There’s a Link Between Culture and Arousal
What happens when you convince women to put their erotic awakening on hold? To bury their sexual confusion, shame, sadness, grief, numbness, trauma and fear? To avoid examining basic assumptions about their bodies and their sexuality? Women’s erotic core goes into hiding. Over time, it can be harder to access genuine desire and experiences of arousal.
The SCAM™–or the Sexual Chemistry Attraction Myth–is the acronym I’ve given to the collection of historically and socially reinforced beliefs that brainwash women into worshipping a false idol in their search for erotic vitality. It offers them the wrong kind of hope. It says that soon, somewhere, somehow, you’ll be rescued by sexual chemistry magic. Your erotic salvation will happen—if you’re lucky—from the outside in. A Sexual Chemistry Tarzan or Tarzan-ess will swing across the screen of your life, scoop you up, and do the erotic heavy-lifting for you.
It’s Easy to Overlook the SCAM of Sexual Chemistry
In our hyper-connected world, scams are more prevalent than ever before. We deal with them all the time: emails from long-forgotten acquaintances who supposedly lost their wallets in Belize, ersatz Paypal prompts encouraging us to reset our password so a stranger can buy baseball hats in Nevada or a Dyson in Key West. We’re used to these types of obvious scams, but it’s easy to overlook the scam of sexual chemistry. If our great-great grandmothers were still alive today to tell us about the legal practice of coverture[1]—where women became their husband’s property on their wedding day—we would immediately recognize what our foremothers described to us for what it was: institutionalized repression.
But when it comes to our present-day, me-too world, women still often blame themselves for their low sexual desire levels. We know that 94% of murders in the U.S. are female victims of intimate partner violence[2], we clearly see the signs of women’s ongoing struggle to achieve personal and sexual autonomy. But it’s not always easy to see the link between personal arousal and desire levels and the culture around us.
That’s how the SCAM™ gets away with hacking into our sex lives. As long as it operates in stealth mode, we’ll blame ourselves.
[1]Retrieved from: https://www.britannica.com/topic/coverture
[2]Martin, Wednesday. Webinar, The Future of Marriage, May, 2018.
Originally published on The Good Men Project.
