Sex Addiction, Sex as Self-harm, and Hypersexuality  These are a few things that I wish my sex ed curriculum covered because I feel like I learned about this waayyy too late and I had to find out from social media of all places.  Who am I kidding, I wish I had sex ed period. Instead, since I live in the south, I had some crazy lady come over to my school talking about how she's a "born again virgin," and how abstinence is the only option. There is a reason why the Bible Belt is also known as the Teen Pregnancy Belt. Anyway, tangent aside, in addition to condoms, birth control, and consent I think another really important aspect of having safe sex is understanding why you're choosing to engage in sex. Because not coming at sex from a healthy place can result in a lot of emotional damage.  First of all, sex addiction is not a thing. Yeah, I was pretty shocked about this. But no, it isn't a thing. Sometimes people just have really high sex drives. Or sometimes, sex is a cover for other things going wrong. For example, people use it as an escapist coping mechanism, effects of repression, a substitute for emotional intimacy, etc. Which then leads me to sex as self-harm. There are people who feel the need to put themselves into uncomfortable situations with people who don't value them as a way of harming themselves. It's usually consists of partaking in risky sexual activity or having sex with people who you know don't respect your boundaries. It's kind of similar to how some people do a lot of risk taking activities when they are depressed. And then there is hypersexuality. Usually this is what people are actually referring to when people point to sex addiction. In addition to everything that I talked about above, hypersexuality can occur to people who have been sexually assaulted. Apparently, there are some people who start to have lots of sex with lots of people after assault as a way to feel like they are in control of their sexuality in a sexual situation. I remember reading The Game a few months ago. Not gonna lie, that was a difficult book to get through and honestly, I read only about half. But there is one part of the book that really sticks out to me as extremely slimy. One of the characters were talking about this guy who is apparently a "natural." Apparently, this guy can get with any girl he pleases with minimal effort and has slept with 100s of women. And these guys started talking about how this guy in question lost his virginity at 11 to his baby sitter who was 17 years old. I remember putting the book down. . In my mind, I was just thinking that THIS IS LITERALLY RAPE, A CHILD CAN'T CONSENT THIS. The way that these guys talked about this situation was as if they glorified it, like this was something to applaud, an accomplishment for the guy they were talking about. Also in my mind, this was around the time when I found out about hypersexuality in general and I just sat there thinking *these guys are glorifying a traumatic event and basically further enabling a coping mechanism.* This guy was basically a classic case of someone with a supposed "sex addiction" actually becoming hypersexual due to trauma and then using sex as a form of self harm.  My thing with this post is not shame people with high sex drives or people who like having a lot of casual sex with different people. Those can be completely natural and healthy. But my thing is that I think it's important for people to check in with themselves and their motivations. It's the same thing with people who want to wait to have sex. Wanting to wait can also be completely natural and healthy.  It's not so much about the decision rather it's about how you got there and why you are making that decision. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is because I feel like this side of safe sex doesn't get talked about enough and because people tend to glorify hook up culture too much blindly without checking in with themselves and thinking whether or not taking part in hook up culture is right for them or if it's coming from a healthy place.