The Sex Myth The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality [Paperback]

From a bold new feminist voice, a book that will change the way you think about your sex life.

Fifty years after the sexual revolution, we are told that we live in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom; that if anything, we are too free now. But beneath the veneer of glossy hedonism, millennial journalist Rachel Hills argues that we are controlled by a new brand of sexual convention: one which influences all of us—woman or man, straight or gay, liberal or conservative. At the root of this silent code lies the Sex Myth—the defining significance we invest in sexuality that once meant we were dirty if wedidhave sex, and now means we are defective if wedon’tdo it enough.

Equal parts social commentary, pop culture, and powerful personal anecdotes from people across the English-speaking world,The Sex Mythexposes the invisible norms and unspoken assumptions that shape the way we think about sex today.The Sex Myth

Introduction

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was consumed by sex. Not by the physical urge to have it, although I had my share of crushes and unfulfilled desires. Nor was I overly concerned with the particulars of how I might go about it, although I studiously read Cosmopolitan each month so that I would know what to do when the occasion arose. My obsession was more esoteric than that. I was consumed by the idea of sex—by what it meant and by what it might reveal about who I was.

If I didn’t have sex, did that make me frigid or a loser? If I did do it, but with someone I didn’t love—or worse, with someone who didn’t love me—would I regret the decision later? What if Cosmo’s thirty-six hot new sex positions failed me in practice? (Friends had reported that some of them were tricky to pull off.)

I had grown up on a diet of teen magazineslc(