"I never want my content to make someone feel like they're failing at sex."
April Maria said this about her own work, but it functions as a diagnosis of what's wrong with a lot of sexual wellness content more broadly. The genre has a problem. In trying to be affirming and empowering, it has created a new set of standards. More sex. Better orgasms. Deeper connection. Greater confidence. The implicit message, running underneath the positive framing, is that if you're not having all of these things, something is going wrong.
April is a sex educator, embodied intimacy coach, and trainee psychosexual and relationship therapist, based in the UK. Her brand partners include Durex, Boots, Ann Summers, and Lovehoney. And her starting point is almost exactly the opposite of what most of those partnerships would suggest: she's not interested in helping people have better sex. She's interested in helping people stop feeling broken about the sex they're having.
"I'm much more interested in understanding the whole person - their body, relationships, experiences, beliefs, health, environment and the messages they've been told about sex." That framing, holistic and non-prescriptive, shapes everything from how she runs client sessions to what she'll agree to promote.
The permission to be messy
The tension April names in sexual wellness content is real and largely unaddressed by the industry that produces it. "There's so much sexual wellness content that can unintentionally create another standard people feel they have to live up to." The wellness aesthetic - aspirational, smooth, carefully lit - applies to sexuality content in ways that mirror exactly the pornographic standard it's supposedly moving away from. The result is a different kind of performance pressure, not an absence of it.
Her answer is to bring both professional training and personal experience into her work. She has experienced her own challenges around pain and intimacy, and she's direct about it. "I'm passionate about talking about the messy, complicated parts of sexuality as well as pleasure." The clinical knowledge gives her credibility. The personal experience gives her authority to say what most educators don't - that sex is frequently neither empowering nor effortless, and that normalising that fact is itself a form of care.
For brands, this is an argument about content register. The aspirational framing that dominates sexual wellness marketing may be actively counterproductive for the customers who most need to feel safe engaging with the category - people navigating pain, shame, low desire, or bodies that don't behave the way the content implies they should. Content that makes space for difficulty, rather than papering over it, reaches people the current register is losing.
On empowerment, and what the word actually means
April has a specific problem with how sexual empowerment is usually discussed, and it's worth quoting directly: "Sexual empowerment means wanting lots of sex, being incredibly confident or being willing to try everything."
That's the version she's pushing back against. Her version: "Sexual empowerment is how we also say no around intimacy and pleasure, and how we learn to not only understand our boundaries but communicate them."
The shift matters commercially as well as conceptually. A sexual wellness industry that defines empowerment as enthusiasm and openness has implicitly excluded everyone who arrives at intimacy with uncertainty, pain, past trauma, or simply a lower appetite than the content suggests is normal. April's framing of empowerment as boundary literacy - knowing what you want, knowing what you don't, and having the language to communicate both - is more accurate and reaches a far wider audience.
The same reframe applies to sexual wellbeing. "It's not about having great sex. It's about having the knowledge and tools to understand what living well with intimacy, pleasure and sex looks like for you." That definition includes understanding and seeking support for sexual pain, staying up to date with sexual health, and knowing which products are safe and appropriate for your body. It is considerably broader than anything most sexual wellness brands are currently building their content around.
On consent as something you read, not just something you ask for
April's approach to consent goes further than the verbal agreement model that most educational content defaults to. "Consent can be in a person's body language." That's a clinical observation with direct implications for how she teaches - and for how brands should think about the educational content they commission.
The ongoing, changeable nature of consent is central to her framework. "It's not simply getting a yes before something happens." Safety, in her teaching, means recognising that everyone arrives at conversations about sex with different experiences, identities, bodies, and histories. Creating space for people to explore without pressure to participate or disclose is not a progressive preference. It's a safety standard.
For brands briefing content creators on topics like how to use a product or how to introduce something new with a partner, this has a direct application. Content that assumes enthusiasm, frames hesitation as a problem to overcome, or presents a linear path to a specific outcome is not just missing the mark educationally. It's potentially harmful for the audience it's trying to serve.
What the industry is still not talking about
April's wishlist for the industry is a list of the people sexual wellness content consistently fails to reach. Pain. Disability. Neurodiversity. Ageing. Changing bodies. Low desire. People who don't relate to the highly sexualised version of sexual empowerment that dominates the category online.
"Sexual wellness shouldn't just be about selling products that promise better sex, especially when we have an opportunity to give people genuinely useful education that helps them understand themselves, their bodies and their relationships."
That's a challenge to the industry from someone who works with its brand partners regularly. The opportunity she's describing - genuine education rather than aspirational marketing - isn't niche. The people navigating pain, confusion, and changed bodies aren't a minority. They're the majority of people who have ever felt the category wasn't speaking to them. Brands that build content for those people aren't being altruistic. They're opening up the largest underserved segment in the market.
Find April Maria at aprilmaria.com and on Instagram as @venuslibido.