This is not about being anti-sex. This is not a call for a return to a puritan past where intercourse was had and not heard. But it is about feeling short-changed and wanting to shake awake the majority of us who have been badgered into apathy by the sexual saturation of Western culture. It is about taking back control of sex, its meaning and its representation from the market.

Is this really our world, where it is no longer strange to see pictures of breasts on the side of buses? Where it is considered hip for men and women to visit swanky lap-dancing clubs while remaining oblivious to the continuum of exploitation that links those polished performers. Where celebrity magazines detail the copulation techniques of minor celebrities, but their readers remain unable to choose on any given night whether they’d rather sleep alone.

To desire and be desired can be many things: funny, awkward, sacred and profane. To be honest about what turns you on demands a particularly intimate bravery. But for all we are overinformed about how other people while away their bedroom hours, about what’s hot and what’s not, men and women are no closer to developing a common erotic language. It seems that that private language is being gradually eradicated from the public domain by the megaphone imperialism of cultural sexism. It is a reasonable question to ask — do men and women bring the same expectations to sexual intercourse? Surveys show that women want sex less often than men, experience orgasm less often and find greater satisfaction in emotional intimacy. But does this mean that women are cuddle-centric, finding it impossible to separate sex from love?

The process of expressing our wanting of another person is necessarily opaque; seduction is by its nature a masque. But this is very different from the wholesale sexual irresponsibility encouraged by cultural sexism. There can be no prescription — too many mora-lisers have failed to codify desire. But we need to stop fooling ourselves that we can translate the sleazy simulacrum of sexual freedom from the billboards into our personal lives. To live the kind of sexual lives that are liberated, we’re going to need a new manifesto.