Our Sick Sexual Culture

The common culture uses sex as a tool of power and barter rather than as a beautiful sharing of pleasure. Married women are made to feel contractually obligated to "give" sex to their husbands, whether they are on good terms or not. Women's magazines tell women "how to keep a man with sex" rather than how to enjoy it. Little girls are sexualized in beauty pageants and in the retail market. Books about "the best sex ever" fly off the shelves, and in my opinion, sex isn't a product, you can't buy a "best" sex. The use of sex as a trade good between women and men is taught in the popular media but worse yet in American homes, schools, and churches.

Girls grow up thinking only beautiful women are "good in bed" rather than embracing their uniquely beautiful bodies and accepting the amazing pleasure their bodies can give them. These same girls are ashamed and afraid of their own bodies. Girls in schools are being taught that once they have had sex, they are like a filthy used toothbrush that nobody wants. They are hearing this in abstinence education programs around the country.

Boys grow up learning the same things. They learn that sex is a commodity the ownership of which leads to status for them. They also learn that sex is an imposition on a woman, something a woman does for them rather than for her own pleasure for which something must be exchanged. They pay for expensive dates with the expectation of receiving sex in return. They grow into men equating the possession of a beautiful sex provider to success. There is a saying, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" which refers to a man feeling no need to marry a woman who "puts out" which equates marriage to ownership. Men, too, become roped into the idea of treating sex as a business transaction rather than treating it as a sharing of pleasure between equals.

Self esteem is lost by this business arrangement. Young men and women both, desperate to transact business for societal reasons will agree to unsafe practices they never would if they were in it for their own pleasure. If sex weren't used as a commodity, prostitution would not exist in all its many legal and illegal forms. Masturbation is frowned on, shifted to the corners of shame, and performed in secrecy and utility instead of touted as the safest route to sexual pleasure and capable of almost endless variation.

Homosexuals are backed into a corner, where the only "respectable" sex exists in marriage, something denied to them by law. They grow up taunted by their peers and caricatured in the media. They face sometimes deadly violence, simply for wanting what every other human being desires - to experience love and pleasure.