MIS-SOLD SEX?

#culture #sex #passion #psychology

“Do you think about sex a lot?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “just often.”

“How often?”

“Often enough to lie about it.”

According to research cited by Psychology Today and The Atlantic, frequent exposure to pornography is diminishing young people’s interest in and enjoyment of real-life sex. And a survey cited by the Los Angeles Times and national surveys reported by the BMJ, young adults in both the United States and the United Kingdom are having significantly less sex than previous generations. So, I wonder… Have you been mis-sold sex?

We live in a world now where sex is smeared across everything – like some oily residue, you wash your hands but you can still feel it. Pornography, that silent institution of instruction, whispers its algorithmic gospel with the persistence of a dripping tap. A symphony of synthetic moans and choreographed contortions catalogued and distributed, until sensation itself is eroded to mere friction. – like mechanical trade, input desire, output climax, leaving lovers downgraded to reenactments with no audience but their own detachment.

It would be unfair to blame porn for the death of good sex. But good sex has always been fragile, misunderstood, botched, confused with conquest or obligation. And just to be clear, I’m no expert on good sex, but I’m pretty fluent on the bad. Also, whilst porn didn’t invent bad sex, I believe it has industrialised it. It took a private uncertainty and turned it into a mass-produced certainty, here is how you do it, here is how you look doing it, here is when you are finished, don’t forget to smash the like button and subscribe for more.

Intimacy, be it a grip, a gentle pull, a playful nibble, are just lost in the theatre of a lens. Because, well, it’s hard to explain… I guess it’s timing, like a rhythm, like musicians feeling for a shared beat, like dancers attuning to each other’s steps. Not just doing a thing, but when and if to do a thing. These are the inner quivers of real intimacy, fragile, evaporative things. And despite what your spam folder tries to sell you, it is not something you learn, because it is not something you can carry around like traditional knowledge. When you know, you will know, but you’ll only know it for that one person, because what you know, will not necessary work on the next. And whilst, arguably working on a similar connection, this is not to be confused with love. – Because, in a similar fashion, just because someone loves you, doesn’t mean that somebody else will also.

The Tantrics held that the body was a shrine to be inhabited. Every glance a mantra, every touch a hymn. Passion, not as climax, but current, an ecstatic stillness found not in noise, but in notice. The vision insists that intimacy is less about the act and more about awareness, the willingness to be entirely present with another, and with oneself. Buddhist Tantra carried this vision into Tibet, where Dzogchen masters spoke of intimacy as a way to dissolve illusion itself. Even the Kaula traditions, with their sexualised metaphysics, insisted that the union of opposites was not about pleasure-maximisation, but about recognising the cosmos as a living pulse.

Elsewhere, the Greeks wrestled with eros as a ladder. In Plato’s Symposium, lust was only the bottom rung: from flesh to beauty, from beauty to wisdom, from wisdom to transcendence. The Sufis, too, wrote in tongues of fire. Rumi and Hafiz turned erotic imagery into metaphors of union with the Divine. For them, longing itself was sacred, the ache, not the release, was the gateway to God. All these traditions, in their own idioms, knew the same secret: intimacy is not a thing to be consumed but a presence to be entered.

Modern culture struggles with that. We reward performance, not patience. Even romance is measured in metrics, swipe counts, streaks, stats. Yet passion is not born in the act, but in the delay. It’s in the want and need. From the eternal second before lips meet to the clumsy fingers fumbling at buttons. The build-up, the anticipation, the tormenting tease of every slight whisper of touch. As the very fine hairs of your skin brushes against the goosebumps of the other, and the breath on your ears can sound like the entire ocean is crashing through your veins.

This isn’t some preachy ode to purity btw. Fantasy has its place, porn has its place, but when the imaginary becomes our foundation, we risk forgetting how to speak the subtle language of touch, tension, and surrender. A language that has no grammar, only accent. No textbook, only translation, written in the flesh of each encounter.

Because true passion doesn’t shout, it haunts, and if you don’t listen closely, those whispers will fade.

:: REFERENCES ::