When Sex Sells, We Lose the Body
Sex sells. It is a phrase we know well. It is so familiar that we often do not even ask what it is selling us.
Sexuality has been used to capture attention, create aspiration and market everything from perfume to protein powder. It has taught us that to be desirable is to look a certain way, to move a certain way, and to perform confidence, pleasure and eroticism as they are shown to us.
It has become the lens through which we have come to understand sex.
The irony is that many people I work with around sex, intimacy and relationships are already shaped by that narrative. There is a belief that we should be more confident, more adventurous, more desirable and more orgasmic. Comparing ourselves against images, expectations and performances that have never been designed to reflect the complexity of real human experience.
In the people I work with, it is rarely because something is actually wrong with them. Most often, they have spent years learning to perform instead of listen to their body. It shows up in the pressure to have the “right” body, the “right” desire, the “right” way of having sex and the “right” version of confidence and pleasure.
We have become observers of ourselves instead of participants in our own experience. “How do I look?” Instead of, “How do I feel?”
Even within fields devoted to sexuality, there is something I keep noticing in how this work is communicated.
If our work is about helping people return to themselves, how do we communicate that work without reinforcing the very narratives we are trying to move from?
I am not suggesting there is something wrong with being sensual, expressive or visibly erotic. Not at all. Eroticism deserves to be celebrated. But there is an important distinction between embodied eroticism and performed eroticism. Because one emerges from relationship with the body and the other from relationship with being seen. One invites curiosity, the other invites comparison. One expands our capacity to notice ourselves and make choices, the other asks us to become something to be looked at and defined by.
When sex and sexuality is communicated through performance, it activates the same nervous system patterns that many people already live with. There may be excitement. But also shame, self-consciousness, uncertainty, and a feeling of not measuring up.
For those of us who work with sex, intimacy and relationships, it should be different. It is not “This is who you should become”, but “Who are you already?”
Our role is not to become a display or a model of how sexuality should look, but to stay present to what is actually happening in us and in our work. To let what we teach and practice communicate what it feels like to inhabit the body rather than perform. To meet people without being an ideal they need to reach, and to remain deeply connected to ourselves so that people never feel they have to become us, or mistake our expression for the destination.
Our work is not to give people another image to aspire to but rather, it is to help them hear themselves again. So they are able to notice the subtle sensations of their own body, trust their own desires, and to discover an erotic life that belongs to them, rather than one inherited from culture.
If people leave our work believeing they need to become more like us, we have only replaced one ideal with another. If they leave trusting themselves more than they trust us, than something has shifted.
Sex does not need to be sold.
