Political

The Perversion of Sex: Part One

4 March

Abuse, Lust, Transaction, And The Lie Of Liberation

The perversion of sex is not new, but the normalization of it might be.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve either read through yourself or at minimum heard about the Epstein files. And don’t worry, I won’t be getting into the specifics of those disgusting atrocities. There honestly aren’t words strong enough to articulate the inhumane things that were transpiring on that island.

But it has had me thinking for quite some time about the perversion of sex.

And how, since the beginning of time, humans have taken something beautiful, something created to be intimate, sacred, connective and distorted it. What was meant to be an act of love has become an act of abuse, an act of trauma, an act of lust, an act of transaction, and an act of absolute perversion.

And to be fair, sex has been perverted since the beginning of time. If we use the Bible as historical reference, Genesis 6–9 describes God flooding the earth because of the depth of human wickedness. Sin had corrupted everything, including a perversion of sex. Even then, something sacred had already been distorted.

So no, this isn’t new.

But what is new is how normalized the distortion has become.

When Abuse Is Protected Instead of Confronted

I wrote a poem years ago that still holds true today. The opening lines were:

“I will never forgive the Black community for how you handle sexual abuse. It’s disturbing how okay you are with violation just because they have a relation to. You acted as if you couldn’t fathom how R. Kelly’s victims stayed so their stories were made out to be untrue, but how many of you still go to family dinners and reunions where your abuser sits across from you…”

Jordan Alexis

And of course it continues.

But my point was simple: we have normalized protecting abusers when there is a personal relationship.

We sweep child sexual abuse under the rug because we don’t want to confront the possibility that it was your father, brother, uncle, or even your aunt. Sex was never created to elicit abuse. But we live in a world where people are comfortable turning something beautiful into something painful and then asking victims to sit quietly at Thanksgiving.

That is perversion.

The Transactional Era

Now let’s talk about transaction.

Anyone who has ever spoken to me about men knows I wholeheartedly believe a man should be a protector and provider. He should make a woman’s life easier. He should bring peace, safety, and generosity.

But my God.

Some of the rhetoric I see online is borderline prostitution dressed up as “standards.” Somehow men and women have become so desensitized that we’ve made transactional sex aspirational. And let me be clear: this is not demonizing sex workers. At all.

But what’s fascinating is that people who do not identify as sex workers are clocking into the same job, performing the same services, negotiating the same exchanges and convincing themselves it’s empowerment because they renamed it “standards.”

If you are lying down with someone primarily because of what you’re extracting monetarily, not because you love them, not because you even genuinely like them, we have once again perverted sex into commerce.

Free will exists. And my point is not to shame, or condemn exploration.

But maturity requires clarity and clarity means being honest about when desire becomes a transaction and when empowerment begins to resemble exploitation.

Lust, Emptiness, and What Science Actually Says

Now let’s get into lust. Clearly one of my favorite topics. “Must We Experience Lust Before Love”

Too many people are comfortable performing acts on each other based solely on physical attraction. Now I realize not everyone views sex as sacred or believes it has any kind of serious weight.

But impact doesn’t require belief.

Because after the attraction fades…
after you experience that hot body…
you’re still left with yourself.

And here’s where science gets uncomfortable.

A long-term cohort study published by the National Institutes of Health (Ramrakha et al., 2013) followed over 1,000 individuals for decades. The researchers examined whether multiple sexual partners predicted later mental health outcomes.

Here’s what they found:

There was no consistent association between the number of partners and later anxiety or depression.
However, higher numbers of sexual partners were strongly associated with later substance dependence disorders, particularly for women.
Women reporting more than 2.5 partners per year had dramatically higher odds of developing substance dependence later even after adjusting for prior mental health issues.

The researchers didn’t moralize or shame. They simply observed a pattern.

One proposed explanation? The potential emotional consequences of “impersonal” sex. Repeated relational detachment. Breakups. Emotional dissonance. Self-medication through substances to cope with loneliness or internal conflict.

Now, correlation is not causation. Let’s be intellectually honest.

But what it does show is that sex divorced from connection may not be as emotionally neutral as culture pretends it is.

The Real Perversion of Sex

The real perversion isn’t sex.

Abuse is.
Exploitation is.
Emotional detachment disguised as empowerment is. When something sacred is stripped of responsibility, it doesn’t become freedom, it becomes consumption. And consumption always leaves someone empty.

We are watching intimacy turn into industry. Connections turn into currency. And trauma gets buried under loyalty. With lust marketed as liberation.

And the cost isn’t just moral. It’s psychological. Relational. Generational.

The perversion of sex isn’t just about a scandalous headline. It’s about what happens to the human soul when something meant to bond us begins to break us.