“Any fun, sleaze or dirtiness has been flattened out of sex in favour of a peppy, humourless rhetoric which is, well, not that sexy.”
culture infiltrating our everyday lives. Where the term might once have referred to relatively niche practices like yoga, silent retreats and meditation, it now refers to anything and everything that is allegedly good for our health. CBD gummies. Special lights for our faces. Vitamin IV drips. Crystal charging. Endless skincare. Going outside. Staying inside. Pick a word, any word, and it has probably once been tied to a wellness trend.
One of the more insidious cultural shifts, though, has been the repackaging of sex as “sexual wellness”. In other words, the positioning of sexual pleasure as a health-adjacent endeavour. When I use the term “sexual wellness”, I’m not referring to the very basic practice of getting regular STI checks and learning about consent , but a way of positioning sex as a vaguely medicalised form of self-care that, crucially, requires financial investment.
It’s both easy and difficult to see how we got here. The late ’90s and ’00s were, to put it lightly, not ideal when it came to sex in the cultural sphere. This was the era of lad mags and Page 3 girls and “steak and blowjob” days and. It was a time when women were viewed as “sluts” for liking sex, or “frigid” if they didn’t.
The fourth wave of feminism ushered in during the 2010s marked a welcome new era for sexual liberation. I’m aware that I’m speaking in broad strokes here, but we began to see queerer, more inclusive depictions of sex. Consent-led depictions of sex. Sex that prioritised communication and pleasure for both parties. Social media helped nurture sex positivity, and using the word “slut” as an insult became embarrassing and dated.
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