Deep Thought: On kinder sex

Social norms, including sexual norms, are socially constructed. They are our collective inventions and tacitly accepted conventions. There were times in European history, not so long ago, when the sight of bare ankles might have sent pulses racing. Today we are less easily impressed.

Where the Church once held regulatory power over our bonking, modern appetites are rather more readily shaped by commercial strategy. Commercial determinants of human desire vary vastly, spanning from mass cultural products such as music, film and literature, to advertising and – not least, pornography. Power over our sex lives is advantageous for some and less so for others, as in other eras throughout history.

While it’s hardly a social taboo to talk about our sexual appetites, it’s nevertheless difficult to critique contemporary sexual norms without appearing puritanical. As women, we are no prudes. We discipline our bodies, starving our appetites and plucking out our body hair, in the name of sexual freedom. We feign delight at being choked and spat on, we push the boundaries of what our bodies deem tolerable. From time to time, we gasp in horror at stories of pensioners being raped by dozens of men while unconscious, without a single one questioning whether or not it was an acceptable thing to do.

If we were tasked with crafting the sorts of sexual norms we’d want our daughters and sons to grow up with, what would they be like? Is kinder sex still sexy? Who gets to decide? Join us for a hopeful, if slightly awkward conversation.

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ABOUT THE HOST
Andreea was 8 years old when totalitarian Communism collapsed overnight in her native Romania. She saw then how quickly yesterday’s absolute truth can become tomorrow reviled atrocity. She knows that societal narratives can shift fast, and when they do, they make deep system re-set possible. For two decades she worked for international development, human rights, health and sustainability in the EU institutions and international NGOs. In 2019 she set up Flare, a Brussels-based think-and-do tank that experiments with practical ways of shifting the collective ideas we hold of what is normal and desirable. This work builds on 15 years of her researching and writing about societal narrative shifts. She is a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader and a member of Global Diplomacy Lab.