Should I want more sex? Less sex? Get wetter? Sleep only with men? Sex therapist Kate Moyle has banned the word ‘should’ from her therapy room. No more ‘should sex’, she commands.
According to Moyle, we all grow up with messages — some patent, some completely invisible — about what sex ‘should’ look like. These messages seep into our unconscious through films, what we read online, porn, magazines and advertisements, and in the absence of proper sex education, end up forming the basis of what we think sex should be like and hence what kind of sex we feel we should be having.
The problem is, Moyle points out, we live in a society where the primary sex model reinforced through much of this messaging is heteronormative, gendered (a man should do this, a woman that) and almost universally focused on penetrative, penis in vagina sex. Even though research shows that 80 per cent of women need clitoral stimulation in order to orgasm, reference to the clit is woefully absent on screen. How many times have you seen someone go down on a woman in a film? Not enough.
Not only does this reinforce reductive ideas about what sex looks like, it also leaves out everyone not having cis-heteronormative sex, discounting such a plethora of routes to sexual pleasure for so many. So, this week I challenge you to think of one ‘should’ you want to permanently banish from your bedroom. Mine will be that ‘sex should finish when a man comes’. After years of struggling to orgasm, it’s an idea I still find tricky to shake, much less challenge in the moment of (unfinished) passion.
