As a somatic sex educator and writer, finding a platform that won’t discriminate against “impure” keywords is difficult. Time and time again, the faint call from the sex-positive community for a new, accepting platform rains down from the mountaintops like a slow-rolling moan. Please, they plead, stop shadowbanning us and tearing us down! The world needs to know about sex!
Then one day I received an unsolicited email addressing me as a content creator in the topic of sex. I was being introduced to a NEW platform, one on which I could talk freely about sex without censorship, billing itself as the “Digital Sex Revolution.” My heart skipped a beat — yes! Could it be? A place for orgasm talk and pleasure activism and education? Sign me up! I clicked on the link, only to be transported to a hyperspace themed website spattered with salacious colors and bold eroticism. It was just what I’d be hoping for, but not. My disappointment mounted upon seeing the logo, a sexy pair of lips, slightly agape. Sigh, looks like the “digital sex revolution” that sought my voice as a sex educator might actually be another social media platform for sex party information. Regardless, I signed up with an innocuous username and poked around for all of twenty minutes. The website, like many others, drips with the type of exaggerated eroticism one would expect of a phone sex operator at 3AM. Sure, perhaps it was well-intentioned. And while the allure is understandable for a certain cross-section of society, it misses the mark as an appealing place for the average person to seek learning and exploring one’s individuality and needs, which is exactly how it was advertised to me. Regardless, this only served to remind me of one thing: it’s this extravagant, x-rated approach to the topic of sex that keeps the average Jane in Idaho from pursuing that orgasm she can’t seem to have with her husband, and keeps the average Joe in his delusion that good sex requires chains and whips and lascivious whispers from an untouchable busty dom.
Kinky, erotic language and setting have a place. It’s delectable and fun when the time is right. The problem is that many, if not most, who need to hear sex-positive messages are far from being reached by the directive and lingo most commonly offered by the sex-positive community. Sure, the lush sex talk lands for many people. It appeals to a kinky, sensuous nature. Yet it also perpetuates the idea that sex needs to be a certain way, or that one needs to be a certain way to attain it. Worse, it preserves the belief that the masculine, hypersexual view of sex is what real sex is. What’s being forgotten is that many real people have messy, non-kinky sex. In losing this perspective, we’re missing an opportunity to forge a new social understanding of sex in the 21st century.
In the last decade we’ve seen body positivity, sex positivity, gender neutrality, and transgendered rights embraced. In recent years, the idea of feminine “rewilding” began to take over social media in the form of embracing women’s reproductive rights, menstrual self-education and step-by-step guides to ditching “what the patriarchy thinks of us.” Yet we still, perhaps unbeknownst to us, espouse a rather masculine, one-sided approach to how we speak about sex. To begin to recognize sexuality as something that exists for ourselves alone means ditching the language and the scenery we’re taught to espouse when we set the stage to talk about sex. In order to continue a healthy sex-positive dialogue, we need to begin to make an effort to walk away from the male-dominated and religion-heavy viewpoint of sex as “smut.”
It’s important to offer adult sexual re-education to the public in order to offset rape culture. What society needs is language that seeks to teach adults and children that sex is normal and natural so that they can have it themselves in safe, consensual environments. If we can’t educate the general public to embrace sexuality in plain clothes, we won’t get anywhere with future generations. The labeling will continue, the inequality will continue, and sex will remain seen as a separate, hushed and ultimately “forbidden” part of the human experience.
The majority of those in need of sexual re-education often believe deep down that their erotic tendencies are shameful in nature. They may live with penetration pain, sexual dysfunction, and trauma that keeps them in relationship black holes. They may still exist far, far away from effectively learning the steps they can take to embrace their bodies, their sexuality, and their lives. They may not ever know or even realize that their sexual health goes far beyond STD identification, and that a healthy sex life is a healthy life, physiologically and psychologically. Most of these people don’t dress in leather and lace every night, use sex toys, feel they have the opportunity to explore kink, or have the emotional means to begin to approach why they desire it in the first place. Many people need sex education with real language and a design that represents humanness. Otherwise, we’ll constantly be missing the mark and we’ll only be reaching the people who are already in the know. By continuing to talk about ALL aspects of sex in drippy, erotic, and hushed voices, we lose those who respond to straight-talk and admission to the reality of humanness.
Social sex re-education can change the world. We need to start by teaching Plain Jane about her anatomy, and showing Joe Schmoe that sex is more than a penis in a vagina. But to get there we need to speak to what sex really means for those who are most in need of hearing it. We need to change the scenery to show the humanity of sex. Sex is messy, sex is intimate, sex is scary, sex is joy, sex is slow, and sex isn’t always “sexy.” Let’s be real.