I've worked in the field of intimate relationships for nearly three decades. But it was only in 2006, when I was asked to rewrite the classic erotic manual The Joy of Sex, that I fully realised how impossible sex can be.
Because ironically, there was very little joy in much of what I found when researching the book. The sexual revolution, which gave us so much liberty, also opened a Pandora's Box of Furies: more widespread pornography, infidelity, sexual infections; immense pressure to have perfect life-long intimacy; these added to the traditional but still present baggage of embarrassment and guilt.
The conundrum is that we're freer to have sex than ever before, but more than ever faced with double-binds and unhappy endings. We reach out for the luscious apple in the Garden of Eden - unlike Adam and Eve, we're now constantly conscious of the snake in the undergrowth.
Happily, rewriting The Joy of Sex eventually showed me that the above is often a red herring. As I expanded my academic research to interviews with real people who delighted in lovemaking, I also recontacted what you might call the naked truth. I came to understand that for all the current complexity, sex can still be what it always has been - an immensely powerful but nevertheless beautifully simple act. As such, it is absolutely possible.
Much of the work I've been doing of late has been aimed at helping people become aware of that. In particular, I've been presenting and teaching on the positive aspects of sex, on ways to strip away the negative associations. to reclaim what one might call an 'innocent' perspective.
To do this, of course, we need to understand how we've come to see sex as impossible. How society has through necessity fenced sexuality round, and how our current revolution has by removing those fences made everything more complicated. How even the most well-meaning of upbringing leaves a legacy of insecurity and shame, and how, by triggering a deep spectrum of human need, the sexual act makes everything more fraught.
All that once understood, it becomes much easier to separate out what we need to take on board around sex and what we don't; to develop our own sense of what is good and what we don't want to accommodate; to cut through the double-binds and make our own sexual decisions - in short, to make sex a real and wonderful possibility in our lives.
Susan Quilliam is a relationship psychologist working in the field of sexual wellbeing; she is the co-author of The New Joy of Sex and will be running The Impossibility of Sex evening at The School of Life on Wednesday 5th October. For more details and to book click here.
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