I’ve lived through a lot of serious change in my lifetime: microwave ovens, smartphones & social media, the interstate highway system, the internet, the invention of frozen yogurt.
Sexuality, however, is still more or less the same: what people want, what people fear, what people can’t talk about, what people don’t understand about their bodies.
A recent New York Times piece interviewed sex therapists (no, not me, but several of my highly respected friends), asking What do you wish more people knew about sex and intimacy? The advice is solid, but the meta-message is: look how much hasn’t changed. This exact piece could have been written, and would have been helpful, 25 years ago. Or 50 years ago. Or the year I was born.
There have been some big changes around sex: Cheap, reliable, legal birth control. The decriminalization of same-gender sex. The ubiquity of internet porn. The cultural recognition of the clitoris (knowledge of which was still limited to a secret society when I was in high school).
I wouldn’t want to reverse any of those changes.
But despite these would-be massive changes, there’s been no accompanying change in people’s sexual difficulties—their fears, their inhibitions, their shame, their self-rejection, their ignorance, their poor mate-selection, their performance anxiety.
This consistency of gloom has kept me and my sex therapist colleagues in business ever since Masters & Johnson invented our field almost 70 years ago. People were concerned then, and remain concerned today, about sexual “performance,” penis size, how to get a partner to climax, whether to fake an orgasm (yes, millions of women and men still do), masturbation & fantasy, maintaining desire in monogamy, and when to say yes to sex.
THAT MARS/VENUS THING
And women and men still view each other as “other”—that whole Mars/Venus thing. To many people, the “other” gender’s thoughts, feelings, and reality are as foreign as a kangaroo’s.
And as long as parents withhold information from their kids, as long as physicians and psychologists remain ignorant and inhibited, as long as some popular religious traditions preach abstinence, ignorance & guilt, as long as sex is seen as a battleground of power and control by all genders…sex therapists will have plenty of business.
Sexual isolation, shame, ignorance, and frustration are problems that will not be solved by eliminating (or legitimizing) pornography or abortion, or debating trans surgery for minors, or centering “consent” in every sexual interaction (we should be talking about cooperation more than consent). That’s because they won’t accomplish the true basis of sexual health and satisfaction. As I showed in my book Sexual Intelligence, these are self-acceptance, communication, and the ability to be present during sex.
So yes, Esther Perel, let’s expand our sexual menu. Yes, Lori Brotto, let’s forget about what’s normal. Yes, Ian Kerner, let’s take inhibited male desire seriously. And yes, Stephen Snyder, let’s support people in losing their minds during sex. I just love quoting my smart professional friends.
But hey, New York Times, let’s ask a question about our questions. How can it be that we’re still talking about the same sexual issues, and advocating the same solutions to these issues, that we did last century? AI is NOT going to fix this—especially if people are too embarrassed or uneducated to ask it the right questions.
That’s good business for us sex therapists, but continued—and unnecessary—frustration for everyone else.
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