Sex is literally everywhere. It’s baked into every facet of our society. From gender segregated bathrooms, to school uniforms (lengthen your skirts!), to advertising—so much of our society is built around sex; having it, avoiding it, struggling with it, or literally building phallic objects and monuments. We seem to be endlessly preoccupied with who is and isn’t having sex: virgins, whores, sluts, prudes, and even incels and chads. It’s always splashed across the front page and randomly placed in films.
Yet for most of the time in polite society, we have to keep pretending sex doesn’t exist. There’s that saying that you should never talk about politics, sex, or religion at parties or the dinner table—though these days, it feels like that’s all people ever talk about.
Still, even in a left-leaning country like Aotearoa in 2022, sex is by-and-large very taboo. That’s why sweet older ladies having a pastry next to you in cafes will pointedly turn around when you’re loudly debriefing last night’s hookup with your friends over brunch. Turns out yelling, “Yeah I didn’t cum but it was alright,” in public is still unacceptable behaviour. We learned that the hard way—pun intended.
But when we don’t talk about sex, or pretend it doesn’t exist, or treat it as dirty or shameful, we begin to get into tricky terrority. Knowledge is power, so why would we collectively keep ourselves ignorant? It probably comes as no surprise that misogyny and patriarchy have a lot to do with it. People with uteri are taught to feel ashamed about sex and their sexuality. We’re taught that sex centres around the phallus, and therefore that sex is for cis-men, and cis-men only. Add heteronormativity and sexual racism and everything else on top of that, and sex suddenly becomes a very complicated topic.
If we’re lucky, we would have received comprehensive sexual education in high school—unfortunately, that’s rarely the case. People are still struggling to grasp what healthy and consensual sex actually is, and a lot of women still don’t know what an orgasm even feels like. A major problem is how sex is constructed to be only penetrative—everything else is disregarded. This marginalises women with conditions that affect their reproductive system such as endometriosis, vaginismus, or different types of ovarian cysts. Penetrative sex often is not an enjoyable activity with these conditions, when it really should be pleasure central. Add to that, so many of us still believe that sex ends when the man cums—and for so many, that is probably the sad reality.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Not to be too #girlboss about it, but we can and should reclaim sex—for everyone. That’s why Craccum’s Sex Issue isn’t only a sexy, fun issue that we put out every year: it’s an essential one. Because we need to keep destigmatising sex, widening our definitions of sex, and promoting healthy and consensual sex. We need to normalise queer sex, and the pleasure of women, enbys, and trans people. Sex doesn’t have to be shameful, painful, or penetrative. So, let your freak flag fly, and let’s talk about sex, baby.
XOXO
Arohanui
Flora Xie (she/her) and Naomii Seah (she/they).