Jessica P. OgilvieTaking society's moral panic about our allegedly oversexed culture to stratospheric new heights, 71-year-old actress Raquel Welch recently told Men's Health magazine that everyone, everywhere these days is a sex-crazed maniac.
“I think we've gotten to the point in our culture where we're all sex addicts, literally,” she said.
To be fair, the quote was part of a larger conversation with reporter Eric Spitznagel about carnal pleasure, but before we get to that, let's clear up the addiction question. To do so, I give you sex educator Sandra Daugherty of the Sex Nerd Sandra podcast.
“I don't want to get painted as anti-Raquel Welch,” she says, “because I think she's super awesome. [But] I would not say we're all sex addicts.”
Daugherty says that sex addiction stems from the same place as any other addiction — compulsively acting out on deep-seated needs. There's nothing unhealthy about wanting to bone a lot, she says, but it becomes an addiction when it happens all the time without any pleasure, or when it gets in the way of relationships, activities or jobs.
And that's probably not the case for the majority of sex-having adults.
Still, that doesn't mean that Welch has relinquished her role as an omniscient icon of all things hedonistic.
In talking to Spitznagel about the graphic nature of modern-day porn, the actress hearkened back to good old days, when “we didn't have to hear about sex all the time…Can you imagine? My fantasies were all made up on my own.”
I think the notion of Raquel Welch having sexual fantasies is a sexual fantasy in and of itself, but more than that, super extra bonus points to her for her cool-cat openness about her smoldering imagination.
Welch also opined that the “pre-fab” porn of today takes all the delightful anticipation out of getting your freak on, and to a certain extent, Daugherty agrees.
“Right now we're coming out of an era of porn that's very sexually aggressive,” Daugherty said. “There's always a place for that, but I love that Raquel Welch is talking about the importance of the anticipation — that's what sex is, the payoff of the flirt and the seduction and the kissing and the foreplay and the wink.”
Indeed. And who better to usher back in the era of the tease than Raquel “animal skin bikini” Welch?
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