For many girls and women, the journey toward sexual empowerment starts with visibility. Wearing what they never felt allowed to wear. Speaking more openly, and embracing desire without apology.

It feels like progress. And in many ways, it is.

But something quieter often gets overlooked, the shift from repression to performance. A new kind of pressure dressed up as freedom. Instead of shrinking, many women start shaping their sexuality around what looks confident, what’s praised, what’s validated, what feels powerful on the surface.

This article looks at what happens when sexual empowerment becomes something women feel they need to display, rather than something they live and feel. It explores why the performance shows up, what it protects, and how to begin returning to a more honest connection with the body.

The Boomerang Effect: From Repression to Performed Sexuality

Before a woman ever chooses how to express her sexuality, her body has already been shaped by what she was told it should mean. Often, that shaping isn’t overt. It lives in tone or in silence. In the way mothers change the subject. In the way schools talk about “protection” before they ever mention pleasure. In the way curiosity is shamed, and desire is cast as dangerous.

She internalizes that long before she has language for it. Over time, this doesn't just impact her thoughts, it impacts how she lives in her body. For many women, this creates a quiet but persistent disconnection.

Eventually, many women reject that shame. They move toward what looks like empowerment. They start naming their desires, wearing what they want, being bolder in bed. And that movement matters.

But if the internal disconnection never got addressed, the empowerment often becomes surface-level. It feels like claiming power, but really, it’s still shaped by who’s watching. The pressure isn’t to hide anymore, it’s to display. To look sexually confident. To seem desirable. To be “wild,” “uninhibited,” “freaky in the sheets.” It’s sold as empowerment, but it still hinges on validation.

So much of this “freedom” is still curated. It still asks the body to perform, not inhabit.

And the question becomes: is the expression coming from a felt sense of yes, from real sensation, from inner clarity? Or is it still about being appealing? Still about being seen?

The High Cost of the “Empowered” Sexual Persona and Sexual Objectification

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from playing the role of a sexually empowered woman while quietly feeling disconnected from your own body. It’s a dissonance that doesn’t always register right away. Especially when the external image is praised. When people say things like, “You’re so confident,” “I wish I were as free as you,” or “You own it.”

But what gets missed is what’s happening beneath the image. The truth that you can look empowered while feeling numb. That you can say yes, enthusiastically even, while your body is quietly tightening, bracing, or dissociating. That you can perform a version of “liberated” sexuality while your nervous system is still in survival mode, locked in patterns of freeze, fawn, or override.

For many women, especially young women, the “sexy” version of themselves becomes a default mask out of habit and out of a long history of needing to be desirable to feel safe, valuable, or in control.

The cost of this persona is subtle but significant. Over time, it erodes presence and contributes to body dissatisfaction. The body stops being a place to feel from, and starts being a thing to manage, to present, to make attractive.

Agency gets blurred and the internal yes and no become harder to hear. Decisions get filtered through what will please, what will impress, what will keep the connection, or the illusion of power, intact.

Internal Conflict: Desire vs. Discomfort

For many women, sexual expression is laced with a quiet, persistent conflict. On one hand, they want to feel attractive, wanted, chosen. On the other hand, they’re exhausted by how often that desire gets filtered through someone else’s lens, especially when it comes to their physical appearance.

“I want to be desired, but I also don’t want to be reduced to just that.”

A lot of women learned early on that being desirable is currency. It buys approval, it keeps relationships intact, and it protects against rejection. It creates a sense of control in situations where actual power is limited. So they leaned into it because being wanted felt safer than being invisible.

But when desire becomes a way to secure belonging or avoid abandonment, it stops being about the woman herself. Her pleasure becomes secondary and the performance becomes primary.

Over time, this creates internal confusion. The mind may say, “I want this,” but the body feels flat, braced, or uninterested. A compliment may land, briefly, but underneath, there’s a simmering resentment, “Why do I still feel like I have to keep this up?”

That resentment doesn’t come from hating desirability. It comes from never having a neutral space to explore it. From always having to wonder if you’re being desired as a whole person, or just a role. From constantly negotiating between being seen and being safe.

When Hyper-Sexualization Poses as Love

One of the most harmful myths promoted by the media and entertainment industry is that if a woman appears sexually confident, if she presents herself in a “liberated” or sexually available way, she’ll be loved more, respected more, and seen more clearly.

But the reality is often the opposite.

The hyper-sexualization of women doesn’t lead to deep love or appreciation. It leads to women and young girls being seen as sexual objects, not full human beings. It leads to a dynamic where the more “liberated” a woman appears, the more some people feel entitled to her body, her attention, and her time.

Sexualized images in the media and entertainment industries often don’t reflect real desire, power, or autonomy. They’re designed to sell and to capture attention. Over time, they’ve shaped the way many young people, especially men, interpret a woman’s body, clothing, or demeanor, as if it’s a signal that something is owed.

In this environment, sexual exploitation, harassment, and even violence become easier to justify, especially when a woman is seen as the one who “invited” the attention simply by being visible, sexual, or expressive.

Research suggests that these dynamics don’t just lead to disconnection. They have concrete, damaging effects. Women are more likely to be:

Taken for granted
Emotionally or sexually used
Treated as interchangeable
Subjected to sexual violence and assault
Blamed for male aggression, due to their appearance or confidence

In fact, sexual objectification in entertainment industry content has been directly linked to low self-esteem, body dissatisfaction, and an increased risk of body image issues, eating disorders, and other forms of psychological distress, particularly in adolescent girls.

Hyper-sexualization doesn’t create intimacy, it distorts it.

When women and young girls are constantly exposed to media images that reduce them to body parts, bodily postures, or revealing clothing, it teaches them to view themselves from the outside in. To define their worth by physical appearance, not by agency, depth, or character.

And when a woman starts performing her sexuality to match those standards, she may gain attention, but often loses access to her own cues, her own boundaries, and her own truth. Worse, the more she performs, the more likely she is to be misunderstood, misused, or controlled by people who were never interested in her full humanity in the first place.

Hyper-sexualization doesn’t teach men to love women better. It teaches them how to consume them. To expect access, and in some extreme cases, to normalize gender-based violence when access is denied.

What Embodied Sexuality Looks Like In Girls and Women

Embodied sexuality can be quiet. It doesn’t need to be displayed or explained, though it can be if that feels right. It’s something a woman feels in her own skin, often without anyone else ever knowing. It’s the sense of being at home in your body, including in the context of sexual relationships. Not just when you feel attractive or “on,” but when you’re alone, unwatched, and unfiltered. When your body is allowed to be as it is, without being a performance.

It means pleasure doesn’t have to look a certain way. Instead, it’s about whether you actually feel something. Embodiment means paying attention to what your body wants, not what you think you should want. It’s about noticing when something feels good, but also when it doesn’t.

True empowerment lives not in how you present, but in how present you actually are.

The Difference Between Embodied Power and Performed Confidence

Embodied Power	Performed Sexual Confidence
Based on how it feels in the body	Based on how it looks to others
Slow, responsive, tuned into internal cues	Fast, polished, focused on outcome
Consent is moment-to-moment	Consent is assumed or performed
Desire is internally led	Desire is shaped around being wanted
Boundaries are clear and self-honoring	Boundaries are softened to avoid conflict or rejection
Feels steady, safe, and self-owned	Feels fragile, attention-dependent

Coming Back to Self-Guided Sexual Expression

they create diverse female characters in the entertainment and media industries — Pause Before Yes

Many women move toward sex out of habit, expectation, or emotional obligation. Saying *“yes”* becomes automatic, something that protects the relationship, keeps the man happy, keeps things smooth, or prevents conflict.

Rebuilding sexual agency starts by pausing. That pause is about checking whether the body is online or going along. This might be the first time a woman’s internal sense of readiness is actually given weight. Over time, the body begins to trust that its signals won’t be ignored.

Touch That Doesn’t Need to Lead Anywhere

Self-touch, without the goal of orgasm, is one of the most confronting practices for women whose sexual expression has been shaped around response and reward. It asks the question, can touch feel good simply because it does, not because it leads somewhere?

Letting Go of What “Sexy” Is Supposed to Look Like

Without realizing it, many women internalize a narrow idea of what sexual expression should look like, confident, high energy, desirable to others. But that image is often built on scripts that never accounted for their real body, real needs, or real timing.

Rebuilding self-guided sexuality means separating from the need to appear a certain way. It allows women to start moving based on what feels natural, not what will be perceived as erotic. For many, this means letting sexuality look different than they imagined. Sometimes slower, sometimes quieter, and often more honest.

Prioritizing Rest Over Output

When sexuality has been shaped by performance, the nervous system is often in a state of high alert, even if arousal is present. That alertness creates fatigue over time. The body stops trusting that it can just be. It feels like it must always deliver something.

Rest disrupts this pattern. When a woman allows herself to rest without guilt, she signals to her system that she doesn’t need to produce in order to be valuable or sexually valid. This is especially important in rebuilding desire.

Pleasure Wands as Tools for Inner Listening

Hyper-sexualization and sexual exploitation teach women to be seen as sexual.

It rewards the appearance of confidence, not the experience of connection. Most of us were never taught how to stay with ourselves during sex. We were taught how to react. How to look interested. How to perform arousal on cue. How to move like we’re turned on, even when we’re checked out.

Over time, that performance becomes automatic. Not because we’re faking it, but because it’s safer and more familiar than the awkwardness of actually listening to our own timing. Pleasure wands are a great tool to repair this.

They give you real-time feedback. You feel where you’re pressing. You notice when it’s too much. You come into contact with parts of yourself that have been ignored, touched too fast, entered without permission, or never even felt.

If you’ve been shaped to perform, chances are your system doesn’t trust slowness. It’s braced. It’s prepared to endure. It expects to be rushed. The wand gives the chance to notice what’s real.

Because when you learn to stay with your own cues, you start to build something most women have never been given, trust.

Trust between your hands and your inner body. Trust that you won’t rush past what you’re not ready for. Trust that you can feel what’s actually there, even if it’s flat, slow, or quiet, and not leave. And from that kind of trust, your sexuality becomes yours again.

Radical Self-Ownership: Redefining What Feels Sexy to You

Letting Go of Cultural Scripts

Most women’s relationship to sex doesn’t begin in the body. It begins in the gaze, what was seen, what was approved of, what was modeled as attractive or worthy. That includes what their mothers said (or didn’t), what partners praised, what media presented as desirable. And over time, those messages take root as baselines for how to act, how to look, how to be wanted.

The problem isn’t that these scripts exist, it’s that most women have never been given space to question them. Let alone live outside them.

What does sexy mean when it’s not being shaped around how someone responds? What happens when there’s no audience? What actually feels good when the pressure to impress is removed?

For many women, the honest answers don’t come immediately. Especially if pleasure has always been about being chosen, approved of, or considered “good in bed.” Reclaiming a real connection to what feels good takes time. Often, the process begins not with clarity, but with noticing what doesn’t feel like you anymore.

Letting go of sexual scripts doesn’t mean becoming less expressive. It means becoming less dependent on performance. Less willing to override discomfort in order to maintain desirability. And more willing to listen when your body has something different to say than what the situation expects.

Tips for Returning to Body-Led Intimacy

other characteristics — 1. Let Slowness Set the Pace

A lot of women move quickly during sex or self-pleasure, but research suggests slowness reveals what speed hides, hesitation, numbness, tension, confusion.
Going fast lets you avoid it. You can squeeze out an orgasm and bypass the uncomfortable parts. But many women already know the difference between getting off quickly and actually feeling connected.

Slowness gives your nervous system time to register what’s actually happening. It lets you feel the difference between tension and arousal, between stimulation and desire.

This is especially important for women who’ve spent years squeezing out orgasms as a way to feel something. The tight jaw, the clenched pelvic floor, the shallow breath, it’s a forced release. It works, sometimes.

Slowness allows you to listen before you and to notice the subtle signals that were never given space. If you are interested in trying slow self pleasure, a great start is this slow self pleasure mini course.

2. Notice When You Leave Yourself

The moment you start thinking about how you look, how you’re being received, or how to keep someone interested, pause. This is often when the negative influence of external pressures begins to affect you. That’s usually when performance begins. You don’t need to stop the experience entirely, but you can shift your attention back inward.

What’s happening at the level of sensation? Where are you bracing, holding, checking out? This noticing is the first step to staying in relationship with yourself during intimacy.

3. Stop When You Need To (Even If It’s Inconvenient)

This is one of the hardest parts of body-led intimacy, honoring when your body says no, even if your mind was excited, even if your partner was into it, even if things were already “underway.” Recognizing and respecting these boundaries is crucial in preventing situations that could lead to sexual harassment.

Every time you pause or recalibrate, you send your body the message that it matters more than the moment. Over time, this builds deep trust in your own internal signals, which is what makes intimacy feel safe again.

4. Track Subtle Sensation - Not Just Arousal

Body-led intimacy doesn’t always start with desire. Sometimes it starts with neutrality, discomfort, or stillness in various body parts. Most women have been taught to measure sexuality by intensity, high arousal, wetness, climax. But real reconnection often starts with the smallest sensations like warmth, softness, slight tingling, subtle opening.

Let those cues matter and let them guide your pace. The more you track the quiet shifts, the more access you’ll have to authentic desire that arises from within, not just what’s sparked by external pressure or expectation.

5. Choose What Supports Presence, Not Performance

No matter the tool, a wand, touch, or partnered intimacy, the goal isn’t to create pleasure. It’s to witness it, to respond to it, to feel it without pressure. If a tool like a pleasure wand helps you stay connected to sensation, use it. If it starts pulling you into outcome or performance, step back.

This includes even helpful practices like yoni mapping or breathwork. If you find yourself trying to “do it right,” stop, because presence matters more than technique.

6. Let Desire Be Incomplete, Inconsistent, or Unclear

You don’t need to feel “fully turned on” to begin and you also don’t need to finish. Body-led intimacy makes room for uncertainty. It lets you just try something for the sake of it and feeling safe to stop whenever you want. When you lead from body led intimacy, you can also feel OK with starting without finishing.

The Empowered Path With Viva La Vagina™ 2.0

Unlearning performance is just the beginning. Once you start noticing when you override, collapse, or perform through sex, it can leave you in a strange in-between. You’ve seen through the old patterns, but you don’t yet have a clear path back into your body. You know you want to feel sex from the inside, not perform it from the outside, but you’re not sure how.

Viva La Vagina™ 2.0 is a deep, carefully designed membership experience with over a dozen modules that walk you through the realities of healing from sexual performance and disconnection, starting from the nervous system. It provides a safe, body-led structure to rebuild your sexual confidence from the ground up.

This course provides the creme de la creme in terms of nervous system regulation and provides practical tools to recognize when you're in freeze, fawn, or override, and how to regulate in real time, and experience actual nervous system repair that you can feel.

Module Examples:

The Voice of Your Pussy - how to identify her cues through grounded sensation
Therapeutic Self-Touch - guided practices that help you relearn how to touch yourself without going straight into outcome or climax
Yoni Mapping & De-Armouring* - a breakdown of why certain areas shut down, and how to reintroduce contact slowly and safely

Conclusion

Hyper-sexualization is often mistaken for empowerment because it looks like confidence. But for many women, it’s just a new version of control. One where the body still doesn’t get a say, and one where the pressure to be desirable never leaves.

Performing sex isn’t the same as feeling it. Being watched isn’t the same as being present. And looking empowered doesn’t mean you’re connected to yourself.

Real empowerment doesn’t come from how you appear. It comes from how well you can stay with your body. Especially when it’s slow, especially when it’s quiet and especially when it’s not giving you what you thought it should.

That kind of embodiment takes practice, repatterning, tools, structure, and most importantly, time. That’s where the work is. And that’s where the freedom actually begins.

Meet Your Author

Courtney Davis

Courtney Davis is a leading force in female sexual wellness, empowering women to reconnect with their body’s wisdom to experience more fulfilling intimacy and pleasure, and as an avenue to express the fullness of who they are in the world. As the founder of The Empowered Woman and Viva La Vagina™ online membership, Courtney guides women on a transformative journey at the intersection of sensuality, spirituality, and empowerment. Beyond conversations, she creates tangible tools for transformation, including WAANDS™ Crystal Sex Toy Boutique and Free Bleed® Waterproof Intimacy Blankets, products designed to help women discover and embrace their body’s wisdom, deepen self-love, and celebrate pleasure. With years of experience helping women unravel shame and overcome conditioning that diminishes confidence, Courtney is a trusted authority on guiding women to embrace their full potential and unlock life-changing pleasure. Originally from Calgary, Canada, she now lives in Austin, Texas.

The Hidden Cost of Hyper Sexualization of Women