As a young woman deep in the throes of hook-up culture, my 20s were marked by heavily persuaded attitudes towards sex that saw me navigating a landscape of what felt like ceaseless casual encounters. To want, to yearn, to harbour feelings for another person was officially ruled out. Instead, I, like so many of us, had declared the disenchantment of sex as a symbol of both freedom and liberation. We were not to assign meaning to intimacy; we were to be wild and uninhibited as we stacked our dating escapades on top of one another as though we were playing a game of cards that we were collectively too well-versed in.
Voices would edge towards the climax of a tale, hands would gesticulate wildly, and we would listen on as our friends’ voices reached foreign octaves in retort to the comedic dramatisation of our tales, revelling in their always appropriate responses as we swapped what we would later come to recognise were dating horror stories.
It was always funny, a joke, an amusing situation to be laughed at, these ridiculous men with their ridiculous notions of dating or their inability to sexually satisfy. Never mind how little dating apps did to assuage feelings of low self-worth, or how distracted we were playing a role that we couldn’t recognise the ways that our bodies had become not a home, but an intermittent launch pad for men that we were intimate with to dive off of in pursuit of greener pastures.
We didn’t want to care or even acknowledge that we were cast to the side, nor did we ever stop to consider the insidious and lasting tolls such acts could take on our lives. We wanted to be sexually liberated, to wave the figurative flag that signalled to men and to our peers that we were completely, totally, and wholly detached. So determined to preserve our seemingly unscathed and thick-skinned exteriors, we were failing to recognise the chasm that was growing between ourselves and our bodies beyond the surface.
What we were missing – or what the combined hook-up culture and science geared towards men was also failing to recognise – was the irrefutable evidence of the innate biological sex differences that make up our nervous systems, and in turn, how we respond to intimacy.
My pleasure, slow and endogenous, came to me in small waves, free from the landscape of casual intimacy that consistently failed to recognise the full depths of my body. I didn’t know this was possible. I’d gently peel back a layer of myself, completely free from the shame that had twisted itself around me in the aftermath of the sexual encounters I had convinced myself I’d wanted in my 20s. And I’d discover something new – a soft spot in my neck, a song that made me cry because I loved it.
As women, our bodies have biological prerequisites that require a sense of emotional and physical safety that casual encounters can’t provide or create, no matter how willing a participant we consider ourselves. Our HPG Axis, oftentimes referred to as the ‘brain-ovary highway’ – a term coined by neuroscientist Dr Lisa Moscini – is the dual communication structure between the brain and the ovaries signalling safety or distress within our endocrine system. A two-way street of sorts, it’s also largely responsible for our female hormones and reproductive systems. When we partake in casual encounters with another person, even if consensual, these subconscious parts of our minds stay hypervigilant and work in our favour to mitigate harm by assessing our environment for threats. Our bodies don’t just want that physical and emotional sense of safety; they need it to avoid flooding the body with cortisol and shutting down our reproductive and pleasure systems.
Despite what the 21st century dating market sold us, our bodies actually have no interest in reproducing with a person they cannot deem safe by measure of the time and effort required to both develop and drop into a state of trust to experience unbridled pleasure. This is why achieving orgasm with a person who is in any capacity unfamiliar to us can be so difficult to achieve, because the deeper ends of our nervous system recognise that safety and trust weren’t met during intimacy. And this is what makes hook-up culture feel so criminal in retrospect, because it encourages women to bypass their own bodies in an uneven sexual playing field that later sees our nervous systems unknowingly slip into survival mode.
When we adhere to the notion of contemporary sexual culture, where we are better positioned to force our biology to override its own protective systems in the misguided name of ‘female empowerment’, we become stuck in sympathetic overdrive. We see our personal endeavours consistently falter due to feelings of low self-worth that casual encounters do little to mitigate. Paired with a greater susceptibility to stress, we’re then more likely to experience both physiological symptoms and chronic pain, which often manifest as illness. It’s a tale as old as time – stress leads to chronic illness and disease, and that we ought to do our best to maintain homeostasis where sickness won’t ever catch up to us. But where in the fine print of casual sex were we, as women, warned of the causation between one and the other? As journalist, commentator, and campaigner against ‘rough sex’ criminal defences Louise Perry notes in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, “young women are forced to learn for themselves that freedom has costs, and they are forced to learn the hard way, every time.”
Throughout my 20s, my ability to have sex ‘like a man’ felt like I was on the right side of feminism. I was liberated, I was empowered (or so I told myself), but every time I would exit stage left, no longer basking in the limelight of my so-called liberated choices, I was always left experiencing immense feelings of self-reproach that I would secretly harbour for fear of exposing myself as a woman who wanted to be seen and heard and known and loved. To want, felt embarrassing, and to acknowledge this was to stoke the embers of shame that sat perpetually dormant in me.
Anxious, depressed, and experiencing extreme endometriosis flares every month, I was quite literally sick and tired, unable to recognise that my body was begging for pleasure at my own hands and mind, and for the cessation of my relationship with a culture that disproportionately took from myself and so many women. Like so many of us, nobody taught me about pleasure, nor did they speak to me about it. That I could have it, was entitled to it, and that I could and should first give it to myself. How it could take on different shapes and feel cool or hot to the touch. That it could be as much about a belly rumbling laugh or a hot meal slowly indulged as it could a gentle tickle in a thigh crease. That pleasure was found within safety and that in having it I could access a different side to myself, facets that were foreign and were whole, facets that were able to want – more and more and more.
My pleasure, slow and endogenous, came to me in small waves, free from the landscape of casual intimacy that consistently failed to recognise the full depths of my body. I didn’t know this was possible. I’d gently peel back a layer of myself, completely free from the shame that had twisted itself around me in the aftermath of the sexual encounters I had convinced myself I’d wanted in my 20s. And I’d discover something new – a soft spot in my neck, a song that made me cry because I loved it.
Hook-up culture robbed so many of us. Of true pleasure and desire, of leaning into our natural inclination to unearth ourselves, by ourselves. But denying our bodies as a sacred landscape will not refute our biology.
It isn’t surprising in a patriarchal world, how so few of us were offered guidelines that taught us to prioritise ourselves, to nurture our bodies and to leverage our female nervous systems for the lives and experiences we weren’t afraid to say that we wanted.
Sexologist and somatic practitioner Kimberly Ann Johnson positions the nervous system as something that both protects us from immediate harm and creates reverberations that ripple through a lifetime. And when we can apply this understanding to our own bodies, home to an incredibly intelligent network of nerves that require harmony, we can stop compartmentalising these bodily systems and intimately connect with them, positioning pleasure as the centrepiece from which that harmony can live, breathe, and metabolise in our bodies. True embodied female pleasure as praxis is not necessarily always sexually derivative, it is however, a practice that begs the question – what makes you feel at home within your own body?
