sex and thinking as a blocker

sex and thinking cannot coexist

I spent 1,5 years working with policy at TikTok. One of my responsibilities was to manage sexual content for one region. Every week, I was discussing sex in the most explicit terms with colleagues from across the world, with everyone from individuals who used to advise former PMs and presidents, to moderators who spent 8 hours every day watching videos of content that should be published on pornhub. Talking so much about sex, what it looks like, where to draw the line, what is considered too sexual, and how to strike the right balance between allowing content that would be positive for the users versus being seen as normalizing sex for minors, all these aspects, made sex very normal to me. I spent so much time thinking about it, breaking it into keywords and images that could be categorized at scale. I went from feeling and from understanding sex on an intuitive level to thinking about it from an intellectual point of view. This was strictly work-related, and I would leave this way of thinking at work when I decided to close the laptop when the day ended. But, while I left this side of my brain at the office every day, I realized there is still a lot of thinking involved with sex; the before, the dreams, the ideas, all of it are just thoughts.

I read this quote from On Love: A Novel, by Alain de Botton:

Sex is instinctive, unreflective, and spontaneous, while thought is careful, uninvolved, and judgmental. To think during sex is to violate a fundamental law of intercourse. But did I have a choice?

Hence the sighing that drowns the sounds of lovers’ thoughts, sighing that confirms: I am too passionate to be thinking. I kiss, and therefore I do not think—such is the official myth under which lovemaking takes place, the bedroom a unique space in which partners tacitly agree not to remind one another of the awe-inspiring wonder of their nudity.

I’ve never thought about thinking during sex this way, but I believe it is helpful for individuals who struggle to let go and feel. It is prohibited to think during sex because the two can’t coexist. It’s against the law to think, intellectualize, to be anywhere but right there, feeling, doing, the only time the brain should be disconnected entirely, not thinking is not an option but a requirement for experiencing it fully. I think about all the work we did to find paths to educate users on TikTok on sexual health without being too much, and I think about how much of the content was focused on thinking. Of course, talking about education and sex from a TikTok point of view means something very different to experiencing it yourself, so the comparison is perhaps not very obvious; however, there is an important piece about sex we fail to teach others about. We talk about so many rules and ideas, sure, things that young people should know to be safe and all of that, but we failed to capture the very core that many people struggle with, perhaps more so girls than boys, which is not to think too much; to understand the connection between mind and body, and learn the ability to separate thinking from feeling. The inability to feel and the constant overthinking is not only harmful in the bedroom but everywhere in life; overintellectualizing your emotions and thinking through experiences meant to be felt and lived is not only a bit sad but it also never works.

You think you are protecting yourself by thinking, analyzing, and intellectualizing, but you are just keeping yourself from fully experiencing yourself and your own life. There are some things we should