it’s an expectation. Neither brings us freedom.I developed Chakrubs, the original crystal sex toy company, in 2012. At that time, the conversations around sexuality were different. Being new to the adult scene was scary. At my first tradeshow with my products, I remember seeing banners with tongue-in-cheek mottos like, “The sexiest show on earth!” paired with exaggerated, almost cartoonish imagery - a glossy- lipped model suggestively biting her finger, eyes wide with faux innocence. Sexuality was still seen as taboo, and in spaces like this, the only way to package it for public consumption was through a kind of performative, winking absurdity.The popularity of my booth, though, proved to me that my inkling that there was a deeper conversation to be had was right. There was a quiet, unconscious need to deepen our reverence for our erotic selves and to understand what held us back from taking pleasure in, well, pleasure.What was missing from the conversation about sex was energy. Intention. An acknowledgment of the deep pains we repress and the vulnerability of wanting to feel good. When I started Chakrubs, it was partly because I felt like I wasn’t just looking for quick orgasms that other toys on the market promoted. I was longing for a way to reclaim a connection to myself that had been lost or ignored from years of the mishandling of my sexuality.Chakrubs took off. And I think it’s because I wasn’t alone in this underlying feeling. Chakrubs found a way to remove shame not only from self-pleasure but from sharing about sexual trauma. After the Me Too movement gained momentum, these conversations about sexual trauma went into hyperdrive in the mainstream. There became a cultural urgency to understand what it meant to feel safe in our bodies, to heal, and to redefine pleasure on our own terms. But in just a few years, the conversation changed again. Pleasure was no longer whispered about - it was everywhere, celebrated, promoted. And then, I started to feel something new. Pleasure was no longer just accepted. It was expected.In trying to remove shame from pleasure, we’ve added shame to not feeling enough sexual pleasure. The irony is that this pressure often presents itself as empowerment. But what kind of empowerment tells us we’re still not enough? And if you’re not fully sexually expressed, you must still be repressed. We’ve moved from shaming pleasure to pressuring it. But isn’t the whole point of pleasure to relieve pressure? To offer freedom rather than another expectation to meet?I felt this shift personally. I was invited to speak on panels about sexuality, feeling like it was assumed I woke myself up every morning with an orgasm (as promoted by many sexual wellness advocates in this space). The assumption was that to be sexually liberated meant to be sexually very active, open to every new expression of sexuality – that if I was going to keep up the image of being the founder of Chakrubs, I had to embody the fantasy of someone who had it all figured out. Naked. Kundalini awakened. A goddess, glowing and all-knowing.Pleasure comes from being awake to how I feel. Sexuality is nuanced and complex - it unfolds, blooms, and shrivels up again. This is what makes it fascinating enough to be a lifelong study for me. I’ve realized that even discomfort, uncertainty, and restraint are part of that unfolding. All my feelings are gifts. The feeling that comes from my unfurling connection to sex isn’t about reaching some perfect state - it’s about staying present with the experience, however it reveals itself to me.The opposite of disassociation isn’t stimulation. It’s presence. Somewhere along the way, the conversation shifted from liberating sexuality to almost demanding it. And in that shift, we have created a new kind of disconnection.Pleasure is not another thing to achieve. It is not another way to prove your worth. It is something to experience in a way that is true to you – not in the way that is expected of you. By taking intentional time to be with myself in the intimate moments that Chakrubs encourages, I have learned to surrender to life, to trust that moments of ecstasy and love will find me. I don’t need to force it. I don’t need to perform it. Sometimes, liberation looks like accepting that we still have certain ‘hang-ups.’ I can be free even while working through them.That, to me, is freedom.Photo by Jaimie Sanchez-Skriba @jaimiecskr" } , "relatedposts": [ { "title" : "Black Liberation Views on Palestine", "author" : "EIP Editors", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/black-liberation-on-palestine", "date" : "2025-10-17 09:01:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/mandela-keffiyeh.jpg", "excerpt" : "", "content" : "In understanding global politics, it is important to look at Black liberation struggles as one important source of moral perspective. So, when looking at Palestine, we look to Black leaders to see how they perceived the Palestinian struggle in relation to theirs, from the 1960’s to today.Why must we understand where the injustice lies? Because, as Desmond Tutu famously said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”{% for person in site.data.quotes-black-liberation-palestine %}{{ person.name }}{% for quote in person.quotes %}“{{ quote.text }}”{% if quote.source %}— {{ quote.source }}{% endif %}{% endfor %}{% endfor %}" } , { "title" : "First Anniversary Celebration of EIP", "author" : "EIP Editors", "category" : "events", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/1st-anniversary-of-eip", "date" : "2025-10-14 18:01:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/WSA_EIP_Launch_Cover.jpg", "excerpt" : "Celebrating One Year of Independent Publishing", "content" : "Celebrating One Year of Independent PublishingJoin Everything is Political on November 21st for the launch of our End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine.This members-only evening will feature a benefit dinner, cocktails, and live performances in celebration of a year of independent media, critical voices, and collective resistance.The EventNovember 21, 2025, 7-11pmLower Manhattan, New YorkLaunching our End-of-Year Special Edition MagazineSpecial appearances and performancesFood & Drink includedTickets are extremely limited, reserve yours now!Become an annual print member: get x back issues of EIP, receive the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine, and come to the Anniversary Celebration.$470Already a member? Sign in to get your special offer. Buy Ticket $150 Just $50 ! and get the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine Buy ticket $150 and get the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine " } , { "title" : "Miu Miu Transforms the Apron From Trad Wife to Boss Lady: The sexiest thing in Paris was a work garment", "author" : "Khaoula Ghanem", "category" : "", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/miu-miu-transforms-the-apron-from-trad-wife-to-boss-lady", "date" : "2025-10-14 13:05:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Cover_EIP_MiuMiu_Apron.jpg", "excerpt" : "Miuccia Prada has a habit of taking the least “fashion” thing in the room and making it the argument. For Spring 2026 at Miu Miu, the argument is the apron; staged not as a coy retro flourish but as a total system. The show’s mise-en-scène read like a canteen or factory floor with melamine-like tables, rationalist severity, a whiff of cleaning fluid. In other words, a runway designed to force a conversation about labor before any sparkle could distract us.", "content" : "Miuccia Prada has a habit of taking the least “fashion” thing in the room and making it the argument. For Spring 2026 at Miu Miu, the argument is the apron; staged not as a coy retro flourish but as a total system. The show’s mise-en-scène read like a canteen or factory floor with melamine-like tables, rationalist severity, a whiff of cleaning fluid. In other words, a runway designed to force a conversation about labor before any sparkle could distract us.From the opening look—German actress Sandra Hüller in a utilitarian deep-blue apron layered over a barn jacket and neat blue shirting—the thesis was loud: the “cover” becomes the thing itself. As silhouettes marched on, aprons multiplied and mutated—industrial drill cotton with front pockets, raw canvas, taffeta and cloqué silk, lace-edged versions that flirted with lingerie, even black leather and crystal-studded incarnations that reframed function as ornament. What the apron traditionally shields (clothes, bodies, “the good dress”) was inverted; the protection became the prized surface. Prada herself spelled it out: “The apron is my favorite piece of clothing… it symbolizes women, from factories through to serving to the home.”Miu Miu Spring 2026 Ready-to-Wear. SuppliedThis inversion matters historically. The apron’s earliest fashion-adjacent life was industrial. It served as a barrier against grease, heat, stain. It was a token of paid and unpaid care. Miu Miu tapped that lineage directly (canvas, work belts, D-ring hardware), then sliced it against domestic codes (florals, ruffles, crochet), and finally pushed into nightlife with bejeweled and leather bibs. The garment’s migration across materials made its social migrations visible. It is a kitchen apron, yes, but also one for labs, hospitals, and factories; the set and styling insisted on that plurality.What makes the apron such a loaded emblem is not just what it covers, but what it reveals about who has always been working. Before industrialization formalized labor into factory shifts and wages, women were already performing invisible labour, the kind that doesn’t exist on payrolls but sits at the foundation of every functioning society. They were cooking, cleaning, raising children, nursing the ill. These tasks were foundational to every economy and yet absent from every ledger. Even when women entered the industrial workforce, from textile plants to wartime assembly lines, their domestic responsibilities did not disappear, they doubled. In that context, the apron here is a quiet manifesto for the strength that goes unrecorded, unthanked, and yet keeps civilization running.The algorithmic rise of the “tradwife,” the influencer economy that packages domesticity as soft power, is the contemporary cultural shadow here. Miu Miu’s apron refuses that rehearsal. In fact, it’s intentionally awkward—oversized, undone, worn over bikinis or with sturdy shoes—so the viewer can’t flatten it into Pinterest-ready nostalgia. Critics noted the collection as a reclamation, a rebuttal to the flattening forces of the feed: the apron as a uniform for endurance rather than submission. The show notes framed it simply as “a consideration of the work of women,” a reminder that the invisible economies of effort—paid, unpaid, emotional—still structure daily life.If that sounds unusually explicit for a luxury runway, consider the designer. Prada trained as a mime at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, earned a PhD in political science, joined the Italian Communist Party, and was active in the women’s rights movement in 1970s Milan. Those facts are not trivia; they are the grammar of her clothes. Decades of “ugly chic” were, essentially, a slow campaign against easy consumption and default beauty. In 2026, the apron becomes the newest dialect. An emblem drawn from leftist feminist history, recoded into a product that still has to sell. That tension—belief versus business—is the Miuccia paradox, and it’s precisely why these aprons read as statements, not trends.The runway narrative traced a journey from function to fetish. Early looks were squarely utilitarian—thick cottons, pocketed bibs—before migrating toward fragility and sparkle. Lace aprons laid transparently over swimmers; crystal-studded aprons slipped across cocktail territory; leather apron-dresses stiffened posture into armor. The sequencing proposed the same silhouette can encode labor, intimacy, and spectacle depending on fabrication. If most brands smuggle “workwear” in as set dressing, Miu Miu forced it onto the body as the central garment and an unmissable reminder that the feminine is often asked to be both shield and display at once.It’s instructive to read this collection against the house’s last mega-viral object: the micro-mini of Spring 2022, a pleated, raw-hem wafer that colonized timelines and magazine covers. That skirt’s thesis was exposure—hip bones and hemlines as post-lockdown spectacle, Y2K nostalgia framed as liberation-lite. The apron, ironically, covers. Where the micro-mini trafficked in the optics of freedom (and the speed of virality), the apron asks about the conditions that make freedom possible: who launders, who cooks, who cares? To move from “look at me” to “who is working here?” is a pivot from optics to ethics, without abandoning desire. (The aprons are, after all, deeply covetable.) In a platform economy that still rewards the shortest hemline with the biggest click-through, this is a sophisticated counter-program.Yet the designer is not romanticizing toil. There’s wit in the ruffles and perversity in the crystals; neither negate labor, they metabolize it. The most striking image is the apron treated as couture-adjacent. Traditionally, an apron protects the precious thing beneath; here, the apron is the precious thing. You could call that hypocrisy—luxurizing the uniform of workers. Or, strategy, insisting that the symbols of care and effort deserve visibility and investment.Of course, none of this exists in a vacuum. The “tradwife” script thrives because it is aesthetically legible and commercially scalable. It packages gender ideology as moodboard. Miu Miu counters with garments whose legibility flickers. The collection’s best looks ask viewers to reconcile tenderness with toughness, convenience with care, which is exactly the mental choreography demanded of women in every context from office to home to online.If you wanted a season-defining “It” item, you’ll still find it. The apron is poised to proliferate across fast-fashion and luxury alike. But the deeper success is structural: Miu Miu re-centered labor as an aesthetic category. That’s rarer than a viral skirt. It’s a reminder that clothes don’t merely decorate life, they describe and negotiate it. In making the apron the subject rather than the prop, Prada turned a garment of service into a platform for agency. It’s precisely the kind of cultural recursion you’d expect from a designer shaped by feminist politics, who never stopped treating fashion as an instrument of thought as much as style.The last image to hold onto is deceptively simple: a woman in an apron, neither fetishized nor infantilized, striding, hands free. Not a costume for nostalgia, not a meme for the feed, but a working uniform reframed, respected, and suddenly, undeniably beautiful. That is Miu Miu’s provocation for Spring 2026: the work behind the work, made visible at last." } ] }