There is a specific way many women have been trained to relate to pleasure: as something that must be earned. You enjoy when the work is done. You take care of yourself when the obligations are met. You rest when you have done enough to deserve rest. Pleasure is what comes after — always after, always conditional.
This arrangement is so normalised that it often does not feel like a distortion. It feels like responsibility. Like maturity. Like the correct prioritisation of things.
But the woman who has spent years treating pleasure as a reward finds, eventually, that the reward never quite arrives. There is always more to do before she has earned it. The permission keeps being deferred.
When pleasure is perpetually contingent, several things happen over time:
The capacity to enjoy — which is a skill, a practice, a way of being available to experience — atrophies. The woman who has rarely let herself simply enjoy something for its own sake often finds, when the conditions finally seem right, that she has forgotten how.
The sense of aliveness diminishes. Pleasure — in its full sense — is one of the primary signals that life is genuinely being lived, not simply administered. Its consistent absence is a specific kind of impoverishment.
The relationship with the self becomes transactional. The woman who must earn her own enjoyment is treating herself as an employee who receives benefit only after performance. This is not a nourishing way to inhabit your own life.
Not self-indulgence in the pejorative sense. Not the suspension of responsibility. Not the license to ignore what genuinely matters.
Pleasure is the direct, present experience of enjoying something — beauty, taste, sensation, laughter, ease, delight. It is what signals to your nervous system that the present moment contains something worth inhabiting.
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It can be simple: the first cup of coffee of the morning, genuinely enjoyed rather than consumed en route to the next thing. The conversation that is fully present rather than half-attended to. The walk taken without the podcast, just because you wanted to be outside.
The work is not to wait until you have earned pleasure. It is to practise receiving it as a baseline condition of your life — something you are entitled to not because you have been productive enough, helpful enough, or accomplished enough, but because you are a person, and persons need pleasure to feel fully alive.
The guilt that arises around this — and it will — is not a signal that you are doing something wrong. It is a signal that you are doing something unfamiliar. Something that cuts against years of conditioning toward the earned reward.
Let it arise. Enjoy anyway.
Related: Women and Rest · Making Space for Joy · On Having a Life Outside of Work
Pleasure is not a luxury. It is part of what your life is for. The Good Girl Delusion is the work of reclaiming it.
Nancy GLO
Reflective storyteller & style curator for women becoming
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