I watch them as I scroll through my feed: these impossibly young faces contorted into expressions of practiced seduction, bodies positioned with algorithmic precision to maximize engagement. Fifteen-year-olds who have mastered the aesthetics of desire without understanding its substance. Children performing adulthood for an audience of strangers.
This is not sexual liberation. This is sexual colonization.
Before I proceed, let me acknowledge the obvious: I earn my living through intimate encounters with clients. My profession exists at the intersection of performed and authentic sexuality. This gives me both unique insight into these dynamics and requires me to examine my own participation in the commodification of desire.
The distinction, I’ve learned, lies not in whether sexuality can be transactional, but in the consciousness and agency behind that transaction.
When Discovery Becomes Performance
For generations, sexual awakening followed a predictable path: we discovered our bodies in private, explored our desires quietly, then learned to share those discoveries with others. Internal awareness preceded external expression. Private exploration came before intimate sharing.
Social media has turned this sequence on its head.
Young people now learn the performance before the experience. They master seductive poses before understanding arousal. They perfect the aesthetics of sexuality while remaining strangers to their actual bodies, their genuine desires, their authentic boundaries.
What emerges is a generation that approaches sexuality from the outside in: viewing themselves through the camera’s gaze, measuring their worth in algorithmic feedback, learning that visibility equals value and provocation equals power.
This troubles me because my work has taught me the profound difference between performed and embodied sexuality. When I engage professionally, I bring skill, presence, and genuine care, but I also maintain clear boundaries around my authentic desire.
The Timing of Choice
My professional encounters occur within clear frameworks: informed adult consent, established boundaries, and conscious choice made from a position of education and alternative options. I entered this work at twenty-six, after university, after attempting graduate school, after working in healthcare, with full awareness of what I was choosing and why.
These teenagers building their identities around digital sexual performance have none of these protections. They’re making choices about their sexual futures from positions of developmental vulnerability, economic pressure, and social conditioning they may not even recognize.
What concerns me most is the timing. I had years to develop my authentic sexuality privately before choosing to offer professional intimacy. I understood my own desires, boundaries, and responses before deciding which aspects I would share professionally and which I would keep for myself.
These young people are discovering their sexuality in public, for profit, under algorithmic pressure to escalate. Whether they’re performing or experiencing genuine arousal becomes almost irrelevant. The public nature of their sexual development itself creates complications I never faced.
When Sex Becomes Content
What happens when sexuality becomes content? When intimate expression gets optimized for engagement rather than connection?
We create young people who experience their own bodies as products to be marketed rather than instruments of pleasure to be explored. Who learn to associate sexual expression with external validation rather than internal satisfaction. Who confuse being desired with experiencing desire.
This hits young women particularly hard. They absorb the ancient lie that their sexuality exists primarily for others’ consumption. They learn to perfect the performance of arousal without developing awareness of what actually arouses them. They master seductive presentation while learning to tie their pleasure directly to algorithmic approval, conditioning themselves to find satisfaction in metrics rather than sensation.
Young men face their own distortions: learning that sexual prowess equals masculine worth, that emotional vulnerability undermines sexual appeal, that conquest matters more than connection. The hypersexualized imagery becomes their template for “normal” sexuality, creating expectations that real intimacy can rarely fulfill.
The Algorithm’s Appetite
Perhaps most insidiously, these platforms monetize sexual insecurity. The algorithm rewards increasingly provocative content, creating an escalation trap where boundaries are pushed not from genuine exploration but from addiction to digital validation.
Young people learn to associate sexual expression with the dopamine hit of likes and comments rather than the deeper satisfaction of authentic connection. They become performers in their own sexual story, always angling for the best shot rather than the most genuine experience.
The Intimacy Problem
This performative sexuality becomes a barrier to genuine connection later in life. When you’ve learned to view yourself as a sexual object, transitioning to experiencing yourself as a sexual subject (someone with authentic desires and boundaries) becomes extraordinarily difficult.
I’ve worked with clients in their twenties and thirties who can perform sexuality flawlessly but struggle to identify what actually brings them pleasure. Who can seduce strangers online but can’t communicate their needs to intimate partners. Who mistake being desired for being powerful.
They often complain that their real-life partners can’t simply “accept them for who they are” without recognizing that who they’ve become is a person whose sense of self depends entirely on external validation. They expect unconditional acceptance while offering only a curated version of themselves, one optimized for approval rather than authentic connection.
This is the tragedy I seek to address through my work: helping people reconnect with their authentic desires after years of performance and disconnection.
What Power Actually Looks Like
True sexual power doesn’t come from being desired by many. It comes from knowing and communicating your own desires clearly, first to yourself, and then to your partner. It emerges from embodied awareness, not external validation. From internal exploration, not algorithmic optimization.
We need to help young people understand that:
- Sexuality is experience to be lived, not content to be consumed
- Desire is felt, not performed
- Sexual worth cannot be quantified in metrics
- True intimacy requires presence, not presentation
- Your body exists for your pleasure, not others’ entertainment
The most erotic thing about a person is often their authenticity: their willingness to be genuinely present rather than perfectly curated. This cannot be taught through a screen.
A Different Path
Imagine young people learning sexuality through embodied awareness rather than digital performance. Through curiosity about their own responses rather than optimization for others’ reactions. Through the development of boundaries and desires rather than poses and presentations.
This isn’t about shame or restriction. It’s about reclaiming sexuality as a realm of genuine exploration rather than algorithmic entertainment. About understanding that the most profound erotic experiences happen not in front of cameras but in moments of authentic connection, vulnerability, and presence.
My profession has taught me that the most meaningful erotic experiences occur not when we perform sexuality for external validation, but when we offer genuine presence, skill, and care from a place of authentic choice and clear boundaries.
The revolution isn’t in performing sexuality more boldly online. It’s in experiencing it more authentically offline: with ourselves, with our boundaries, with partners who see us as whole humans rather than content to be consumed.
The Collective Cost
Yet perhaps the most troubling aspect of this phenomenon extends beyond individual psychology to collective consequence. When an entire generation of young women learns that their primary value lies in sexual appeal, we move backward as a society rather than forward.
The women who fought for our presence in boardrooms, laboratories, and positions of power did so believing that future generations would be valued for the full spectrum of their capabilities. Instead, we’re witnessing a voluntary return to reduction: brilliant minds choosing to monetize their bodies because the algorithm rewards sexuality more than intellect, creativity, or innovation.
This isn’t empowerment. It’s the repackaging of ancient limitations in modern packaging. When the most economically successful young women are those who perform sexuality rather than those who excel in science, art, or leadership, we send a clear message about what society truly values in women.
The teenage girl earning six figures from her bedroom may feel powerful, but her success reinforces the very systems that tell other girls their minds matter less than their bodies. We’re collectively training an entire generation to see themselves as sexual products first, complete humans second.
In a world that teaches us to perform desire, the most radical act might be learning to feel it. And perhaps even more radical: refusing to perform it for profit while our actual capabilities go unmonetized and undervalued.