The fifth house is about pleasure. Tender, evolving, and sometimes revolting pleasure. It’s the house of sweets, of candy shops and amusement parks. It’s a playground. It’s also the house of sex.

Sometimes, if you choose to have children, the fifth house will also be about birthing and your relationship to your children. Always, whether you choose to have children or not, the fifth house is about your experience of your own childhood.

When I talk to people about the fifth house, surrender and helplessness always comes up. There is surrender in pleasure but there is also often helplessness in childhood. The fifth house is the house of good fortune. But pleasure isn’t so easy. For most of us, pleasure can be a struggle.

Lunar nodes in the fifth house can often look like regrets around pleasure or childhood. Having a besieged fifth house can be that you feel like you’re not allowed to have pleasure, that there is trouble in it, or that there is danger in joy. Even having uncomplicated and incredible fifth house transits that leave you head over heels in love with someone or something that keeps just enough space for you in their life can leave someone who tries to guess when their heart will be broken again with unrelenting suspicion reeling.

There is something helpless about the fifth house because it’s interests, birthing and pleasure, are automatic processes that you have no control over. There is no way to think through pleasure, even if your type of indulgence has to do with serious study and big brain activities. The act of falling into pleasure always happens without you meaning to do it.

There is no self correction in the fifth house but there is control. Pleasure is an automatic process but it eludes you when you have no control over your environment or decisions. Pleasure is not just about a fuck in the sheets or a fap here and there. The reason why pleasure takes deep cultivation is because issues of pleasure are also issues around existence. You can’t access pleasure if you are housing insecure, if you are in crisis, and if you do not have access to needed medical care.

There’s the traditional pleasure sources, which are often gendered and colonial. Femmes are seen as sources of pleasure, which is exhausting work. Audre Lorde writes that “For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” There is pleasure in perfumes, sex, and beauty but there is also the pleasure of an early morning stretch and of taking out the trash. Your capacity for pleasure, just like your integrity, cannot be earned but must be supported.

The Fifth House Changes

I think that the fifth house is the house that changes the least, at least in my observations. In traditional readings of the fifth house, it’s said that the fifth house represents older children in the first phase of life, middle children in the second, and younger children in the last.

The reason why I don’t find this interpretation of the fifth house useful is because I feel that it centers a specific type of experience. The idea is that the fifth house rules young children, the type that you play with. The fifth house is supposed to rule sex that is linked to reproduction. The fifth house rules oldest children first because your oldest children are born when you are in the first phase of life, your middle during the second, and your youngest when you are mature and aged. That’s the way things are supposed to go. But who has children after a second Saturn return? For sure, some people do and it’s possible. But the second Saturn return is also about menopause for a great deal of people.

I like to think of the fifth house in a very consistent way. It’s your childhood and your memory of that childhood. You remember that childhood if you have children of your own, whenever you choose to have them. Your remembered childhood changes when you raise children. The fifth house is how you played when you were a kid and how you play as an adult.

Sex is play. Jokes are play. Storytelling is play and brainstorming can also be play. The fifth house includes all of these things because the fifth house declares how you play.

The fifth house is about being five years old. It’s about sweet sixteen. It’s about being twenty eight and learning how to cum for the first time. It’s about being forty and having a bigger and more voracious appetite for pleasure than you had when you were a youth. It’s about being fifty two and dating again for the first time in a long time and about being sixty four and developing the type of sense of humor that makes other people scream.

The ways that you play might change but the fifth house always has to do with play. In the first phase of life, it has to do with how you play as a kid and in your youth. In the second phase of life, it has to do with how you play as a real adult in your community. In the last phase of life, it has to do with how you play as an elder.

Venus

The fifth house is completely bound by Venus. How you feel about your fifth house will depend not only on the condition of the ruler of the fifth and any planets in the fifth but also upon your Venus.

Venus co-signifies the fifth house (alongside the Moon and Jupiter in medical uses of astrology) and it rejoices in its own house. Venus rejoices in the same place where it has ownership. Venus rejoices in self ownership.

Venus is a hard planet for me. I’ve written about this in the past, about those of us with freakish feeling Venuses. Venus can sometimes feel like a kind of womanhood that isn’t accessible to a great deal of us. But there is also an element of femme revenge in Venus—in the freakishness of femme beauty. There is power there and there is enjoyment.

The fifth house can be a hard house for the same reason Venus is hard. The things that it describes—beauty, pleasure, and play—can feel superfluous. They’re things that we are told are superficial, things that don’t matter to existence. They’re usually the first things to fall away when we live in survival mode.

And, yet, there is not just dignity but also hope in the fifth house. There’s the hope of not always being in survival mode. There’s the dignity of having your complexity acknowledged when in pleasure and allowed pleasure without punishment. And there’s also the adamancy and courage around wanting.

Saturn feels bullied when it’s in the fifth house because Saturn and Venus don’t get along. Saturn is teased here—humiliated. Saturn learns to find pleasure in these things, in anticipation and waiting and in begging for permission. Having a strong Saturn, no matter the condition of your Venus, can make your pleasure headspinnngly kinky.

Jupiter in the fifth house gives brilliant opportunities for pleasure. This is the fall in love transit. Very rarely have I talked to people who have experienced a fifth house Jupiter transit without falling in love with something or someone. The Moon in the fifth feels good. The Sun or Moon in the fifth house cares about the immediacy of pleasure.

Mars here is a little more complicated. There is an alliance between Venus and Mars but one that often ends in humiliation and capture for Mars. There’s sometimes pain in pleasure and rage in childhood when Mars has to do with the fifth house.

Working with the Fifth House

I think that the best way to work with the fifth house is not to push yourself to be more or less sexually active than you have to be or to do things that are stereotypically about pleasure such as drinking, partying, or consuming but to remember, with activated memory, what pleasure felt like as a kid.

A lot of kids find pleasure in their bodies at an age too young to remember. They get a mosquito bite and find that it feels good to scratch. They spin around in circles until they’re dizzy. They find sensual pleasure also and some forget about this until they’re older.

What did it take for you to find pleasure as a kid? Did pleasure feel safer for you when an adult gave you permission or did it feel safer to steal moments of play away? Did you need privacy to play? Did you need familiarity with a neighborhood? Did you need to be invited? Did you need access to clean clothes to find confidence to play with others?

Working with the fifth house means that you recognize the support that you need in order to play. Pleasure is not about willing yourself to have fun or about trying to achieve an orgasm so that a sexual encounter can end. It’s about recognizing that, for you to create pleasure, that your pleasure needs privacy or validation or invitation or secrecy or permission or all of the above.

There is no self correction in the fifth house or self blame. But there is rigor. There are rules here, because having rules and consent over the rules gives you protection. The fifth house isn’t worked on as much as it is protected, indulged, and supported. It doesn’t need to be a loud house nor a quiet one. It begs for self attention, asking for more when you want to give it more, but taking what is given the way children accept gifts—without apology.