I have all the sex I want without fear or shame. I feel no obligation to partake in sex acts I don't want, or don't interest me. I don't feel pressure to change who I am or what I look like to excite someone sexually. I don't have to view sex as something I do for someone else, or endure for someone else. I don't do "maintenance" sex. I don't have to accept that sometimes my pleasure just isn't coming, and I should just get it over with. I don't have to perform sex for someone else. I don't use porn as a blueprint for what my sex life should look like.

My sex life is for me, on my terms. I am sexually liberated.

Like most of us here, I went through a sexually experimental phase. I jumped into BDSM. I tried polyamory. I pursued people hoping they would be receptive of me. And looking back, I realize it was due to insecurity on my part. I saw myself as a misfit compared to other women, and felt a need to compensate in order to be more "interesting" to other partners. If I couldn't be the hottest woman, I could at least be the adventurous one.

I did have partners, but I wasn't happy. That pressure to keep performing was still there. At no point could I turn it off and not disappoint my partners. Their vision of me was already set.

I thought this was sexually liberating at first, but it turned into sexual restrictions. I fear a lot of women today fell into the same trap, but instead of the "thou shalt nots" of the past we now have "thou musts."

There are two kinds of freedom: freedom to and freedom from. We have the freedom now to do any sexual act that we please, but do we have freedom from the expectations? Certainly not.

True sexual liberation can't exist until the "vanilla shaming" goes away and conversations about sex stop becoming one-up contests about who can endure the most torture. Sex positivity has a lot of flaws, but this is among the worst.