There are a lot of things I’d like to see happen in 2018, but beyond my own goals, I’d really love if this became the year we stopped hyper-sexualizing literally every non-sexual thing in our society.

It seems like everything in our culture revolves around hypersexuality. This isn’t to say that sex and sexuality is something we shouldn’t talk about – on the contrary, I think we need to have more open and honest conversations about sex, but we need to look at the context of how we portray sex and sexuality as a society.

We over-sexualize everything, especially on many platforms aimed towards children. This warps our perceptions of sex and sexuality in unhealthy ways. We make everything about a woman’s body sexual, even something as arbitrary as shoulders. Then we use these over-sexualized perceptions of women in the media and shows that children watch. When we place these perceptions on women in their late 20s and then make these women play high school-aged children on television and in movies, we teach children to have unhealthy and unrealistic expectations for themselves.

Even something as pure as friendship is over sexualized in our society. Platonic friendships between people of the gender(s) they are sexually or romantically attracted to are constantly sexualized. Parents talk about how cute their kids would be as a couple or something of the like until they are a bit older and then it is all surveillance and lock down to protect the fragile purity of their daughters. It’s ridiculous.

We need to promote these kinds of platonic relationships between young people because most people have more platonic relationships than sexual or romantic ones and these are the relationships that teach us sympathy, empathy, respect, and communication. These are the relationships that help young people grow into mature adults who can have healthy romantic and sexual relationships in the future.

I’d also love it if I could watch a commercial for food, cars, soap, or any other non-sexual product without their being some not-so-hidden message behind every advertisement. These tones flow into every other topic I’ve talked about and before we can see a change we need to have real conversations about how our unhealthy perceptions of sex and sexuality have an impact on our society.