Why sexuality is bad

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Sexual health. Home Sexual health. Sexuality explained. Actions for this page Listen Print. Summary Read the full fact sheet. On this page. Different types of sexuality Discrimination based on sexuality Sexuality and mental health Helping someone struggling with their sexuality and mental health Where to get help.

Different types of sexuality Sometimes, it can take time to figure out the sexuality that fits you best. Heterosexual and homosexual Most people are attracted to the opposite sex — boys who like girls, and women who like men, for example.

Bisexual Sexuality can be more complicated than being straight or gay. Discrimination based on sexuality Equality and freedom from discrimination are fundamental human rights that belong to all people. Sexuality and mental health LGBTI people have an increased risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, homelessness, self-harming and suicidal thoughts, compared with the general population.

Some of the stressful experiences that can affect the mental health of an LGBTI person are: feeling different from other people being bullied verbally or physically feeling pressure to deny or change their sexuality feeling worried about coming out, and then being rejected or isolated feeling unsupported or misunderstood.

Desire for physical contact in other contexts, for example contact sports, is not sexual because it has other motives winning, exhibiting dominance, etc. It is not a desire to reproduce or to express love or other emotions, although sexual activity, like other activities, can express various emotions including love.

Overly restrictive sexual ethics derive from definitions that wrongly build these extraneous motives into the concept of proper sex. Sex without love is condemned by those who think that proper sex must be an expression of love; sex without physical contact is simply not sex in its primary sense, not condemnable on that ground. What sexual conduct is then wrong on ordinary moral grounds? Primarily that forced on others without their rational consent. Rape is the most obvious example, involving not only physical assault, but humiliation, invasion of privacy, and most often lasting psychological harm, all of which are separately wrong-making in other contexts.

Only slightly less obvious in this category is sex with minors, which might seem a counterexample to my main claim in being considered wrong because sexual.

But again such activity is not only coercive, since children are incapable of rational consent in this context, but psychologically harmful in the long term, coercion and infliction of harm being paradigm wrong-making features of any actions. Finally, clearly in this category as well are sexual activities with subordinates: doctors with patients, lawyers with clients, bosses with employees, and teachers with students. Such relations are again exploitative and in a slightly less obvious way coercive.

There are borderline cases in this category too, such as sex with a person under the influence of alcohol or drugs or with prostitutes, sometimes but not always wrong, depending on the plausibility of seeing coercion in the context. More controversial is whether any consensual sex between willing partners is wrong. Tradition and the Catholic Church hold that any sex outside the context of marriage is wrong, or, in the secular version, any sex outside the context of loving commitment.

The connection of sex with reproduction, its biological function, might long ago have provided some justification for this restriction, if children are best raised by two parents.

More likely as a justification for restrictive sexual ethics these days is the supposed connection between sex and love, captured by the concept of romantic love. Again, according to tradition dating back to Plato, sex without love expresses our lower animal natures, the enemy of reason that should control the psyche. Loss of rational control in sex might still lead to condemnation of casual sex on prudential grounds as leading to addictive promiscuity. But loss of control in sexual acts can be conceived as something good, a release from our ordinary repressed selves and our mundane concerns, and the closest we come to unity with another person.

And distinguishing this loss of control in the heat of passion from loss of control over when to engage in sex allows us to see that casual sex need not be addictive. Just as we can eat for pleasure without becoming gluttons, and can enjoy making money without becoming miserly hoarders, so we can have sex for pleasure without becoming addicted. The same applies to sex. Objectification allegedly denies the subjectivity of the partner, treats her as less than a person, denies her the respect due to a person.

In answering this charge, we must admit straight off that sex does involve viewing the other as a sex object: the focus is on the physical body. And we not only consent to being sexual objects, the trillions spent on perfume, cosmetics, deodorants, attractive clothes, and plastic surgery indicate that we want to be viewed as such.

Zhana Vrangalova on The Science of Good Sex Read more Consideration of moral factors relevant elsewhere shows that using others as means is not always wrong. Many human relations, most economic transactions for example, involve using others as means. When I buy a car, I use the salesperson as a means to my end. I am not particularly interested in her welfare, and I certainly do not love her. To use another as a means with her consent is perfectly permissible, especially when both parties benefit.

I use my wife as a means to get a wonderful dinner I could not prepare. If using another as a means were wrong, why would it be better in the context of a marriage with loving commitment? Sexual desire and love are fundamentally different psychological states.

It is relatively exclusive: we love several people at once, but not a large number. And we can have fleeting sexual desires for many others, while there is no fleeting or casual love. Why, then, are the two often confused and grouped under the single concept of romantic love really a conglomeration of two states, sexual desire for one who is loved? While the confusion probably results in many failed marriages as sexual desire begins to fade in the absence of genuine love, there are common features, offsetting the differences, that suggest a union of the two states.

The male gaze threatens, male desire is aggressive. Our primal instincts are pathologised with the jargon of gender studies. Righteous and necessary efforts to reduce sexual crimes have had the unwelcome effect of teaching generations of men that our sexuality can be dangerous and frightening. Don't believe me? Look back at the Bailey review into the early sexualisation of children, and the surrounding media hoo-ha.

Leaving aside any concerns about the veracity and accuracy of the report itself and I have plenty myself it is striking that acres of print were devoted to the impacts of these social trends on girls, their self-esteem and body image; their developing sexuality; their safety and security. Barely a word was spoken about boys, beyond fears that they are being turned into beasts.

Again and again the message came out: girls have problems. Boys are problems. And yet does anyone doubt that there should be concerns about how easy access to porn impacts upon boys' sexual development, their self-esteem, their body image or performance anxieties? It's not as if young men bask in perfect mental health and happiness — young men commit suicide at nearly four times the rate of young women, and sex and relationships rank high on their list of concerns.

At the other end of the age range, sexually active older women are now widely eroticised albeit often with a rather misogynistic undertone as "cougars" or forgive me "Milfs" while their male equivalents are disparaged as dirty old men. Observer columnist Viv Groskop recently went further, opining about any older man who has sex outside marriage, even the mild-mannered old janitor John Major, saying "Unfortunately it's not against the law to be an old lecher.