The Stories We Tell About Sex
The World vs. Your Sex Life
Where did you first learn about sex? Perhaps it was your first “grown-up” romance novel or at a cautionary sermon at your church. Maybe your sister sang its praises and your mom framed it as something women must “get through” to produce children.
Whether fictional or biographical, these stories we’re told about sex play a big part in shaping our own narratives about it.
My first introduction to sex was through the tacky romance novels I read growing up. If you’ve read any Harlequins, you know the story: Demure Heroine knows nothing about sex or romance. Through a kidnapping, marriage of convenience, bargain, or misunderstanding, Heroine meets Bad Boy. They dance around the topic (and deed) of sex for a bit, which culminates in a sex scene that is often forced by the Bad Boy. Despite being forced, the heroine ends up enjoying it thanks to the incredible skills of her partner.
With those kinds of narratives, it’s no wonder I (and so many of us!) had such a strange relationship to sex and pleasure.
The messages that I got from my family were no less confusing. My family described sex as great and pleasurable, but EXCLUSIVELY for married people. To my mom, your life was over if you became pregnant before marriage - and based on the time she grew up in, she had a point. Abortion was still illegal back then, pregnancy out of wedlock often dashed your hopes of ever getting married, and women had little to no financial freedom on their own. Sex may have been a good thing, but was as dangerous as a loaded gun.
These mixed messages really caused me to make wilder mistakes along the way - and finally come to a point of really studying what it was to be sexual and what it was to be in relationship.
We have so many stories out there and so many ways that we are told to be sexual, so many ways in which we are told that we need to behave around our sexuality and pleasure, and so many of these stories are just dead wrong.
The bad: rewriting these stories be more challenging than we think. It can take a lot of self-exploration, bravery, and open-mindedness.
The good news: I’ll be there to help you every step of the way through the Better Sex Podcast, this blog, and consultations if you’re so inclined.
What stories about sex are you currently trying to rewrite? Let me know in the comments below - I’d love to hear from you!