Like Cooking, But For Sex

Ted Florea

"This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook — try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless and above all have fun!" — Julia Child

Our mission to unleash our sexual potential is not new. What is new is a growing openness in global culture to engage with these traditionally mysterious, medicalized, and largely taboo aspects of our sexuality. And while we've made great strides in fighting for our sexual rights when it comes to gender, sexual orientation and lifestyle, we've only just begun to systematically address sexual response as a central part of the human experience.

We want to inspire you to see yourself as standing on the threshold of a new pleasure revolution. One with the potential to increase human happiness more significantly than all other scientific or technological advances for maximizing our other human pleasures. To get a sense of the journey we're embarking on when it comes to sexual enjoyment, it's instructive to think back to where we were in our enjoyment of food just a few decades ago.

It's 1954 and Americans have just added an exotic new cuisine to their staple of meatloaves and tuna noodle casseroles — frozen TV dinners. For super special dinner parties, the adventurous turn to the joys of dipping bread into pots of melted Velveeta. Truly fancy means steak frites in a heavy sauce at that expensive French place. And nothing else. The first sushi restaurant in the US will not open until 1978. And it will take thirty years for most Americans to try Mexican food for the first time, most likely at an "authentic" Mexican restaurant chain.

Fortunately, it's not 1954 anymore and the world has undergone a culinary revolution. Our enjoyment of food has reached unimaginable levels of diversity, complexity and choice. Ingredients now span the globe, with new ones being discovered, added and recombined every day. Recipes proliferate and circulate online exponentially. Restaurants, meal kits and delivery services cater to all cuisines and palates. Foodgasm is now officially a word. Sorta. And with countless cooking shows and celebrity chefs we now all speak a rich culinary language that makes Grandma's deviled eggs and beef stroganoff vocabulary seem downright archaic. Because it was.

We've embraced the pleasure of food and used culinary science, experimentation and creativity to reimagine what food can be. And we've done the same with almost all the other pleasures in life, from how we enjoy music and entertainment to how we live and travel. Across all these domains, we've created a life of creature comfort and sensory stimulation that would be the envy of all the queens and kings of bygone years.

But despite all of these advances, and despite all the strides we've made to guarantee our sexual rights, we're just starting to decode our sexual appetites and trace the outlines of a revolution that will do for sex what the culinary revolution did for the way we eat.

Right now, sexual pleasure remains largely a blank menu. The ingredients are unknown, or if they are they have no names we can all agree on and use. Meals remain largely expected and habitual. Even when we reach great heights of sexual pleasure, like an exotic meal we had in a faraway place, it's hard for us to send the recipe back home let alone prepare that delicious meal for ourselves or teach others to prepare it for us.

If we're honest, we have to acknowledge that compared to our culinary repertoire our sexual repertoire is limited to say the least. We can experiment with dozens of different kinds of avocado toast, choose from hundreds of sakes to accompany our ikura with quail egg or ask for one of an infinite permutation of overpriced kinds of coffee.

Then we can finger our vaginas. Go down on our partners. And fuck.

Can you spot the difference?

The vision is simple. Humans share recipes. We share playlists. We teach each other dances and pass them across generations. One day — and the trajectory is clear — we'll share our discoveries about pleasure the same way: not just that something was good, but the specific, nuanced, named realization of how and why and for whom. The vocabulary that doesn't yet fully exist, but will. Future generations will look back at this era the way we look back at more closeted times: with fond disbelief that so much went undiscovered, unnamed, unexplored. Sex will become what food has already become — an area of lifelong learning, of joyful unembarrassed exploration, of knowledge passed from person to person like a recipe too good to keep to yourself.