Intimate Justice: A Framework

"Justice is what love looks like in public." —Dr. Cornel West

I have been turning these beautiful and evocative words over in my mind since I first heard them, sometime in 2011. I turn them over, look at them sideways, invert them—something always eluding me.

In my years-long process of engaging with this idea, I have arrived at a related but different question: if justice is what love looks like in public, what does it look like in private?

What is Justice?

A brief taxonomy of justice frameworks:

Criminal Justice. Represents a fundamental distortion of language. This phrasing conflates justice with retribution and punishment. In practice, criminal justice maintains carceral systems and is designed to perpetuate rather than interrupt cycles of harm.

Social Justice. Social justice seeks equal treatment under the law and fair, non-discriminatory access to basic rights and privileges in a society. This is about social equality under current systems but still begs the question—how can we achieve social equality in a society organized along principles of supremacy?

Reparative and Restorative Justice. Related but typically applied at different scale. Reparative seeks to ameliorate large scale harm brought about by generational inequality, and the legacies of human rights abuses within and between nations. Restorative is typically a model for making amends between individuals, an alternative to the approach that favors retribution and punishment.

Transformative Justice. Focused less on outcomes and more on systemic causes of distributed harm, the transformative justice framework acknowledges that harm within systems of manufactured inequality is by design. It seeks transformation of systems, not reform or repair—addressing causes not only symptoms. The most radical approach, literally ‘from the root’ (Latin: radix).

Defined as a framework for responding to violence, harm, and abuse, transformative justice points to the roots of social dysfunction and seeks to disrupt and transform. What lies at the root of every society and community? Our most intimate relationships: partnerships, parenting, friendships, workplaces, families.

Intimate Justice. Is justice made present in our closest relationships when dignity, pleasure, accountability, and agency organize how we relate to ourselves and each other. It names how forces of extraction, dehumanization, and disconnection are internalized and reproduced in intimate spaces, and offers practices to refuse them. The four principles meet the three forces directly, and not in isolation from one another. Dignity refuses dehumanization. Pleasure and agency refuse extraction. Accountability refuses disconnection. Each principle reaches further than its nearest force, and none of them work alone. No one is exempt: the relationships closest to us are the ones we are always inside, and therefore always responsible to.

Personal Origins

Foundation: Childhood

I didn't grow up with the kind of love that feels like justice—love that would make Dr. West's quote make sense to me. My childhood was defined by two overlapping contexts: the hippie cult I was raised in, and my immediate family which was dominated by an abusive parent. The developmental experiences in both set the stage for my obsessive interest in power dynamics, and how people make meaning and relate to each other.

In the hippie cult the ethos for raising children was very hands-off and framed as empowering, as a show of respect for our autonomy. In practice, however, the impact was one of neglect and abandonment. I was under-supervised and over-exposed to adult material and themes. As all children do, I adapted to my environment. In retrospect I see the anxiety that permeated my early life.

In the more immediate context of family, my dad preached anti-establishment ideals while parenting with an arbitrary, unearned authority. He engaged me in passionate debate on politics, spirituality, and social change while exhibiting an active disregard for my physical, emotional, and psychological safety and well-being. 

Scaffolding: Higher Education

I pursued higher education primarily as a pathway to escape these environments. The fact that it fit my personality and fed my voracious appetite for learning was a secondary blessing and ultimately liberating. 

I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Meaning, Culture, and Change from a small liberal arts college in northern California. Soon after, in my early 20s, I moved to New Mexico. I completed coursework for a Master’s degree in Language Literacy & Socio-cultural Studies at the University of New Mexico, and made it most of the way through a master’s degree program in Counseling Psychology as well. These institutions and programs were unique and rigorous. They furthered my understanding of how hierarchical systems of power work socially and globally, how people make meaning, and the impact that cultural narrative has on shaping individual reality. 

Understanding and investigating these themes was meaningful to me, and provided a lens through which I could see my childhood experiences in the same contextual frameworks. Unequal power dynamics operate similarly across scales, from the intimate to the social—whether between a parent and his children or the state and its people. 

These frameworks would ultimately inform my work in a seemingly unrelated field—therapeutic sex and relationship coaching.

The Missing Curriculum

It is accepted wisdom that relationships require hard work.

Imagine attempting to read this essay without literacy skills. Even partial familiarity—recognizable letters, a few known words—wouldn't make it easy. Reading would be extraordinarily hard work.

Humans are wired for language, but acquisition and fluency don't occur in a vacuum. Each is modeled, taught, and practiced. As social animals we are also wired for connection, but in place of deliberate instruction we get magical thinking, prohibition, and a narrow band of what's allowed.

Without real literacy—emotional awareness, the ability to communicate across difference, the capacity to navigate needs and limits—we are left in a landscape littered with tips, tricks, and surface-level advice that fails to develop genuine competency. We inherit and repeat.

Patterns

Unjust relational dynamics are not aberrations in intimate and social life. They are what gets transmitted and reproduced in the absence of just, meaningful modeling.

Zero-Sum

The zero-sum game reproduces in relationships as the pervasive and unconscious belief that a gain in one area must inherently represent a loss in another. Sacrifice, compromise, and transactional negotiation are normalized and accepted as relational truth, wisdom even. This is scarcity framing. Even when navigated with good intention, the expectation is that we lose something in order for the other to gain; in order to gain something the other has to lose. Intimate exchange as transaction instead of shared experience. 

Conflict is approached with a boxing ring mentality—two fighters, fists up. A battle in which someone loses and the other wins; someone is proven right, and the other is blamed. Winning the round may temporarily satisfy on an ego level but provides little to no relational value or satisfaction. The question "win what?" is never asked (or answered), and the outcome is rarely anything other than an anxious peace—a peace that only lasts until the next round kicks off.

Fuck Me/Fuck You

In a just relational ecosystem boundaries function as the infrastructure of intimacy, a nuanced interplay between needs and desire, capacity and limits. We don't live in such an ecosystem.

We live in a culture that conditions us to orient to boundaries as an either/or: self or other, never both. Some of us are socialized to approach a boundary as a challenge, something to push past or erode on our way to getting what we want. Societally this is applauded—the push through that earns a great achievement, even at cost to our well-being (fuck me) or the way someone got around the pesky obstacle of another person's limit or refusal in order to acquire the desired outcome (fuck you). Some of us are socialized in response: defend, protect, stay vigilant. Which predictably and regularly ends in collapse. It becomes easier to acquiesce, to give in. Attrition is the mechanism, not weakness. Pretty much always fuck me.

Internalizing this socialization, we then pre-empt it. We bypass our own limits and capacity, tolerating the crossing of our boundaries—often because this was modeled as a way of showing love. When this inevitably becomes intolerable, we swing in the other direction, erecting rigid barriers as a strategy for self-protection. Previously porous boundaries become brittle and inflexible. The belief underlying the swing is: in order to be connected to you, I have to disconnect from myself; in order to be connected to myself, I have to disconnect from you. 

Fuck me, fuck you.

Principles

Self or other, never both. Justice in private refuses the never.

Justice in private looks like relationships in which desire, needs, capacity, and limits can find their authentic shape—connection organized around principles of dignity, pleasure, accountability, and agency.

Dignity and pleasure are intrapersonal, about our internal sense of worth and well-being. Accountability and agency are interpersonal, about how we move in the world and engage with one another.

Dignity

The understanding that each of us is inherently worthy and that our needs, desires, gifts, and challenges all deserve respect. Honoring our own dignity and that of others pushes back against zero-sum thinking, the either/or approach to boundaries, and establishes the context necessary for collaborative negotiation.

Pleasure

Beyond meeting the basic needs of survival, a principle and ethic of pleasure is about the right to thrive. It includes access to and space for leisure, play, and creativity. Dignity and pleasure are not rewards that must be earned, regardless of the narratives we have internalized that insist otherwise. Both are vital.

Accountability

Accountability begins with the recognition that we have impact—whether negative, positive, or neutral. We will make mistakes, fuck up, hurt and get hurt, and that doesn't make us bad people. With dignity intact, we can be accountable for our impact without veering into self-loathing over the mistakes or into arrogance when our influence is beneficial.

Agency

Agency is the right and capacity to choose within real structural and relational limits. In relationships it is making intentional choices while considering ourselves and others. This mindset—choice made with awareness of limits—alters the landscape from one of sacrifice and compromise to one where we are empowered to explore creative solutions.

The Revolution is Relational

Intimate justice is fundamentally relational work, but it isn't only personal.

How can we communicate across difference and solve social problems at scale if we're unable to do it in our closest relationships—with our friends, our partners, our siblings, our children?

These relationships are the site of justice. Not justice work, justice itself. What we refuse to reproduce in private is refused at scale.

No system can take away a restored interior, the capacity to be accountable, agency exercised under imposed constraints, small pleasures held onto under conditions designed to foreclose them.

Transforming how we relate is the revolution.

Originally published September 2025. Substantially revised August 2026.