True sexual liberation requires looking beyond Western frameworks and centering the lived knowledge, cultural practices, and liberatory visions emerging from the Global South.

Pain during sex is far more common than people realize, yet shame, silence, and social stigma keep many suffering alone and breaking that silence is the first step toward healing, understanding, and pleasure.

Sexual risk-taking cannot be understood as personal irresponsibility when pleasure, marginalization, and oppressive systems so profoundly shape why people engage in the behaviors they do.

It’s time for epidemiology to move beyond a narrow focus on risk and disease and finally treat sexual pleasure as a meaningful, measurable, and essential part of population health.

Queer women’s diverse sexual experiences help them see and name the gendered harms embedded in heterosexual norms, offering insights that can transform how we understand, prevent, and respond to unwanted sex.

Gender-affirming care is safe, medically necessary, and often life-saving for transgender youth, yet misinformation and political bans continue to deny them the support and dignity they deserve.

Sex education is limited and ends far too early, so the internet has become an essential lifelong resource for adults seeking inclusive, nuanced, and empowering sexual learning.

A growing body of research suggests that bisexual women’s especially high rates of sexual assault stem less from individual factors and more from the intersecting stigma, sexual disrespect, and gendered power dynamics they disproportionately encounter in college sexual environments.

Global traditions recognizing third-gender identities show that cultural acceptance can reduce stigma and support healthier sexual lives, even as discrimination and inequality remain real threats.

Queer nightclubs should be sanctuaries, yet rising stigma and discriminatory laws have turned them into targets, showing how urgently we must fight ignorance, protect queer spaces, and prevent hate-motivated violence.

Queer women’s diverse sexual experiences give them a critical distance from heterosexual norms, helping them identify dynamics that hinder or enhance communication, boundaries, and pleasure.

Bisexual people face uniquely high rates of substance use not because of their identity, but because discrimination, isolation, and intersecting stressors create conditions that heighten risk.

By mapping sexual experiences onto dimensions of pleasure and danger, we see that gender inequalities, and even the orgasm gap, stem partly from how social norms shape the mix of feelings people bring into sex.

Even in times of crisis, sexual health and pleasure remain essential to people’s well-being, yet they’re routinely excluded from emergency responses, leaving the most vulnerable without critical support.

The U.S. urgently needs comprehensive sexual health indicators, because without measuring the full picture, including pleasure, we can’t meaningfully address rising STIs or the broader syndemics tied to sexual wellbeing.

Sexual pleasure is a human right—and when we destigmatize practices like masturbation and recognize pleasure’s health benefits, we can build a more inclusive and evidence-based approach to sexual wellbeing.

Despite decades of backlash and stigma, 2021 showed that centering sexual pleasure can meaningfully improve health and equity—while revealing how urgently pleasure activism is still needed.

Postpartum sex is shaped far more by pain, pressure, and lack of support than by the arbitrary six-week rule, and new parents deserve real guidance in reclaiming pleasure after birth.

Faking orgasm reveals that sex is deeply social, shaped not just by bodies but by pressure, performance, and the desire to avoid awkwardness.

"Sex isn’t just a physical act but a social interaction shaped by expectations, awkwardness, and power, and recognizing this is key to understanding how people experience or struggle to access sexual pleasure."