We’re giving away 5 copies of brilliant new book, The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality, which examines our preoccupation with sex. Why do we sometimes feel like we aren’t having enough sex? Is the person next to us having more? What do social norms tell us and does it matter?
To enter to win a book, reblog this post and share a sex myth YOU’D like to see busted. See contest rules here.
We interviewed The Sex Myth author Rachel Hills about why she wrote the book.
SS: What are some myths about sex?
RH: Where do I begin? That guys “can’t help themselves,” and will do it with pretty much anyone. That sex makes you dirty and impure, especially if you’re a woman. That we’re “born this way” – an idea that I suspect serves more to reassure straight people than to legitimize LGBT folks. But the “myth” that I talk about in the book is bigger than any one misconception about sex: it’s the idea that what we do when it comes to sex says something very profound and important about who we are, and that if you don’t have the right kind of sex, there’s something wrong with you.
SS: Why did you decide to write THE SEX MYTH?
RH: The initial idea came out of the shame and frustration I felt about my own sex life. When I was in my teens and early twenties, I wasn’t having much (read: any) sex, and I felt quite embarrassed about that. I didn’t see people like me reflected on TV or in magazines – the assumption was that all young people were sexually active, and that if you weren’t you either needed to have a really good reason not to be (eg religion, maybe asexuality) or there was something really tragic about you.
When I realized I wasn’t the only person whose sex and relationships life hadn’t unfolded the way that popular culture leads us to believe it should, I became really interested in exploring the issue further. I wanted to understand not just the ideals that are communicated to us around sex and relationships, but why those ideals around sex and relationships matter so much to us.
SS: Why do you think there’s this stigma that if you’re not “hooking” up with someone on a regular basis then you’re not attractive?
RH: I don’t think it’s about hooking up – casual sex obviously has plenty of stigma of its own – so much as it is about being sexually active. And that’s because sex is treated as this huge signifier of a whole lot of things in our culture: of how desirable you are, of how well your relationship is faring (if you’re in one), of how engaged you are with life, or even of where you sit on the political spectrum. That’s a lot to invest in one act, and it means that we take our “successes” and “failures” when it comes to sex very personally.
SS: What do you want people to take away from THE SEX MYTH?
RH: That sex is political, and that the way that we experience and think about sex is shaped by social and cultural forces. Which means that the discomfort and insecurity that many of us feel about our sex lives doesn’t reflect a deficiency in us, but rather a deficiency with the culture. There’s no one right way to have a good sex life.