September 4: World Sexual Health Day

We use Artificial Intelligence both through an AI assistant called Camille, and also within virtual characters in the scenes. Camille allows you to be accompanied and represents a trusted person in whom you can confide without judgment.

The first mental impact on sexual health is also felt on the physical level, it will be sexual disorders and dysfunctions. These disorders can have a purely physiological origin, but the psyche is often at the heart of these problems.

The best known of these dysfunctions are erectile function disorders, that is to say the difficulty in having or maintaining an erection when desired, ejaculation disorders, most often when ejaculation occurs earlier than would have been desired, orgasm disorders, that is to say the inability to achieve orgasm, and vaginismus, a disorder causing intense contraction of the vagina leading to intense pain during penetration.

These disorders can have a physical origin, but when this is ruled out by a doctor, the psychological origin remains the most probable. therapy will then be necessary to work on these difficulties, whose origin is often multifactorial. We will seek to understand how the body functions, the thoughts and behaviors that maintain these difficulties, and to modify them to regain satisfactory functioning.

Another category of disorders influenced by the psychological dimension of the person concerns desire and libido, which could be defined simply as the desire to engage in sexual activity (alone or with others). This desire fluctuates naturally throughout life, sometimes high, sometimes very low, or even non-existent. This intensity does not determine the disorder. It is the impact on the person's life and the suffering that this intensity causes that will determine whether the person needs to be helped.

However, for the WHO still, sexual health "does not consist only of an absence of disease, dysfunction or infirmity". Well-being therefore goes beyond bodily and psychological functioning. The factors that contribute to it extend around each person, in the environment, the entourage, partners, and many others.

The WHO clarifies its definition as “the possibility of enjoyable and safe sexual experiences, free from coercion, discrimination and violence”. This sentence highlights a central and fundamental aspect of healthy sexuality: consent.

Sexual consent is defined as agreement to participate in one or more intimate and/or sexual acts.

To be valid, consent must meet three conditions: it must be given freely, informed and by a person competent to consent.

Free consent means that acceptance must not be given under violence, duress, pressure or threat.

Informed consent means that the person giving consent must not be in a state that impairs their judgment and their capacity to consent. A person who is heavily intoxicated or under the influence of substances, for example, is not able to give informed consent.

That the person is capable of consenting, finally, presumes that the person is of a sufficient age to understand what they are consenting to, that their mental, psychological and intellectual state allows them to understand what they are consenting to and that they are conscious. A person who loses consciousness during an activity to which they have consented is no longer able to consent. A sleeping person is not in a state to give consent, regardless of their body's automatic physiological reaction.

Consent is not based on the presence or absence of sexual arousal, or any other sign. Consent is a state of mind that must be communicated and can be revoked at any time.