It's World Sexual Health Day (Who Knew)

I feel terrible, I just learned this morning that today is World Sexual Health Day. I'm a sex educator and I should know these things. I'm also someone who is forever looking for things to feel bad about, so maybe I "knew" but then "forgot" only so I could know again. Sexual health is, after all, a very confusing, and often neuroses-inducing concept.

No matter, this is the third year that the World Association for Sexual Health has marked September 4th as a day of awareness raising about the importance of sexual health and now that I know, I thought I should do something about it.

I'm not the only one. All month long the academic publisher Taylor and Francis are making 35 sexual health articles from their peer-reviewed journals available for free. So if you're interested in articles like:

"GWM looking for sex--SERIOUS ONLY": The interplay of sexual ad placement frequency and success on the sexual health of "men seeking men" on Craigslist

or

Marital satisfaction and communication behaviors during sexual and nonsexual conflict discussions in newlywed couples: A pilot study

or

Predicting the job satisfaction of female sex workers in Queensland, Australia

For a less academic approach, you might want to celebrate in your own way, in your own words. At a minimum, why not take a few minutes sometime today and think about how you would define sexual health. What does the term make you think of, and what would you say are the requirements for leading a sexually healthy life? If you have an answer to that last question, consider too how those requirements do and do not reflect your own sex life.

I find that the amount of shame most of us have when it comes to sex means that our definitions of sexual health don't always include things that we do and enjoy. We may masturbate more than we think we "should". We might enjoy sexually explicit writing, pictures, or movies, but think that such things shouldn't be part of a healthy sexuality. We might have fantasies and desires we have never shared with anyone because we are sure they are not healthy.

Of course it all depends on how you define sexual health.

Read More: How Do We Define Sexual Health?