Every issue of our journal features papers from a range of disciplines, different theoretical approaches and methodologies, and often divergent results. However, I feel confident guessing that many of us in the field of sex and relationship therapy are working towards a healthier conceptualization of sex and sexuality, and sex and relational practices that are conducive to wellbeing across the lifespan. Whether we are therapists, scholars or both, many of us work to expand the sexual wellbeing of individuals, relationship systems, and ultimately cultural, social, and legal systems.
This is not an easy enterprise given that often current dominant cultures actively promote messages that are directly counter to sexual wellness. Our field is not immune to those messages, and I have previously written about the need, for example, to move from a reproductive to a pleasure based theory of sexuality, or the need to expand what we consider to be the baseline of human sexuality, beyond apparent normativity. For example, in the US, where I currently live, sex is both not talked about in schools or at home, given a couple of hundreds of years of puritanical culture's influence, and yet apparent everywhere in popular culture, from cartoons to music videos, from advertising to movies, as well as in local landscapes, from sex shops to strip clubs along long stretches of highways, from anti-abortion billboards to trafficking of young people, especially Indigenous children and adolescents.
It is hard to ignore the ubiquitous nature of sexual messaging, even in the midst of a public moral discourse discouraging frank and explicit sexual education, and often attacking the funding and promotion of reproductive rights. This is not to mention the rape culture we are also immersed in, as well as the racism, cisgenderism, ableism, ageism and classism that impact the way people are able to relate to their own bodies, sexualities and relationships. I would argue that it is hard to deny that we live in an unwell sexual and relational culture, which is also increasingly globalized through the homogenization of media. Sex and relationships can end up seeming little more than commodities to be gained or maintained by following arbitrary rules and games, while people seem to continue to starve for intimacy, self-esteem, and connection with themselves, others, and ecological systems around them.
This can seem like a bleak landscape, yet here we are, an unlikely crew of biological, neurological, and social scientists, doctors and researchers, therapists and scholars, invested in supporting the wellbeing of our clients, patients, and research participants, invested in a future where sexual wellness can indeed become social, cultural, and legal realities. I hope we can see the unwell cultural, social, and legal messages about sex and relationships around us as reasons to keep going, even when our work seems to be a little against the current, in fact, maybe especially then.