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I Stripped Away The Myth Of Sexual Freedom
It wasn’t an easy task
The conversation with my partner began on a Saturday night as we watched a 1960s documentary. The images showed thousands of young people in Detroit celebrating “free love,” dancing and proclaiming a new era of sexual liberation. Those radiant faces, so full of hope, contrasted brutally with the reality we live in today. The innocent smiles of that generation transformed into the empty masks we now wear, disguising ever-deepening emotional scars.
At 30, I grew up hearing stories about how the sexual revolution freed us. “Now you can be yourselves,” they told us. “Your body, your rules.” But no one warned us that this supposed freedom would come with invisible chains. Sitting on the couch, between glasses of red wine, I shared with my partner how my friends feel pressured to perform a sexuality that isn’t always their own, shaped by unreal expectations and manufactured desires.
Pornography infiltrated our lives like a silent poison. A close friend, let’s call her Mary, confessed to me through tears how she discovered her boyfriend could no longer feel pleasure without recreating increasingly extreme scenes he watched online. “I don’t know who I am in bed anymore,” she confided, “I feel like an actress in a movie I didn’t choose to star in.” My partner shared similar stories from his…
