THE CENTER FOR POSITIVE THOUGHT: What's Tricky About Your Sex Life?

We tend to feel very alone with the challenges of our own sex lives – but thereby miss a general truth: there isn’t anyone on the planet for whom sex hasn’t been, either now or at some point, an acutely difficult subject. We shouldn’t compound our miseries by imagining we are alone in having them.

We are repeatedly given messages that we live in sexually enlightened times, that we belong to a liberated age. And therefore the implication is that we ought by now to be finding sex a straightforward and untroubling matter. We are not – after all – Victorians or prudes.

The standard narrative of our release from past inhibitions goes something like this: for thousands of years across the globe, due to a devilish combination of religious bigotry and pedantic social custom, people were afflicted by a gratuitous sense of confusion and guilt around sex. They thought their hands would fall off if they masturbated. They believed they might be burned in a vat of oil because they had ogled someone’s ankle. They had no clue about erections or clitorises. They were ridiculous…  MORE