Male desire is treated as inherent. Female desire is treated as strategic, or calculating, even.

Intimacy matters not because sex is another thing to accomplish or another relationship task to optimize, but because it is one of the few places left in modern life where we can stop managing everything.

Start having sex. Start flirting. Start talking. Start dating. Start prioritizing your partner’s pleasure. Start communicating your needs and boundaries. Start respecting one another and the relationship you’ve built together. Start making time for each other. Start finding humor, joy, and fun again.

So, don’t delay. Don’t delay your pleasure and desire and joy and freedom. Give yourself permission to enjoy today. Leave the dishes in the sink, let the kids play independently for twenty more minutes, and get the gift for the birthday party online. Live your life now, to-do lists be damned.

What if we consider the act of faking orgasms as a learned behavior based on survival? Perhaps faking orgasms is a safety valve, something we might do consciously in the moment, but that is rooted in deep unconscious survival mechanisms.

How can we talk about sex in an open, honest, and vulnerable way? We are taught not to do that. We are taught to be people-pleasers, performers, and actresses—not fully sentient beings in charge of our internal needs and our external environments.

But the pursuit of gratitude has been bastardized.

It has been contorted and castrated into a tool for female subjugation. And we’re all eating it up. Not only are we eating it up, but we’re also the ones espousing the practice, like a meditative Munchausen’s syndrome.

The call is coming from inside the house.