How to Have a Fun, Healthy Sex Life Free of Anxiety and Hang-Ups

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But when one half of the population is cast as the holder and embodier of sex, while the other is the agent who views, desires and gets sex, you have a recipe for disordered relationships with sex and with one's own body. The sexualization of women and girls – not you personally seeing an individual woman as sexy or attractive, but widespread media and advertising imagery of women and girls as things to be looked at and conduits through which to sell or promote items – has devastating effects on real-life women and girls.

It also negatively influences men and boys. A  study by an American Psychological Association taskforce found that sexualization of girls led to decreased cognitive and physical function, greater body dissatisfaction, increase anxiety, eating disorders, low self-esteem, depression, compromised physical health, diminished sexual health, stronger beliefs in  gender stereotypes, and greater acceptance of teen dating violence. Girls are so inundated with cultural messages to be sexy for boys that they live in a state of sustained anxiety about their bodies. So, they see sexuality not as something fun and healthy, but as something they perform for the viewing pleasure of others.

Disturbingly, too many girls get that same message at school and from religious and political leaders: girls are the holders of sex, and boys are the takers. Conservatives in the US paint sex as dirty and sinful and reflective of a lack of self control … until you're married and trying to create a baby, and then, like magic, it's wonderful.

As a personal belief system, that's fine. But that belief system has been legislated into education in many states, with the additional lesson that boys and girls are fundamentally different in that boys want sex, while girls want love – and so it's up to girls to withhold sex in order to secure commitment. In that view, all relationships are heterosexual, and female sexuality is still a thing to be used in the service of something else.

For advertisers, the "something else" is selling goods. For social conservatives, the "something else" is securing marriage. 

In a better reality, sexuality would be understood as a fundamental part of human existence, its good inherent and not dependent on how it can be leveraged. Why? Because pleasure is a good thing. We should all feel more of it when we can. And sex, for many people, is a source of a uniquely wonderful range of pleasurable feelings – physical, emotional and spiritual. 

It's a simple concept, but in a society so disordered and divided when it comes to sex, it's a radical one. Sex should feel good. Maybe that means candles and a rose-petal-filled bathtub. Maybe it means restraints and role-play. Maybe it means feeling gorgeous when you live in a body that advertisers tell you is ugly or wrong. Maybe it means having sex with someone of the same gender. Maybe it means feeling great about not having sex at all.

Pleasure-centered sexuality means that sex doesn't have to come with self-loathing or anxiety; sex doesn't have to be performative or even "normal".

Getting there doesn't just require more discussion and imagery of sex. It requires a fuller, more diverse and more thoughtful way of imagining sex, and a recognition that better sex will only come with increased equality across the board. Sex isn't its own thing, totally divorced from the rest of our society and culture. A cursory look through mainstream internet porn sites makes clear that how we image sex when we're expressly seeking to titillate is like a magnifying glass for some of our ugliest social problems – misogyny, racism, fetishization, objectification, violence. We can recognize that and still feel unashamed that for many (most?) of us, at least some of those attempts at titillation work.