America’s Insane Attitude Towards Sexual Pleasure
But the good thing to come from Cyrus’ arguably bad stage is awareness of sexuality vs. sexualization. Her in-your-face sex romp, minus business-as-usual sexy, yanked down the curtain from what America has been selling us from all corners of the cultural divide: sex without pleasure.
The real story here is how we’re such a hypersexualized, yet pleasure-starved culture. America is a Christian consumer nation bent on policing sexual expression, while selling smut and sanctimony steeped in shame. Profitable sexual transgressions are the norm, yet apparently the only threat to childhood innocence. So conversation about healthy sexuality to combat today’s paradoxical messages must be squashed to “protect the kids.” Conservative culture warriors—aided and abetted by an infotainment media that feeds off of extremes—conflate the progressive push toward sexual freedom and justice with the toxic byproduct of anything-goes commercialism.
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Former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders—fired by President Clinton after being smeared by culture warriors for answering honestly a press question on masturbation—now in her 80s, preaches the three Ps of sex: “One is procreation. The other is prevention. But let’s face it, 99.99% of sex…is about pleasure.”
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How can American freedom exist without sexual freedom? How can we be sexually liberated when politicians and big business dominate America’s sexual narrative? Though a hypersexualized nation, we’re hardly open about sex. Otherwise we’d expand the conversation beyond slut shaming and victim blaming when the next sex scandal or crime hijacks our infotainment highway, whether another pop culture shockwave, Steubenville, or Penn State. As sex therapist Gina Ogden, author of The Return of Desire, asked me, “How is it we can talk about sexual abuse, but not sexual pleasure?”
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While most of the animal kingdom does it solely for procreation, sex for pleasure is what makes us human.