It is said that love is blind and that sex is impervious to reason. However, a person's view on sex is incredibly indicative of that person's fundamental view on life itself. For some, it is a sacred act to be performed only in marriage, and for others it is a fun act, to be performed on any lighthearted whim of desire. It has a different meaning for all people. In Audre Lorde's essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power", sex is described as a tool of power for women, as a tool to be used to empower and lift the self from repression, imposed both by others and by if. . Similarly, in her novel Sula, Toni Morrison illustrates sex as a tool that can be used to free women from the social burden and constraints of stereotypes and expectations. However, he also describes this attitude as something that can hurt and alienate. In his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz portrays sex as a symptom and symbol of deeply rooted cultural ills. All three writers establish sex as a function of society used to perpetuate stereotypes, a function largely dependent on women but belonging to men, and work to encourage women to claim it as their right as well. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayIn "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Lorde challenges the Western masculinist characterization of the erotic as an element of human degradation, as well as its use as a tool of oppression. She argues that this framing of the erotic has ghettoized women's sensuality, a medium through which people know and orient themselves to the world, thus erasing a significant form of women's liberatory power. To address this erasure, Lorde offers a vision of the erotic as a system of understanding that shapes the knowledge of yore, a critical mode through which women can achieve excellence. Lorde's stance on the erotic has established itself as a political, social and academic tool of deconstruction, subversion and imagination. Although the liberating power of the erotic lies in its point of origin (the self), Lorde suggests that women have been taught to question the self as source, "to suspect what is deepest in [them] themselves," which “has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information” (Lorde 53). Oppression is a cyclical process that systematically suppresses various forms of power, and Lorde's essay is a response to this suppression, particularly regarding his claim that the relationship between oppression and power is often marked by corruption and distortion: "In order to perpetuate itself, all oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change” (Lorde 53). An example of such distortion is the way the erotic itself has been misrepresented as pornography, a way of experiencing sensations, gaining knowledge without feeling. This distortion of the power of the erotic reinforces docility, obedience, and external definition, all of which contribute to the cycle. of oppression through the process of dehumanization. Morality and equality are irrelevant in the face of a man's libido, and it is this travesty of social understanding that Morrison emphasizes through his depiction of sex in Sula. The titular character operates beneath the understanding of sex as "pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable"..