When most hear the phrase “sexual awakening”, they think of the first time in someone’s life where they experience sexual arousal or the desire to be physically intimate with another. And even though this view about sexual awakening is correct it doesn’t convey what awakening actually means in the context of human sexuality. Discovering your sexual self is a normal and exciting experience that can occur at any time and at any age. We are never too old to reinvent our sexual selfs 🖤

Most people experience their first sexual awakening during early adolescence, between 10-14 years old, but really can happen at any age and is often a significant part of an individual's journey toward understanding their own self identification. And even though at that age most of the “education” that is given comes from movies, porn, mainstream media or parents, school and community telling not to ask or worse, to feel shame for even having such thoughts, for the time people reach adulthood they suspect that sex it’s way more than sexual acts, includes sexuality. It encompasses our values, attitudes, feelings, interactions, and behaviors around the concept of sex.

“Essential to our perspective is the assumption that with the beginnings of adolescence and with the increasing acknowledgement by the surrounding social world of an individual's sexual capacity, many novel factors come into play, and an overemphasis upon a search for continuity with infant and childhood experiences may be dangerously misleading. In particular, it may be a costly mistake to be overimpressed with preadolescent behaviors that appear to be manifestly sexual. In general, it is possible that much of the power of sexuality may be a function of the fact that it has been defined as powerful or dangerous. But this overenriched conception of sexual behavior (to the degree that it is possessed by any individual) must largely follow upon considerable training in an adult language that includes an overdetermined conception of sexuality. Thus it does not necessarily follow that the untrained infant or child will respond as powerfully or as complexly to his own seemingly sexual behaviors as an adult observer”.

Gagnon & Simon; Sexual Conduct | 1973

Understanding this is key to comprehend what actually sexual awakening is [according to me, of course] because it is not just that we are becoming aware of sex, but that our attitudes, feelings, and values around sex are beginning to shape themselves. Acknowledging that our sex view it’s shaped within a [very often negative] collective it’s part of the second awakening. So what exactly is sexual awakenings at this age? Simple, recognize our internal and social negative narratives/scripts and work toward burning that shit. Is it easy? Hell no! Is it worth it? HELL YES!.