✨ This Week at The After Party — The Pleasure Principle

 Opening 🥂 Toast

Reporting from the edge of reinvention — it’s Robyn Cohen and this is The After Party.

To the women who have nothing left to prove. 
Who know that pleasure isn’t optional, it’s oxygen.

Maybe your power was taken before you even had language for it.
Maybe you’ve spent years believing that desire was something to be managed, not celebrated.
Maybe you still feel guilty for wanting things; love, sex, peace, pleasure, ambition —without needing to earn them.

I see you. Because I am you.

I started caretaking when I was ten.
Not babysitting. Caretaking.
My sister had a disability, and I took on the role of her second mom while still a child myself. Those years that should have been filled with friends, fun, and joy, were shaped instead by responsibility and emotional labor far beyond my age.

Then, at 15, when I finally started dating, the boy I was in love with took things too far.
There was no consent. Just force. And then absence.
He left me alone afterward, outside, under the stars.
I lay there staring at the sky, stunned, asking myself:
“What just happened?”

So between caretaking at home and the trauma of that moment, my girlhood, my freedom, felt like it had been taken. Pleasure didn’t feel like a right. It felt like something for other girls.

But then… I left home.
At 19, I moved to Montreal for university, and that was the beginning of everything changing.

For the first time, I wasn’t someone’s sister, or someone’s daughter, or someone’s obligation. I was just me. And I started making choices that cracked me open.

Yes, I partied. Yes, I did drugs.
But I also found:
Confidence.
Autonomy.
Power.
And intimacy that I got to define on my terms.

That was when I started living for joy, not survival.

I cut myself off from my parents not long after.
I started supporting myself.
And no, I didn’t chase some high-powered career. I worked to live, not the other way around. Because once I had a taste of freedom, I knew that what I wanted most was to enjoy life.

Then at 28, I met the love of my life.
And you know what?

I didn’t have to shrink.
I didn’t have to hide the wild parts or explain my choices.
I didn’t have to apologize for my past.
I could be fully myself, messy, sensual, complex, whole.

Twenty-four years later, I’m still with him.
Still in love.
Still me.
And still completely done with the idea that women have to earn their right to pleasure, joy, softness, or desire.

So this week, The After Party is a celebration, but also a reckoning.
A reckoning with every story that told us to wait our turn.
A reckoning with the shame we’ve been handed and told to carry.
A reckoning with silence, and the decision to finally speak.

Your pleasure isn’t a phase.
It’s not a mistake.
It’s not “too much.”

It’s your damn birthright.
And reclaiming it doesn’t make you reckless.
It makes you free.

You are not selfish for wanting more.
You are not broken if it’s taken you this long to believe you deserve it.
You are not behind.
You are blooming.

Right on time.

Truth 💣 Bomb

Let’s get one thing straight:
Desire isn’t the problem.
Silence is.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that wanting is dangerous. That appetite is shameful. That pleasure makes us irresponsible, or selfish, or weak.

But that belief? It’s a lie we inherited.
A system we internalized.
A story we didn’t write, but we’re still living inside it.

So here’s your wake-up call:
Your desire is not the threat, it’s the truth.

It tells you what you value. What you long for. What still lights you up.
It’s not shallow. It’s not indulgent.

And the moment you stop apologizing for it is the moment you start living on your own terms.

Want more, and don’t whisper when you say it.
That is not shameful. That is sovereign.

🔍 Ask Yourself

• Where have I made myself smaller in order to be loved or accepted?

• What messages about pleasure and desire did I grow up believing? Who gave them to me?

• When I think about pleasure; sexual, creative, emotional, physical, what fears come up?

✍️ Challenge of The Week

Write Your Pleasure Manifesto

Pull out a journal, a voice memo, a napkin — anything.
Then finish this sentence: “Pleasure, for me, looks and feels like…”

Write without editing.
Write like no one will ever read it.
Then answer this:

• Where does pleasure live in my body?

• What kinds of touch, time, people, energy, or environments bring it out?

• What pleasures have I denied myself — and why?

Set a timer for 10 minutes. Let it pour out.

Then — this part matters — read it back. Out loud.
No cringing. Just curiosity.

Your clarity lives in your body. Give it space to speak.

📚 Want To Go Deeper?

Here are a few powerful reads to help you reconnect with your own pleasure and desire, not for anyone else’s gaze, but for your own liberation.

🔗 “The Pleasure Rebellion: Why Reclaiming Your Sexuality is a Radical Act of Power “ - From Find Your Feminine Fire by Amanda Tests
What if reclaiming your pleasure was the key to unlocking your deepest confidence, your most powerful leadership, and your greatest success?

🔗 “Come As You Are” by Emily Nagoski
Understand the science behind sexual desire, especially for women — and how to work with your brain and body, not against them.

Mirror 🪞 Talk

To the one who stopped asking for what she wants —
Remember who you were before you quieted down.
Before you made yourself smaller to stay palatable.
Before you confused comfort with safety.

👑 The Guest List

Esther Perel – Psychotherapist, Boundary‑Expander, and Desire Disruptor

Before she became one of the world’s most sought-after voices on relationships and intimacy, before the TED Talks, the bestselling books, the viral podcast sessions, Esther Perel was a Belgian daughter of Holocaust survivors, raised in a community shaped by both trauma and resilience.

She grew up fluent in tension. Safety vs. risk. Duty vs. freedom. Survival vs. pleasure.
And from a young age, Esther understood that love alone doesn’t guarantee desire.
Connection requires curiosity. Intimacy demands more than proximity.
And even in committed relationships, we crave not just closeness, but aliveness.

That idea would become her life's work.

After studying psychology in Belgium and the U.S., Esther spent decades working with couples, not just to help them stay together, but to help them stay awake inside their relationships.

To remember how to want.
To understand that eroticism isn’t just about sex, it’s about energy, creativity, and autonomy.

Her first book, Mating in Captivity, shook the table.
It asked questions no one in the therapy world was asking, like:

• Why does good intimacy often kill great sex?

• Why do we crave what we already have — until we have it?

• Can we be loyal… and still long for mystery?

But Esther didn’t stop there.
She launched Where Should We Begin, a podcast that lets listeners sit in on real therapy sessions with real couples no edits, no scripts, no hiding.
What she reveals isn’t just about other people.
It’s about us. Our patterns. Our wounds. Our hungers. Our fears of being too much… and not enough.

And still, Esther kept expanding.

She brought her work into corporate culture, teaching that the health of our personal relationships directly affects our leadership, creativity, and communication.
She spoke at the World Economic Forum about trust and power.
She reframed infidelity not as a moral failure, but as a complex crisis of identity, grief, and renewal.

And she kept naming the things we were too afraid to say out loud:
That desire dies in the face of over-responsibility.
That eroticism needs risk.
That being “good” has often come at the cost of being true.

Esther Perel’s work isn’t just about relationships.
It’s about reclamation.
Of self. Of sensuality. Of agency.

“The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives,” she says.
“And the erotic is not just what you do — it’s how you feel when you do it.”

She reminds us that pleasure isn’t a reward for perfection, it’s a right we’ve always had.
And that desire isn’t lost with age, motherhood, marriage, or trauma — it’s just been buried.
Waiting for us to go looking.

It’s her audacity to say what so many of us have lived but never voiced:
That reclaiming your desire isn’t a luxury.
It’s a survival skill.
A liberation tool.
And a map back to yourself.

🎧 Listen: Where Should We Begin — one of the most intimate podcasts on the internet
📖 Read: Mating in Captivity — the book that redefined intimacy for an entire generation
🎥 Watch: TED Talk – “The Secret to Desire in Long-Term Relationships”

Party 🎁 Favors

Because healing is holy — but also hot.

📚Try it! Luxury Bath Set by Nourish & Refine –Soak your stress away with their natural aromatherapy bath salts, which are scented with 100% therapeutic-grade lavender essential oil and organic dried lavender buds.

 👚 Buy it! Nécessaire’s The Body Oil Grapefruit — because your skin deserves midlife luxury.

🧘‍♀️ Enjoy It! “Sade Girls Only” — a mix of Sade, Lana Del Rey, Erykah Badu, and Amy Winehouse to soundtrack your glow.

📣 Last Call…

Before we turn the lights up...

What if this next chapter isn’t your second act, but your real debut? Hit reply and share what your messy middle has taught you.

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Until next week,